Central to Kevin Hart’s thesis on A.D. Hope (OUP, $14.95 pb) is the idea of him as an ‘Orphic poet’, neither Romantic nor Classicist, but a poet who subscribes to ‘the Orphic myth of art transforming being and overcoming death’. ‘[H]e believes that poets have a sacred mission that must be conserved.’ ‘[T]he true model of the poet as hero is Orpheus, not Rimbaud.’ ‘One can see Hope as a writer for whom questions of form and metre are crucial or one can regard him as an Orphic poet for whom poetic vision is prior to everything else, including form.’

Hart ranges widely over the poetry and some of the criticism and offers a hermeneutic of approval, without the awed tenderness of sycophancy or the subtler false humility of subservience. He offers lucid, sharp-edged analysis of the poems with footnotes of praise or dissent. His general aim is neither to simplify nor demystify Hope but to hold the real tensions up for examination without subjugating or eliminating them. The analysis of the poems makes his case basically convincing, though I felt he was becoming Delphic and a bit confusing rather than Orphic in attempting to rescue Hope’s attitude to women as expressed in the poetry.

Moving from Aquinas to Nietzsche and Brennan, Hart has much that is stimulating to say. ‘Desire, art and death: these are the main themes of Hope’s poetry.’ Hart is not afraid to pass value judgements on some of the work. As author of The Trespass of the Sign, Hart has a deep knowledge of Derrida and affinity with him. But his book is not an exercise in Derridadaism. Hart wears his deconstructive interests as a singlet, or a hairshirt. Painlessly. Unobtrusively.

Not so Lyn McCredden in her book on James McAuley (OUP, $14.95 pb). As revealed by the already obsolete Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988), if certain French critics suffer a pimple, certain Australian critics break out in measles. After reading this book, if you want to hear a critical judgement, you have to watch Rumpole. It is replete with humility, overdosed on charity, and flatulent with dogma. The writer is dead, long live the critic.

McCredden belongs to this school of judgemental non-judgement. Her book could well be called Derrida versus McAuley. Derrida wins in the first round and. the fight should have been called a non-contest. Basically the argument is that McAuley didn’t know what he was on about, particularly in his metaphors. And when McCredden offers her ‘alternative readings’, she shows that McAuley still got it wrong. Her text wears a badge, ‘Deconstruction rules, OK’. I have no argument with this act of faith. The problem is the flag waving on terms like ‘logocentric’, ‘strategies’, ‘deconstructed’, ‘absence’, ‘differance’, ‘desire’ et les autres.

This would not matter much if McCredden were not an extremely fine critic. Her account of McAuley’s love poems is marked by insight and well-written analysis. She is a sharply noticing critic, crisply alert about the poems. She will certainly make readers of McAuley think again, and that makes her book a success. But she is chained to her own dogmas, a position she claims to deplore. One of her favourite devices is the rhetorical question, or the political question, which is not answered but waltzed about.

What she is concerned with in the poetry is an ‘overwhelming absence’ which she then presumes to fill. The tone is often dismissive. Of ‘Gnostic Prelude’ McCredden notes the poem’s powerful insistence on ‘its own blindness, its “sightless grope” and vain seeking. Perhaps patterns of verbal blindness and insight are more interestingly deposited or dug for, constructed and deconstructed, by less unified, assured intention.’ McCredden gets irritated with McAuley’s collision of images (she never develops the notion of paradox), but she often gets locked in a jail of her own jargon.

This is a book definitely worth reading for the many challenges it offers, but it is a pity that McCredden lives so dogmatically in one of ‘the myriad unifying schools of literary criticism’ that she deplores. She is a too original and potentially individual critic for that.

In his rather jumbly book on Peter Porter (OUP, $14.95 pb), Peter Steele reveals that he is his own critic. He is both eclectic and individualistic. He can write some very dull practical criticism, even down to a one-to-four listing of the main points. He notes at the end of the book that he is writing as a friend of Porter, which I consider a dangerous practice, especially when he refers a number of times to Porter in conversation. As a writer, Steele rarely uses a simple word where an erudite word can be found: ‘attingency’, ‘pur sang’, ‘dinglich’, ‘nominable’, ‘nidal’, ‘enisled’, ‘cosmofy’.

One of Steele’s techniques is to paint Porter’s poems with guilt by association. On codifying, Porter is linked with ‘Chaucer, Dunbar, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats’. Porter is lumbered with nearly every ‘canonical’ English poet, Auden being offered as his preferred jogging mate. Yet for all this, Steele has written a very impressive book. He excels at writing with impressionistic, summary verve, and is the wittiest of the three writers in this series.

Taking terms from A.N. Whitehead about learning, Steele approaches Porter’s poetry in terms of ‘romance, precision and generalisation’ and devotes a chapter to each. Referring to the way ideas ‘thicken’ the poetry, Steele comments:

… a poem of Porter’s looks like the history of ideas after Isiah Berlin has been through it there is more energy around, more ideas around than was the case before […] They are also, like all his poems, a kind of charm against time, something plucked from its teeth, and held up for jokes.

All three books offer ideas to think about, to argue through. They will ruffle a few feathers.

Reconnoitres: Essays in honour of G.A. Wilkes (OUP/Sydney U.P., $24.95 pb), edited by Margaret Harris and Elizabeth Webby, will leave feathers as unruffled as those of an obsolete feather duster. Which is not to deny that it is a very worthy book, of considerable interest. It is just a bit dull and a bit old-fashioned.

Wilkes deserves a tribute. In 1962, he became the inaugural Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University, and he also edited Southerly for twenty-five years. A man of leadership, indefatigable energy, and earnest authority, as Webby notes in her cautious introduction, Wilkes worked ‘on establishing and making better known the canon of Australian Literature’. Some debatable ideas here, anathema to most of the writers of the Penguin History, of which Webby was one of the editors.

All the contributors are present or former colleagues of Wilkes. The whole process of editing must have been a restrictive one and some articles are as dull as Bob Hawke being humble. There is nothing much about feminist writing, Aboriginal writing, multicultural writing. Following the explorations of Paul Carter, David Lawton writes with humour (mostly unconscious I suspect) about Major Mitchell naming the places he ‘discovered’. J.F. Burrows is worthily dull about ‘specimins of an Australian narrative dialect’ while Alex I. Jones is computer dull about ‘Sound Symbolism in Lawson’s Poetry’.

But there are some lively articles and some very useful articles. Stephen Knight is fascinating but too brief on some variations on popular songs and in Barbara Baynton and Marcus Clarke. Don Anderson is interesting on American echoes in Australian poetry, while Michael Wilding and Brian Kiernan give valuable overviews on the short story and biography. Peter Edwards gives a lively and stimulating account of ‘men without women’ in Steele Rudd and Lennie Lower. Religious consciousness in Francis Webb and David Malouf is the subject of a valuable discussion by James Tulip, while Adrian Mitchell is enlightening on ‘The Ambivalence of C.E.W. Bean’. This is a worthy book that runs the risk of nodding off dreaming of its own worthiness.

In 1970, Grahame Johnston published Annals of Australian Literature, which was a comprehensive list of books and authors from 1799–1968. Now it has been supplemented and updated to 1988. It is a most useful reference book (OUP, $45). Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine have added to Johnston’s list of the earlier years and brought the book up to date. My only criticism is that, though the book is called a second edition, and is still clearly substantially Johnston’s work, his name appears nowhere on the cover or the title page.