Christopher Brennan is widely regarded as a poet profoundly out of step with his time and place. Although his major work, Poems [1913] (1914), is considered to be poetry of daring originality and is a collection of far greater density than any other long piece of Australian poetry from the late nineteenth century, it is also an incongruous, erratic collection. The poetry is deeply embedded in expressions of personal emotion but also seeks to form a universal myth of self-presence, using European forms to describe Australian conditions. Brennan was one of the few poets of the period to write extensively about poetry at the same time as writing it; he also introduced a poetic method that was highly stylized and self-consciously artificial in a period when the temper was democratic and the subject organic. A distinct talent for languages allowed Brennan access to a wide range of writings about literature...