[In the following essay, Fleming takes issue with the generally warm response Australian critics have given Wright's poetry. He methodically attacks both the "content" and the "form" of Wright's works, and decries what he terms her "paucity of imagination."]

Some verse is made to be sung, some intoned, some declaimed, some spoken—and some mumbled. Judith Wright's belongs to the last category. Compare this

Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie
Lik til a leaf that fallis from a tree
Or til a reed ourblowin with the wind
Mark Alexander Boyd (1563–1601), Sonet

with this

Sanctuary, the sign said. Sanctuary—
trees, not houses; flat skins pinned to the road
of possum and native cat; and here the old tree stood
for how many thousand years? that old gnome—tree
some axe-new boy cut down. Sanctuary, it sad:
but only the road has meaning here. It leads
into the world's cities like a long fuse laid.
Judith Wright, "Sanctuary"

It is necessary to be thus unhandsome at the outset because it has become universal practice for Australian critics to write of Judith Wright's verse no more responsibly than does the writer of the dust-jacket blurb of … The Two Fires: "It is safe to predict that many of them [referring to the verses of an earlier book], by their inspired fusion of passion, intellect, and artistry, will live in the literature of the English-speaking world." Similarly, Kenneth Slessor's "Five Bells" has in this continent been described on at least one occasion as superior to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

In view of which things it seems advisable in the present examination not to beat about the bush.

The poetry of The Two Fires is poetry made of certain classifiable ingredients: of epithets—

Nothing is so bare as truth—
that lean geometry of thought
"The Man Beneath the Tree"

of apostrophes—

Oh, Passionate gazer, oh enraptured hearer,
oh eager climber, perhaps you climb too late.
"Dialogue"

and, especially, of appositions—

—all of which are rhetorical devices for simulating fervor; which is a different thing from poetry.

Quite probably it is this quality of fervor which accounts for the high prestige in Australia of Judith Wright's work. As Yeats remarked, "They don't like poetry; they like something else, but they like to think they like poetry."

Other detracting characteristics of Judith Wright's work, of which critics to date have been equally oblivious, would be abstractionism (notice how characters like Old Gustav, Mr. Ferritt, the Prospector, are generalized before being realized), a didacticism that generally blows up in bathos—

Yet it is time that holds,
somewhere although not now,
the peal of trumpets for us; time that bears,
made fertile even by those tears,
even by this darkness, even by this loss,
incredible redemptions—hours that grow,
as trees grow fruit, in a blind holiness,
the truths unknown, the loves unloved by us.
"The Harp and the King"

and a high frequency of appearance of the off-key adjective (gonfalon of the contemporary band-wagon)—

The solitary mountain is as tall as grief
"Mount Mary"

This is what I can neither bear nor heal
for you—that the fierce various street,
the country tower of tree and bell of bird,
are blown aside a little by the venomous wind
that twitches at the curtain over hell …
"Two Generations"

On the other hand, to be fair, what Judith Wright seems to have her eye on, through these "incidentals," is a registering of sudden "illuminations" (whatever that may mean); as thus:

Hunger and force his beauty made
and turned a bird to a knife-blade.
"Black-shouldered Kite"

Root, limb, and leaf unfold
out of the seed, and these rejoice
till the tree dreams it has a voice
to join four truths in one great world of gold.
"The Wattle-tree"

I suppose it may be possible to compose in this fashion useful poetry even though the verse be inferior (e.g. Keats?), but it is an unsatisfying and unlikely accomplishment. Prosody, after all, is what essentially distinguishes verse from prose; and the prosody of The Two Fires, as manifested in recurrent vocal awkwardnesses such as "like a long fuse laid," "makes all whole," "which, known one instant, must subsist always." "No Mother's Day present planned," is unlovely.

Having isolated a few, but quite damaging, points in the matter of "form," it remains to consider the more tricky matter of "content."

