SOURCE: "Some Poems of Judith Wright," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, May, 1968, pp. 201–13.

McAuley was an Australian poet, critic, and educator who influenced his country's literature through his emphasis on traditional poetic forms and techniques and his opposition to the nationalistic tendencies of some Australian writers and critics, including those in the "Jindyworobak" movement that championed native Australian elements in the arts. In the following analysis of several of Wright's poems, McAuley studies both content and mechanics to contrast what he considers Wright's better poetry with her less successful work. He concludes that Wright's best poems are endowed with a consonance of form, content, and purpose that the others, while successful on certain levels, lack.

I want to consider first of all some of the very good poems in Judith Wright's first two volumes. A few of these stand out in an order of excellence of their...