The Muse of Australia

"The Muse of Australia" (1862) is a poem by Australian poet Henry Kendall.

It was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 28 August 1862 and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.

Synopsis

In this poem Kendall outlines his desire to be a poet of Australia, and, in order to achieve that, he must seek the muse of the country. This muse has "a glorious face" and holds "the Harp of Australia". In her analysis of Kendall in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry Judith Wright comments that this "muse" is the same figure that "Charles Harpur had met in 'The Dream by the Fountain'; though Kendall laments that the Muse has not descended for him".

Critical reception

In his chapter titled "Kendall's Sublime Melancholy", in Henry Kendall : The Muse of Australia edited by Russell McDougall, Peter Otto notes that "For a poem that seems at first to do little more than repeat such stock Romantic motifs in a colonial setting, what is suprising about 'The Muse of Australia' is just how persistently it emphasises irreconcilable division."

Publication history

After the poem's initial publication in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1862 it was reprinted as follows:

• Poems of Henry Kendall by Henry Kendall, George Robertson, 1886
• A Century of Australian Song edited by Douglas Sladen, Walter Scott Publishers, 1888
• Selected Poems of Henry Kendall edited by T. Inglis Moore, Angus and Robertson, 1957
• The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall edited by Thomas Thornton Reed, 1966
• A Treasury of Colonial Poetry, Currawong, 1982
• ' edited by John Barnes and Brian MacFarlane, Heinemann, 1984
• Henry Kendall: Poetry, Prose and Selected Correspondence edited by Michael Ackland, University of Queensland Press, 1993
• An Australian Treasury of Popular Verse edited by Jim Haynes, ABC Books, 2002