Using his review of The Other Half (1966) as an occasion to write a retrospective of Wright's career, Ewers traces her development from regionalist to universalist, and concludes that she is a mystic with a poetic voice.
In this excerpt, Walker argues that Wright's collections Fourth Quarter and Phantom Dwelling represent a growth in the poet's already estimable talent and vision. Walker contends that in these books Wright brings a variety of new influences and insights to bear on old themes, answering with clarity questions left open by old poems, and finding peace through reconciliation where once she found conflict.
Here, Brissenden examines Wright's first three volumes of poetry. The critic praises many aspects of the poet's work, but worries that the metaphysical panderings in the third volume, The Gateway, denote a shift in Wright's focus, "away from the personal, the particular and the dramatic towards the abstract and the impersonal. "
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 Wri...
The following essay was delivered as a seminar in 1981. In this analysis, Janakiram examines and applauds Wright's struggle, in both poems and in life, to create a relationship "to be won by love only" between the European settlers of Australia, the Aborigine population and culture, and the land itself. Jankiram maintains that Wright uses this relationship to achieve a true Australian identity, not as an exile or a conqueror, but as a native at peace in her homeland.
Here, Kohli contrasts Wright's work with the more overtly sensual poems of Indian poet Kamala Das. Kohli argues that words and communication have a higher value in Judith Wright's poetic vision of love than they do in the poetry of Das, whose emphasis on passion "makes words irrelevant." The critic also maintains that Wright's work depicts love as a source of contentment and completion.
In the following essay, Scott places the philosophical underpinnings of the poet's work within the context of a Platonic worldview, noting her dual views of nature: on one hand it represents the immediate world and worldly concerns, while on the other it symbolizes an unchanging cosmos that is sensed unconsciously and idealized as Eden.
Here, Wilkes defends Wright's third and fourth volumes of poetry, The Gateway and The Two Fires, contending that the two collections represent an expansion in Wright's poetry, an attempt "to reach beyond the immediate experience, to probe its significance. " Additionally, Wilkes examines the significance of two later collections, Birds and Five Senses, in Wright's body of work.
In the following essay, Fleming takes issue with the generally warm response Australian critics have given Wright's poetry. He methodically attacks both the "content" and the "form" of Wright's works, and decries what he terms her "paucity of imagination."
In this review of Wright's retrospective collection The Double Tree, Pritchard notes an increasing flexibility in Wright's poetic tone, comparing her work to that of D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats.
Judith Wright's collection of talks given "because she was invited" has as its first concern poetry in general. [Because I Was Invited] also presents a further group of poets treated in the manner of her previous book Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. The great merit of that book lay in her rejection of the usual critical approach, with its emphasis on style and technique at the expense of theme and philosophy…. In the broadest sense the issue of conservation underlies the ent...
Judith Wright is a poet of resonant plainness. Much too plain in the past, for my taste—but her two recent books [Alive and Fourth Quarter] suggest that she is verging on new shores of amazement. This is partly horror at the efficiency with which her fellow-countrymen are raping their country and partly the intensity of growing old. Hymning a good wooden house and its familiar and loved objects, she asks, 'Who'd live in steel and plastic/corseting their lives/with things not decently mo...
Selected from work over a span of 30 years, Wright's poems [in The Double Tree: Selected Poems, 1942–1976] bear witness to her commitment to "poetry's ancient vow to celebrate lovelong/life's wholeness." She is Australian, and her bond to her native land and its once pastoral wildness is evident, expressed in lyric poems of skilled prosody. In her later work, the vow to celebrate radiance is harder to keep. As she sees the destruction to wildlife, water, and land, s...