It is first necessary, however, to clarify this distinction—important, in general use, but little understood—of "form" and "content." "Content," to start with the essential matter first, is that part (qualitative part, say aspect) of a poem which is translatable without loss into other words—whether arranged in verse, prose, or a foreign language; as melody may be played without loss on any instrument, or be sung, or whistled: as design may be executed without loss in pencil, in water color, or oil—so "content." It is the basic, first received part of a poem, that on which it is constructed, called inscape by Hopkins, phanopoeia by Pound (understood as the play of images on the imaginative eye), plot by Aristotle—also form (in the technical sense as distinct from its meaning in the looser usage). When this "content," "inscape," "phanopoeia," "form" is slight, as it well may be, there must be considerable melodic or verbal interest to compensate (as in the Elizabethan songs). On the other hand, excellence in plot can cover all manner of defects in technique (e.g. though Villon and Corbiere may have nowhere near the technical resource of Laforgue, say, they are nevertheless the better poets).

Rather than contrasting "content" and "form," then, it is better to contrast "plot" and "technique"—better still to make use of the poet's terminology, "phanopoeia," "melopoeia" and "logopoiea," subdividing "technique" into two. Thus:

phanopoeia:

the conception, the idea, "what it says" together with "the way of putting it";

melopeia:

the music—sound, rhythm, metre, rhyme;

logopoeia:

the implication—what's implied by the words and by the words and by the sound, in toto—the relation which all the parts bear to each other and to the whole and to all the other poems, writing, expressions, etc., that may be expected to be known to the cultivated reader whether as tradition or as current clichéd usage.

Let us now apply these distinctions to Judith Wright's work: the "melopoeia" has been shown to be crude; the "logopoeia" she makes use of is the non-sophisticated type, the blurred, non-rational "heavy-going" kind of association which means everything or nothing, not being precise. Now for the "phanopoeia." For convenience let us subdivide this into two parts, (1) "what it says" (the literal side), and (2) "how it puts it" (the imaginative side—previously called Wit).

In regard first to the literal side, "what it says," it may be useful to keep in mind that some writers are interested in the life of the mind (i.e. the advancement and promotion of useful, communicable knowledge), while some are not. The "content" of those who are not, though possibly interesting as a curiosity, must necessarily be considerably less significant than that of those who are. Though deadly serious in most of her poems (as one wanting to have it both ways), Judith Wright does not evidence in her work any noteworthy such interest. Indeed, it can be categorically asserted, harshly perhaps but necessarily, that her quasi-biological musings along pre-Socratic lines of speculation (One / Many / All / Time) have added nothing to the quantum of human knowledge.

As thus for instance: in "At Cooloolah," as frequently elsewhere, Judith Wright broaches the time-honored theme of the "rootlessness" of European peoples in the Australian aboriginal's land—in such incredibly incompetent lines as

Those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah
knew that no land is lost or won by wars
for earth is spirit: the invader's feet will tangle
in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears.

I should imagine that a genuinely satisfactory mental accommodation to a strange landscape and climate would consist in distinguishing its features and aspects, and in naming them accordingly. Which process immediately separates one from most of those who dance corroborees: they are the ones whose "blood is thinned by fears." Judith Wright appears to exhort us in much of her work to go back to the mental attitude of people who dance corroborees—that is, to some variety of Animism.

Now Animism in one form or another seems currently to be the "philosophy" most favored in verse, particularly in the official critical circles—possibly because "thought" along such lines does not impinge seriously on matters ethical or political. Hence perhaps another reason for the high standard of Judith Wright's work…. But for the life of me I cannot fathom how people to whom the whole heritage of Western civilization is available as a birthright must go hankering after barbarisms and darkness—on cultural manifestations, at any rate, far less rational and less spiritual than ours (specialists naturally excepted).

In conclusion, I should like to set in juxtaposition for the reader's meditation two disconnected stanzas from Judith Wright's "The Man Beneath the Tree" and two from William Carlos Williams' "The Fool's Song." In this case we are pointing up the paucity of the imaginative side, "how it puts it," of her "content" / "phanopoeia"; but the sound and associative values of the two exhibits may also be profitably compared. The comparison should illustrate how it is no truly kind service to the local product irresponsibly to inflate its importance.