Australian poetry is popularly conceived as a tradition founded by
the wry, secular and stoic strains of its late-nineteenth-century
bush balladeers Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson and 'Banjo'
Paterson, consolidated into a land-based 'vigour' in publications
such as the Bulletin. Yet this popular conception relies on not
actually consulting the poetry itself, which for well over one
hundred and fifty years has been cerebral, introspective, feminine
and highly - even experimentally - religious. Western Christian
mystics and Western Christian mystical poets of the classical
world, Middle Ages and modern era have been sources of inspiration,
influence and correspondence for Australian poets since the
writings of Charles Harpur (1813-1868), but there have also been
ongoing debates as to how mysticism might be defined, whom its true
exemplars might be, and whether poets should be considered mystical
authorities. This book dedicates whole chapters to five Australian
Christian mystical poets: Ada Cambridge (1864-1926), John Shaw
Neilson (1872-1943), Francis Webb (1925-1973), Judith Wright
(1915-2000) and Kevin Hart (1954 - ), with additional contextual
chapters on their contemporaries and new approaches by Aboriginal
poets since the early 1990s. Scholars and students are increasingly
disregarding the popular 'bush' facade and reading Australian
poetry in terms of the sacred, the philosophical, the contemplative
and the transcendent. At a national level this can be traced back
to the post-war and 1970s generations of poets and readers who
rejected the safe old bush myths for a more relentless
interrogation of Australian origins, environments and metaphysics.
Yet internationally, as among the general Australian public, the
very idea of an Australian Christian mystical poetry seems
incongruous with a metaphysically weak bush tradition which asks
very little of them. This book casts Australian poetry in a new
light by showing how Australian Christian mystical poetics can be
found in every era of Australian letters, how literary hostilities
towards women poets, eroticism and contemplation served to stifle a
critical appreciation of mystical poetics until recent decades, and
how in the twentieth century one Australian Christian mystical poet
began to influence another and share their appreciations of Dante,
Donne, Traherne, Blake, Wordsworth, Bronte, Rossetti, Hopkins,
Yeats, Eliot and Lowell. Despite parallel international works on
British, American and European Christian mystical poets, there has
never been a book-length exploration of Australian Christian
mystical poets or poetics. This study draws upon eight years of
research to not only consider debates around Christian mysticism
during the lives of its selected poets, but to also frame its
argument in terms of the twenty-first-century Christian mysticism
scholarship of Kevin Hart, Amy Hollywood, Ursula King and Bernard
McGinn's seminal multi-volume history of Western Christian
mysticism, The Presence of God. Simultaneously, Australian literary
criticism of the relevant eras as well as in the present are
explicitly engaged throughout. This book is a rigorous work of
original scholarship which will significantly impact future
discussions on the possibilities of Australian literature.
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