SOURCE: "Judith Wright's World-View," in Southerly, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1956, pp. 189–95.

In the following essay, Scott places the philosophical underpinnings of the poet's work within the context of a Platonic worldview, noting her dual views of nature: on one hand it represents the immediate world and worldly concerns, while on the other it symbolizes an unchanging cosmos that is sensed unconsciously and idealized as Eden.

Most of the 155 poems in Judith Wright's four books make manifest love and birth and death, which are abstract ideas having in themselves no single form, in terms of such concrete particulars as lovers, old people, little children and Australian landscapes. These subjects, love and birth and death, are shown as all inter-related and aspects of time, and as provoking questions we continue to ask, but never finally answer, about what and why we and life and time are.

Our philosophies are formed in part...