Review of Robert D. FitzGerald ed. Julian Croft; and A Tribute to David Campbell, A Collection of Essays ed. Harry Heseltine

Abstract

It is as if R. D. FitzGerald tried to do for Australian poetry what William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens did for twentieth century American poetry. 'No ideas but in things' was the Williams' doctrine; while Stevens, the great theorist of the imagination, reasoned a way forward out of Romanticism into Modernism. Between them they defined the opposite limits of the modern poetic imagination; and for FitzGerald to attempt to encompass and resolve in his own work these extreme modem tendencies of concreteness and abstraction may suggest the heroic nature of his undertaking and why at times he seems to fall short of success. It certainly suggests why he holds such an honoured place in modem Australian literary history.