Harold Stewart often described himself as his country's most un-Australian, or anti-Australian, writer. In 1949 he wrote to H. M. Green: "Once, if writers mentioned dilly-bags or sick stockriders, I merely groaned--now I go berserk and commit mayhem." Six years later his complaint to A. D. Hope was directed at their entire age: "It is so long now since I gave up living in the Twentieth Century, so long since the cult of contemporaneity, the myth of modernity evaporated for me, that I find myself somewhat at a loss to know what to say about some . . . poems." Stewart's poetry supports these comments. Even in his earliest schoolboy verse and the two volumes he published in Australia in 1948 and 1956, there is nothing that links his works to their immediate context. Phoenix Wings (1948) consists largely of poems inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and Eastern legends...