Luke Davies and the electrified lyric : praise and lament in Australian postmodern romantic poetry

  • Louise Carter

Western Sydney University thesis: Doctoral thesis

Abstract

Romanticism has always had a vibrant presence in Australia's poetic landscape. In the critical discussion about Australian romantic poetry, the American literary scholar Paul Kane is highly visible. His 1996 book Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity famously links Australian romanticism with aesthetics and states of 'negativity.' Kane argues that romanticism as an aesthetic movement reached Australia 'belatedly,' and that it came 'in the guise of an absence.' Negativity thus became a 'driving force' for Australian poets, resulting in a 'strain' of romantic poetry that is characterised by a recurrence of themes relating to emptiness and inauthenticity. This thesis argues that since the emergence of postmodernism in the later 20th century, a new strain of Australian romanticism has appeared: one that is material, relational, embodied, and positive. The distinct aesthetic forces of postmodernism and romanticism combine to produce an energetic charge, similar to an electric current. I refer to this new Australian style of poetic lyricism as 'postmodern romanticism.' The long love poem 'Totem Poem' (2004) by contemporary Australian poet Luke Davies is at the centre of my analysis as an exemplar of postmodern romanticism. Davies' poetry repeatedly brings together opposites - such as the secular and sacred, the worldly and otherworldly, the ancient and modern, and the sincere and ironic - to create modes of aesthetic plenitude and disorder (or re-ordering). 'Totem Poem' combines the irony of postmodernism with the earnestness of romanticism, creating an effect of amplification: 'Totem Poem' is the 21st-century equivalent of a courtly love poem, written not for a lute or lyre, but for electric guitar. The interplay of opposites within Davies' poetry extends to a dichotomy between the ebullient joyousness of 'Totem Poem' and the profound sadness of Davies' later work Interferon Psalms (2011). The thesis also studies Robert Adamson as a contemporary Australian praise poet, and reflects upon the history of 'lament' within Australian poetry, arguing that lament recurs historically in Australian literature as a space for marginalised voices to bring public expression to personal suffering. These ideas are explored creatively in the accompanying poetry collection Golden Repair. The collection comprises a titular long poem, followed by a sequence of individual lyrical poems that embrace a postmodern romantic mode to express praise and lament in context of 21st-century urban and suburban Australia.
Date of Award2021
Original languageEnglish

Keywords

  • Davies
  • Luke
  • 1962-
  • Totem Poem
  • Australian poetry
  • history and criticism
  • romanticism

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