‘What You See Must Be Other’: Language and Eros in the Poetry of Richard Kelly Tipping

Abstract

Richard Kelly Tipping belongs to a generation of Australian poets who learned their trade in the late 1960s, at a time when, especially in America, the attitudes of late Romanticism were yielding to a new and broader conception of poetry. The creative imagination which had dominated every phase of Romanticism, from Coleridge to the Modernists and from the Modernists to Wallace Stevens, had been so thoroughly established as the interpretive principle of life that its hegemony need no longer be defended. The prison-house of words, home to the Modernist dilemma, had been exploded; in its place stood 'the gaiety of language [which] is our seigneur'. But if this phrase of Wallace Stevens' still emphasised language, the poets who followed him, taking language for granted, would be able once more—but in a quite different way from any pre-Romantic writer—to emphasise the world.