Ern Lalor Malley

Writing about Gwen Harwood reminded me of another famous hoax in Australian literary circles.  It happened in 1943 when two poets, James McCauley and Harold Stewart, sat down one afternoon, invented a poet, and wrote a number of poems in his name which they submitted to the Angry Penguins magazine.  They wanted to embarrass Max Harris, the editor of the magazine, by showing that he would print any old rubbish.

The poems were ostensibly in the 'modernist' style but were really just a conglomeration of random phrases culled from whatever book they happened to pick up at the time.  However, long after the embarrassing event, several critics have said that the poems, in fact, have literary merit and are good examples of the surrealist style.  The emperor has no clothes.

James McCauley, one of the conspirators, went on to become Professor of English at the University of Tasmania.

Durer:Innsbruck, 1495

I had often cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

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