SOURCE: "Keeping the Home Fires Burning: Australian Poetry, Judith Wright," Shenandoah, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1958, pp. 33–9.

In the following essay, Fleming takes issue with the generally warm response Australian critics have given Wright's poetry. He methodically attacks both the "content" and the "form" of Wright's works, and decries what he terms her "paucity of imagination."

Some verse is made to be sung, some intoned, some declaimed, some spoken—and some mumbled. Judith Wright's belongs to the last category. Compare this

 Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie
Lik til a leaf that fallis from a tree
Or til a reed ourblowin with the wind
Mark Alexander Boyd (1563–1601), Sonet 

with this

 Sanctuary, the sign said. Sanctuary—
trees, not houses; flat skins pinned to the road
of possum and native cat; and here the old tree stood
for how many thousand years...