Faced with the question of the justification of man's existence, and of his appropriation of the means for that existence, in a world without God, [FitzGerald] replies in effect that man is his own justification; for FitzGerald, the line of progress is still upwards and onwards. The virtues he extols are those of courage, endurance, and moral stoicism, rather than the Dionysian gaiety recommended by the Lindsayans. He is the poet of progress, of conscious or unconscious tasks, of objective work and achievement; there is about him an air of masculinity and sinew, his poetry, at its worst head-masterly, is at its best noble. (p. 155)

FitzGerald … has always been, when the circumstances of his life permitted it, a steadily productive writer. Though his poetry for a time tended to increase in argumentative and narrative content, and to decrease in verbal and imagic interest, over the years, he has sometimes suddenly achieved (as in the poem 'The Face of the Waters') a remarkable depth of insight and exactness of expression.

Though the force of contemporary preference has made him into a poet capable of compression and lyric shape, he has seldom been in fact a lyricist. His gift has been rather expository and narrative; and where he does (as he can) bring off a true lyric poem, it is often so compressed in thought and expression as to seem cramped into the briefer form as into a Procrustes' bed.

FitzGerald's first books, The Greater Apollo (1926) and To Meet the Sun (1929) were notable for their directness and good sense as well as for their thoughtfulness, but it was not obvious that the writer was a poet of stamina…. (pp. 155-56)

In Moonlight Acre, particularly in the first series, the influence of [Christopher] Brennan's 'Wanderer' poems is evident. There is, in fact, a certain reminiscence of Brennan's sentence-line even in the later poems; the length and involvement of clause after clause, the run-on lines and even the run-on verses, which make the argument seem even more strenuous than it is; so that at the final clause the reader feels he has been led at a long muscular striding pace through a complex climbing zig-zag of thought. A paraphrase of précis of the sentence, however, can often simplify it surprisingly—and it is characteristic of FitzGerald, though not often of Brennan, that a paraphrase of whole poems is not only possible, but sometimes even enlightening.

This is perhaps a serious criticism. Poetry, above all, is justly thought to consist in economy and exactitude of phrasing—the best words in the best order; moreover, even the attempt to paraphrase a poem of the order, say, of Yeats's 'Byzantium', or even one of Milton's lesser sonnets, ends and must end in bathos. The poem ought to subsist in an order of its own. FitzGerald's poems sometimes seem almost wilfully complicated and knotted …; it is a touchstone, in his poetry, by which we may distinguish the really good from the expository poems. (pp. 156-57)

FitzGerald's is the message, not of a prophet of disaster and rebirth, but of a less apocalyptic writer—one who can console himself with the thought that, though the search of the poet is difficult, it ends where it began, in human communication. (p. 158)

[FitzGerald's] blunt-mindedness—which, to do FitzGerald justice, seems to stem rather from an uncritical enthusiasm for action as such, than from lack of sympathy for slaves and underdogs—is allied to that quality in him which links him with the bush balladists and the tough-masculine strain in Australian development. He is, as it were, the poetic apotheosis of the balladists. Though he does not write in a vein that looks at all like the ballad, his longer narrative poems 'Heemskerck Shoals' … and 'Between Two Tides' … seem like a philosophical translation and restatement of the attitude behind, say, 'The Man from Snowy River', with its glorification of sheer action and undaunted courage…. (pp. 159-60)

FitzGerald has also devoted thought to the moral problem of the man of action, the man who forms part of the continually interwoven chain of living and doing, which he sees as more important than the individual who is its growing-point, as it were. In 'Fifth Day', he meditates on the fact that 'what's done goes on for ever as consequence', and therefore

          it concerns all men that what they do
          remains significant unbroken thread
          of the fabric of our living …
          Attitude matters; bearing …
          … dignity and distinctness that attach
          to the inmost being of us each.

In the poem 'The Wind at your Door', he treats of another moral problem which lies somewhere at the back of the Australian consciousness—the conflict between the claims of heartless authority and of its victims; a conflict that was introduced to Australian soil with the First Fleet. One might have half expected the writer of those lines in 'Moonlight Acre' to take the side of authority in the age-old quarrel; it is the mark of a certain subtilizing and sensitizing over the years that in this later poem FitzGerald takes up the cause of the victim. (pp. 161-62)

FitzGerald has … been concerned with a kind of non-Christian, conservative morality, throughout his poetic life; and his poems, seen as a whole, are attempts to define and explain this point of view. (p. 163)

FitzGerald is nothing if not a materialistic poet, as a rule: he remains the poet who accepts stone as stone and tree as tree, and deeper philosophical questions of the relationship of concept and percept, of creation and destruction, it might seem, concern him very little.

But if we did think so, we would be wrong. Poets, even those that seem most predictable, are apt to be unexpected; and perhaps the most unexpected poem by any Australian poet is FitzGerald's 'The Face of the Waters'…. It is in free rhythms, and it is unrhymed, where FitzGerald usually prefers more or less conventional forms, and it is a meditation on no less a subject than Creation, and on the impossibility of meditating on Creation.

