This Chapter Covers Australian poetry of the modernist era, involving the figure of Kenneth Slessor, who is arguably not only the most talented poet Australia has ever produced but also one whose work has raised questions about the identity and thrust of Australian poetry that have resounded throughout the era.

Australian poetry in the era of Kenneth Slessor’s generation did not enjoy an “efficient market” with respect to a world audience. To have an “efficient market” in finance means that stock prices reflect all available information, and that therefore everybody knows all the factors that lead to a stock’s valuation. But, in Slessor’s era, if a poet of distinction arose in Australia, he or she was not immediately recognized by the world as a poet of distinction. Thus the low esteem placed on Australian poetry in metropolitan centers did not reflect all information available at that time. This situation was well described by described in 1980 by Chris Wallace- Crabbe, himself an accomplished poet, as one of “unilateral free trade” (Wallace-Crabbe, xxx). Australia received foreign poetries but did not export its own. Though this condition has not been totally rectified, Australian poetry in the twenty-first century suffers from far less of a comparative disadvantage.

That an efficient market did not exist proceeded from various factors — Australia’s perceived remoteness and isolation, the fact that Australia was not a “hotspot” of political crisis, and Australia’s perceived rejection of modernism. In addition, the world was not ready for the idea of multiple centers of literary production. It was far simpler to believe that anything worthwhile would be written in London or New York, sparing the need to monitor developments in Sydney and Melbourne. That Kenneth Slessor or Judith Wright is not better known outside Australia is because of these historical circumstances.

There are fundamental critical assumptions entailed in seeing Slessor as the center of modernist Australian poetry. First of all, a Slessor-centric perspective excludes those poets born before 1900 (the general approach of this volume); a look at the birth dates of the central figures of Anglo- American modernist poetry — Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, Pound, Crane — would show how limiting this approach would be outside Australia, and that it is only justified within Australia by assumptions of cultural belatedness, an aspect of “the cultural cringe.”