SOURCE: Kramer, Leonie. “Imitation and Originality in Australian Colonial Poetry: The Case of Charles Harpur.” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 116-32.

In the following essay, Kramer highlights word choice and construction in Harpur's poetry to address early influences on his work. Kramer also analyzes the poet's later attempts to merge the form of his Continental “mentors” with an original Australian style.

‘Australian poetry’, writes Vivian Smith, ‘starts with the indelible stamp of the cultivated amateur’.¹ It also starts with a mixed inheritance, with established modes of poetic address (particularly odes and elegies) and their accompanying eighteenth-century linguistic fashions; and with an expectation of imaginative freedoms and renovated forms and language promised by the experiments of Romanticism and supported by the hope of adventure in a new land.

Although the very earliest attempts at verse (such as Michael Massey Robinson's celebratory and occasional odes) were, like the clothes of the...