Between position and desire: the love poetry of James McAuley

Australian poets have attracted such controversial reputations as has James McAuley. Criticism of his poetry is riven with inability or open refusal to separate biography from text, and is a minefield of repressed or partly acknowledged ideologizing. "McAuley" is "classical and graceful", the "ice-man" of Australian letters, narrowly anti-modernist, and the unforgivable E M Malley. There has been litde of substance or detail written on McAuley's poetry since the appearance of his first two books, Under Aldebaran (1946), and A Vision of Ceremony (1956). This is a staggering fact: that Captain Quiros (1964), Surprises of the Sun (1969), Collected Poems 1936- 1970 (including The Hazard and the Gift, 1971) and Time Given (1975) have never been given sustained attention as part of McAuley's output.Of course many substantial essays and reviews have appeared on individual volumes. This lack of critical attention to the extended body of work may be explained pardy by one particular academic tendency: to categorize McAuley as ideologically "unsound",politically, aesthetically and meta-physically, and to do likewise with the poetry. Such a tendency may be cloaked in terms of discussion of the poetry in the light of "relevant biographical facts". It may take the form of refusing to discuss the poetry at all.