Les Murray

doi:10.1017/9781009470186.016

11 - Les Murray

Ancient and Modern

from Part III - Authors

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2024

David McCooey

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Ann Vickery

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Ann Vickery: Affiliation:
Deakin University, Victoria

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Summary

The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.

Keywords

pastoral Georgic religion modernism

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry , pp. 183 - 196

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009470186.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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References

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11 - Les Murray

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