John Hawke : The Moving Image : Judith Wright ' s Symbolist Language

IN A 1965 interview with John Thompson, Judith Wright was asked if she considered herself a ‘nature poet’. She replied, ‘No, I don't. My real interest, I think, is the question of man in nature—man as part of nature. The theory of correspondences that Baudelaire brought forward—the question of nature as a symbol for one's experience has always seemed to me to have a great deal in it.’ Thompson is reiterating a misconception common to readers of the poets of the 1940s—one which affects Douglas Stewart, for example, as much as Judith Wright—which reduces their poetry to its face-value, treating them as ‘landscape’ poets concerned primarily with the depiction of Australian fauna and flora. It is a view which might be seen to derive from the nationalist tradition of colonial art-criticism, in which painters are judged according to the accuracy of their figuration of local scenes. But the themes of Australian poetry, at least from the time of Harpur and Kendall, have followed a quite different trajectory from those of our artists. As Wright's reply clearly indicates, the central thematic concerns of our poets lie firmly within the metaphysical traditions of Romanticism and its adaptation in French Symbolism. In the words of Tom Inglis Moore, Wright belongs to ‘a line of philosophical poets, and is continuing a well-established tradition of metaphysics in Australian poetry’—and he cites Harpur, Kendall, O'Dowd and Brennan as precursors.