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1 PRELIMINARY ENGLISH ADVANCED AREA OF STUDY: BREAKING FREE POETRY OF GWEN HARW

1 PRELIMINARY ENGLISH ADVANCED AREA OF STUDY: BREAKING FREE POETRY OF GWEN HARWOOD 2 Syllabus Context Area of Study: Breaking Free In the Area of Study, students explore and examine relationships between language and text, and interrelationships among texts. They examine closely the individual qualities of texts while considering the texts’ relationships to the wider context of the Area of Study. They synthesise ideas to clarify meaning and develop new meanings. They take into account whether aspects such as context, purpose and register, text structures, stylistic features, grammatical features and vocabulary are appropriate to the particular text. Area of Study: Breaking Free Students will explore the Area of Study: Breaking Free, through an exploration of the prescribed novels. They will consider the social, historical and personal circumstances from which some individuals seek freedom. This could include physical and metaphorical constraints which require individuals to make choices. Students will consider how and why individuals react to their circumstances and the choices they make to challenge, resist or conform. They will investigate a range of texts relating to this topic in terms of how textual features represent aspects of this concept. They will compose a range of critical and imaginative texts in response to the topic. Students will need to consider their prescribed text and other related texts of their own choosing. Prescribed Texts: 1. Harwood, Gwen, Selected Poems: A New Edition, Halycon Press, 2001, ISBN 0646409174 ‘Alter Ego’, ‘The Glass Jar’, ‘At Mornington’, ‘Prize-Giving’, ‘Father and Child (Parts I & II)’, ‘The Violets’ Anthology of short stories INTRODUCTION: CONTEXTUALISING GWEN HARWOOD Biographical information Born at Taringa, Queensland, Gwen Harwood was raised in Brisbane. Her wide-ranging interests include literature, philosophy and music – she was organist at All Saints Church in Brisbane. In 1945 the poet married William Harwood, an academic linguist, and moved, albeit reluctantly, to Tasmania. It was there that she found her lifelong passion for the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The philosopher’s influence colours Harwood’s entire ‘opus’. An early poem appeared in Meanjin 1944, her poems, stories, critical essays and reviews have appeared regularly in a diversity of Australian journals since the early 1960s. ‘She has written libretti for composers Larry Sitsky, James Penberthy, Don Kay, and Ian Cugley as well as other occasional words for music. Beginning from her “deep inner necessity ... to realise in words the moments that gave my life meaning”, Harwood came to believe conversely with Wittgenstein in “the power of poetry to infuse experience with value.” The distinctive and impressive poetry which has emerged from these beliefs has led to an increasing critical and ... popular attention.’ Harwood’s first volume, called simply, Poems, appeared in 1963. Since then there have been only one and a half more books – Poems: Volume tow in 1968, and Selected Poems, in 1975. Gwen Harwood made her debut when she was forty-three, married and the mother of four children. Harwood’s honours include: The Meanjin Poetry Prize in 1958 and 1959, 3 the Grace Leven Poetry Prize in 1975; The Robert Frost Award, 1977; and the Patrick White Literary Award, 1978. She received an honorary D.Litt. from the University of Tasmania, 1988, and, in 1994, an honorary doctorate from the University of Queensland and Latrobe University. Bone Scan won the Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award and J. J. Bray Award, 1990; Blessed City won the Age Book of the Year Award, 1990. *All quotes are from Elizabeth Lawson, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (2nd ed), OUP 1994 (pp.349-51). http://dargo.vicnet.net.au/ozlit/writers.cfm Gwen Harwood died in 1995 in Hobart The following aspects of Harwood’s historical, social and cultural contexts could be investigated by students. The content below is a starting point only. It is important that students not only consider Harwood’s context but their own context and to keep in mind the syllabus emphasis on meaning as a dynamic activity that is as much concerned with them as responders as it is with the composer. Students as responders are not an homogenous group necessarily. They need to reflect on how aspects of their own context – their gender, age, cultural and social background – might influence their response to the poetry.  