Poetry
The Bushrangers, a Play in Five Acts, and Other Poems
Charles Harpur · 1853
Synopsis
The volume opens with a play in five acts and in verse devoted to a bush outlaw, inspired by Jack Donahue, who had killed a man in 1828; Margaret Williams sees in it an Elizabethan drama covered with an overflowing romanticism. There follow thirty-nine poems already published elsewhere, including “The Creek of the Four Graves”, “To an Echo on the Banks of the Hunter” and “Lines Suggested by the Appearance of a Comet”, according to AustLit.
Context
Published in Sydney by W. R. Piddington in 1853, the volume is its author's third collection. The play, extracts from which had appeared in 1835 in the Sydney Monitor, was the first published in the country to set its action there and to be the work of a locally born author. Never performed, it was rewritten and became in 1867 Stalwart the Bushranger, published only in 1987. G. B. Barton judged the play weak but held the poem of the four graves to be the best in the book; the Empire saw in it the best proof of a talent born in the colony.
Who it is for
A verse play in the Elizabethan manner and about forty poems, in English; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
A landmark of Australian theatre, and the collection of the man regarded as the country's great poet of the nineteenth century.
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