Leaders scale poetry's register
Luke Slattery
From: The Australian
October 20, 2010 12:00AM
POLITICAL leaders rarely reach for the high oratorical register by quoting
from the nation's poets.
But in yesterday's speech outlining the reasons for our continuing
commitment in Afghanistan, despite the mounting loss of soldiers' lives,
both political leaders were keen to strike an elevated tone.
Julia Gillard, reflecting on the Diggers' tradition of wartime sacrifice,
recalled these lines from James McAuley:
I never shrank with fear
But fought the monsters of the lower world
Clearing a little space, and time, and light
For men to live in peace
The problem with dovetailing poetry into prose is that the former is often
ambiguous, multi-layered and vulnerable to misuse.
The Prime Minister, for example, is quoting from McAuley's 1956 poem The
Ascent of Hades, and the voice is that of the Greek hero -- best known as
the hulking statue called the "Farnese Hercules" -- whom Ulysses meets in
Hades.
Poet John Kinsella was nettled by the martial use to which Ms Gillard had
put a literary reference.
"I'm a committed pacifist and I disagree with the use of poetry for that
'heroic' purpose, even when it's a poet whose views I don't share," he said.
"Poetry certainly offers points of entry into a discussion in ways that no
other text or speech can do. But it can also show the ironies of the
position of him or her who quotes it, even if the text seems apt."
The irony of Ms Gillard's gesture will not be lost on students of culture,
for McAuley was a Catholic anti-communist and co-founder of the staunchly
conservative journal, Quadrant. He is perhaps best remembered today as one
of the two pranksters -- the other was Harold Stewart -- behind the Ern
Malley hoax.
The two tradition-minded poets wrote 16 nonsense poems in the modernist
style and sent them to Max Harris, then editor of the literary magazine,
Angry Penguins, as the work of a blue-collar unknown. Thoroughly duped,
Harris published them as the works of a new star in the literary firmament.
Tony Abbott yesterday played a more circumspect literary card, citing
Charles Bean's encomium for the men of the first AIF: "What these men did
nothing now can alter. The good and the bad, the greatness and the smallness
of their story will stand. Whatever glory it contains, nothing now can
lessen. It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a
monument to great-hearted men; and for their nation a possession forever."
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