Historical Context Harwood wrote in the postwar (WW2) period of Australia. (Publication dates are shown in the previous section). This period writing was dominated politically by the era of Robert Menzies as Liberal Prime Minister and his Liberal Party successors. It was an economically prosperous but socially conservative era. However, it was also a period of enormous change: o postwar European migration o increasingly unpopular Australian involvement in the Vietnam war  Literary and other influences o Romanticism Harwood describes herself as a Romantic and certainly her invocation of the role of the artistic imagination in transcending the concrete reality of our lives, finds resonance in the poetry of Keats. This transcendent power of the artistic imagination is ‘as crucial to an understanding of Gwen Harwood’s poetry as it is to a reading of Coleridge..’1. o Modernism Harwood is clearly as well a poet of the 20th century. In her depiction of a world that chills and defeats: ‘the lost world of the Surrounded One – in which the artist, the thinker and the lover never meet or connect or understand each other’s role in the universe, is very like that of the twentieth-century absurdists.’2 The sense of existential loneliness inhabits many of her protagonists. Her exploration of the ‘interior’ is replete with Freudian and Jungian allusions as she attempts to represent the imaginary, the inner self rather than the external, measurable world. The dichotomy between public and private notions of space and time is essentially modernist in its articulation. In poems such as ‘At Mornington’, and ‘Father and Child’, she traverses a life time within a ‘moment’ of ‘real’ or public time – standing with her friend at the gravesite, walking with her elderly father. o the philosophy of Wittgenstein Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was a German philosopher who philosophised about the relationship between language and ‘reality’ and the degree to which we can exist or make sense of ‘reality’ outside of the language that we use. For Wittgenstein, the meaning of language is not dependent on linking the word or phrase referentially to things in the world; rather meaning depends on social acceptance of the ‘rules’ by which language can work. Like 4 the rules of a game, Wittgenstein argued, these rules for the use of ordinary language are neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false: they are merely useful for the particular applications in which we apply them. The members of any community— accountants, students, or rap musicians, for example— develop ways of speaking that serve their needs as a group, and these constitute the language-game. Human beings at large constitute a greater community within which similar, though more widely-shared, language-games get played. While students do not need to closely study this philosophy, it is important for them to at least understand the way in which it affected Harwood’s poetic explorations. There are direct allusions in several of Harwood’s poems to Wittgenstein. In the late poem, ‘Thought is surrounded by a Halo’. Wittgenstein’s strangely beautiful assertion provides the title and the inspiration for such lines as: ‘Language is not a perfect game/and if it were, how could we play?’. 3 Music Harwood’s training and interest in music (she learned privately, became organist at All Saints’ Church on Wickham Terrace, taught music, trained with her family who were all competent musicians, wrote librettos, dedicated various poems to musicians Larry Sitsky and Rex Hobcroft) is evident in both the musical allusions in her poems and in her emphasis on the aural quality of her poems.. ‘I think all my writing has been influenced by the fact that I was a trained musician. Perhaps something about working in a fugal form…that is, starting with a simple idea and carrying it through with all kinds of harmonies changing underneath it..’.4  Critical evaluation o Harwood’s awards are identified in the biographical section of these notes. o the Tassie house-wife poet ‘I feel that I have been handicapped by being the poet-housewife figure: you know, how she can make a nice apricot sponge and write poetry too. There is a savage, nasty part lurking somewhere down there, and yet this is part of the kind mother too.’5 While reviews of Harwood are often prefaced by such attributes as ‘mother, gardener, pianist..’, she has attracted widespread critical and popular attention. In her 1975 interview with John Beston she responded to his question about the relatively slow recognition of her by Australian critics in the following way: ‘It seems odd to me that things I wrote over ten years ago are now receiving attention. But it doesn’t bother me. When I started to write I thought that perhaps I’d just be known as the writer of an occasional poem, but being received as “A Poet” has been beyond my wildest dreams. I don’t think of myself as “A Poet” , just as a uploads/Litterature/ harwood-study-guide.pdf