Critical Article by Brian Matthews

Critical Article by Brian Matthews

Henry Lawson, Australian, Australian poetry, bush poetry, bush poem, bush poet, bush, medieval obsession with death, poem, poet, poetry

Abstract: Matthews finds a unity in the arrangement of stories in While the Billy Boils. The chronological nature of the stories, the use of rumour and the consistent use of time and distance are all elements that support the structure of the collection. Matthews concludes that the world of While the Billy Boils is "various and crowded", but it is a world "in which the whole undeniably loose undertaking can be regarded as hanging together". (Quoted from Auslit Website information).

Matthews remarks that '...above all, the rumour and the reality which stalks through Lawson's fictional world with almost medieval intensity
and obsessiveness is Death.'p 194. Whether this is a fair description of 'the medieval' in Lawson's poetry is unclear but Lawson is preoccupied with injustice, and the uncomfortably close gap between annihilation and the vicissitudes of his ife: poverty, illness or war.(HH)

AustLit BRN: 21818
Last amended: 24 Jul 2001

Matthews, Brian

Cantrell, Leon (ed.), Bards, Bohemians, and Bookmen: Essays in Australian Literature.

University of Queensland Press

1976

Critical article

English