期刊名称：Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
印刷版ISSN：1447-8986
电子版ISSN：1833-6027
出版年度：2007
卷号：6
页码：137-139
出版社：Association for the Study of Australian Literature
摘要：Katherine Barnes begins her book by suggesting that Australian readers have
neglected and underrated Christopher Brennan’s poetry because they lack a
grounding in its “big ideas”. Accordingly, she “aims to provide the kind of
context that I think we need to grasp if we are to understand and evaluate
Brennan’s poetry properly”. That context lies chiefly in Romantic and
Symbolist thought from Blake and Novalis to Mallarmé and Yeats, but with
a much longer mystical lineage stretching back via Swedenborg and Jacob
Boehme to neo-Platonism, Gnosticism and rabbinical tradition. In Barnes’s
view, its main legacy for Brennan was “the notion of a higher or transcendent
self constituted by the union of the human mind and Nature” (2-3), a theme
which she pursues through exegesis of key selections from Poems [1913],
in the light of the poet’s very extensive reading on mystical subjects. The
volume is divided into seven chapters: “Divinity and the Self ”; “Mirror and
Abyss”; “Art and Silence”; “Brennan’s Theory of ‘Moods’”; “‘Red autumn
in Valvins’”; “Two Preludes and a Liminary”; and “The Assimilation of our
Inmost Passion”. There are valuable introductory sections to most of these,
but the main argument remains structured around sequences and individual
items from Poems.