It is, also unexpectedly, a very successful poem, making its point (unlike much of FitzGerald's work), more through imagery and suggestion than through statement and argument. It is indeed almost surrealist in its picture of the 'tentative migration' of 'a universe on the edge of being born'…. (p. 164)

This [poem] is an attempt to go much deeper than most Australian poets have cared to trust themselves. It is an attempt, in fact, to go far beyond the region where 'stone is stone and tree is tree,' into the region of 'the eternal instant', or 'nothing, which is the quick'. It is scarcely surprising that the poem's agonizing search for 'the pre-time pinpoint of impossible beginning' should be through a region of negatives. But the poem constantly refers back to the daytime world, where this impossible beginning becomes 'your hand stretched out to touch your neighbour's/and feet running through the dark, directionless like darkness'….

The poem, seen against the background of the rest of FitzGerald's work, seems an enigma. Here is the most apparently commonsense and even at times prosaic of our writers, embarking on an excursion into the depths which seems momentarily to out-Brennan Brennan: embarking almost without warning and preparation, and returning safely (though it is an excursion he does not seem to have wished to repeat). The cruel pursuing laughter, the terrified feet on the 'black granite' (a detail that frightens like a nightmare)—how terribly authentic they seem. We wonder if the poem can rescue itself, as it were, and return to the upper levels on which alone poems can properly function; and when it does so there is a sense of relief as though some trapeze act were safely over. (p. 165)

Two things, however, can be observed in criticism of this remarkable poem. Firstly, though it begins with a terrible and monumental image implying a consciousness behind creation, and a mocking consciousness at that, which can laugh as it frustrates the attempt of life to break out of darkness, this image is not pursued or explained. To impute mockery to (presumably) the Creator is to introduce an alarming duality into the notion of creation. Surely, if this is a mere intuition, it needs justifying: and since it is introduced at the beginning, some reference at least should be made to it, even if only for the sake of unity, in the conclusion. It is too large and disquieting a notion to be left, as it is left, unexplained. It weights the poem profoundly at the beginning; we expect a counter-weight at the end, and instead we are presented only with a catalogue of the attributes (if such they may be called) of the 'pinpoint of impossible beginning'; the creator-notion has disappeared, and the mockery of the laughter that presides over creation is neither explained nor explained away.

Secondly, the last passage of the poem is extremely difficult to unravel; perhaps this is intentional…. [The final image of the poem is that of an eggshell] being destroyed, not by a thrust from within of life emerging, but by a thrust from outside, since it 'buckles under'. If an eggshell is broken by the emerging life, it does not buckle under, but upwards; if it is crushed inwards, the life within is injured…. The image is confusing; not only I think, because the 'eternal instant' is in any case inexpressible and contains all possibilities, but because the thought is unclear. (pp. 166-67)

[One] thing may profitably be said here: this poem stands alone in FitzGerald's work, both as his chief exploration of a theme which seems particularly to concern the twentieth century, that of subconscious or pre-conscious existence, and also as the only poem in which he uses a dream imagery which is almost surrealistic in its vague suggestiveness….

The strength of his handling of [the images in the poem], the sense of their dreamlike rightness, as we read, give them an impact which, it must be confessed, FitzGerald's poems do not always have. He has not, on the whole, worked through the image, but through statement; and after this poem, which was published in 1944, he returned to his former method.

During the next year he published under the title 'Said the Don' part of what was later to appear as the long poem 'Between Two Tides.' It is a discursive historical narrative to which might be profitably prefixed Jacob Burckhardt's observation that man is 'the one and only thing which lasts in history and is its only possible centre … this suffering, striving and active being, as he is and was and will be for ever'….

For FitzGerald, error sometimes seems only of the kind implied in the phrase 'trial and error', and sin does not exist.

                                     Man is these things,
    And Life's like a wave breaking—not good or ill—
    or right or wrong, but action and pressing forward.
                                                (p. 168)

Does FitzGerald believe … that, in spite of the fact that the widest-looping comet cannot escape from its 'intolerable centre', there is such a thing as Progress in a straight line—progress in the nineteenth-century sense? He does not imply that man has grown morally or ethically better, over the centuries….

History itself, it seems, must act as its own yardstick; we must, as he wrote in 'Essay on Memory', 'build upward though we guess not to what skies'. A historical imperative may not seem a wholly satisfactory substitute for a moral imperative (particularly if, as FitzGerald seems to imply, it stems from a mocking Creator); but it seems, in the end, to be all FitzGerald has to offer us, as a philosophy.

Philosophies, however, are not poetry; and even if FitzGerald's man-of-action viewpoint on the world does not always convince us, the poetry remains, and we would be very much the poorer without it. Though his theme is still, as it has always been, the justification of man to man, his later short poems in particular have expressed it in terms much more epigrammatic and moving than those of his middle period. Poems like 'Bog and Candle', 'Edge', 'The Wind at your Door', and 'This Between Us', are a noble and a masterly summing up of what this poet has been and done. There is about them a quality of sculpture—sculpture well and truly made, that will stand up to time and weather. They are poems that form a kind of monument to man. (p. 169)

Judith Wright, "R. D. FitzGerald," in her Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.), Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1965, pp. 154-69.