SOURCE: Elliott, Brian, and Adrian Mitchell. Introduction to Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920, edited by Brian Elliot and Adrian Mitchell, pp. xv-xxvii. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1970.

In the following excerpt, Elliott and Mitchell define landscape and politics as the two principal subjects of nineteenth-century Australian poetry.

Poetry is one of the expressions of the community consciousness; in surveying the poetry of Australia to about 1920 we have kept very much in mind the community which produced it, largely a provincial community. The colonial habit of thought was extraordinarily persistent—traces of it are still evident and not just in our poetry. Not that we wished to analyse the colonial mentality per se. Our focus is on the growth of an indigenous poetry. But our premise is that poetry cannot be divorced from the society or the times out of which it grew. This anthology, then, presents perspectives...