In his biography of Robert D. FitzGerald, published in 1974, A. Grove Day noted that FitzGerald was "acknowledged during the past quarter of a century to be Australia's most prominent poet." In 1965, when FitzGerald published his collected poems in Forty Years' Poems and won the Encyclopædia Britannica Australia prize for literature, that judgment would not have been contested by most literary critics. Today, however, FitzGerald's reputation has been eclipsed by that of his contemporary with a much smaller output, Kenneth Slessor, despite that FitzGerald's poetry is more ambitious and more wide-ranging than Slessor's. These poets are seen as the two most influential early modernist poets in Australia, but FitzGerald's stubborn resistance to the stylistic changes that swept through English poetry in the middle of the century, his uncompromising pursuit of the unfashionable notions of "beauty" and metaphysical ultimates, and the bulk of his output made him seem...