by Alex McKeown
Australian poets didn’t take to free verse until the 1960s, with brief experiments in the late 1930s and early 1940s having been killed off by the Ern Malley Hoax. So the conventional story goes. If you ask someone in the know then they might mention the popular contests held in the 1910s by outlets such as The Bulletin, which sadly only received Whitmanian parodies by rank amateurs. Or they might mention the two isolated experiments which very belatedly become part of the standard Australian canon in the 1980s: “Grotesque” by Lesbia Harford and “Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebraic-Symbolico-Riddle Musicopoematographoscope” by Christopher Brennan. It’s clear enough, if only from the titles, what these two accomplished poets thought of free-verse as a form; absurd, ugly and good only for parody.
For sustained and serious output we might look to Frederick Manning, a friend of Ezra Pound, who wrote imagist free verse in the 1910s. But Fred hadn’t stepped foot in Australia for at least a decade when he began his free verse practice, so while he may technically win the title of Australia’s first free verse poet, I’m not sure if we have any real right to claim his achievements as our own.
So, did free verse pass us by? Was there really no Australian free-verse poet who wrote and published in Australia for Australians until the Jindyworobak movement in the 1930s? In fact, there was, but her existence has not yet been noted in the annals of Australian literary
history. Her poems have never even been released in book form. And yet you’ve certainly heard of her: I speak of Pamela (P.L.) Travers (1899 – 1996), most notably the author of Mary Poppins. For a year prior to her leaving for London to become an international literary success, Travers published a deluge of poems, stories and anecdotes in Australian magazines, and received significant recognition for her efforts.
Travers’s writing career begins with some rhyming poems in three issues of The Bulletin in March and April of 2023.
April
Soon she’ll come dancing
In her yellow gown
Autumn leaves upon her head
In a chaplet brown.
Leap high, young Laughter,
Play your merry part,
April comes a-swinging, singing to my heart!
Eyes like a sunset
Creeping to the west
And, for lover’s pillowing,
A round kissing breast.
Pipe low, O wonder,
Shadows come unfurled,
For the dusk of April drenches all the world!
Bend down, I’ll whisper
(No one else must know),
He comes in April,
Love-laden, and so
Farewell to Sorrow,
Joy shall stain the years,
And the lips of April quench my foolish tears!
Travers was an accomplished formalist and continued to publish such poems alongside her free verse, including sonnets, heroic couplets, ballads, triolets and rondels, showing clear influence from Ernest Dowson and the decadent movement.
From May 1923 onwards, Frank Morton gave her free-rein in her own monthly column, “A Woman Hits Back”, for his journal The Triad, a surprisingly heavy responsibility and honour for a 24 year-old who had only just received her first publication. It is in this column that we see her first foray into free verse:
From “What My Family Thinks I Think”
I am made of sawdust.
Of course, I have blood in my veins,
But I avoid thinking about it
As much as possible…
It is not nice.
My mother found me under a pansy petal
One day
When she was picking flowers
In the front garden,
And that is how I came to be born.
We do not talk much about the event…
It is not nice.
I must not dance
More than twice in succession
With the same man.
And even then I must keep my partner
At a full arm’s length,
Even if we are dancing the Woop-Woop Jazz.
I must never kiss a man
Unless I am about to become engaged to him,
Because nice girls don’t do that.
I shall marry some day, I suppose,
But I don’t think much about it…
It is not a nice subject
For a young girl.
…
The speaker goes on to describe the supposed happy ending of the loveless and passionless marriage eventually to be her fate. She knows the absurd innocence and self-denial expected of a young woman and exposes it with a nice ironic detachment. This subject matter is typical of the column, later described in the journal as “that pageful of candid feminism which each month set so many of us blinking.”
The form of this free verse is curiously casual and unrhythmic for a poem of 1923, more reminiscent of the form-phobic second-wave of free verse which would come to dominate the poetry airwaves of the 1960s than the quasi-metrical, rhyming, high-style of innovators such as Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot that defined free verse at this time. Such poets, each in their own
way, used free verse to experiment with what was possible with meter. Free verse for them was not a freedom from form but a new and exciting form to play with, moving in and out of different meters and rhyming patterns. A large percentage, sometimes a vast majority, of lines from such poets could be easily extracted into a metrical cento. Traver’s poem is more akin to the verse stylings of William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, who would become major influences on the free-verse revival of the 50s and 60s, and whose lines and sentences resist metrical readings.
If a proudly British-Australian poet of the 1920s was influenced by such American Americans as Moore and Williams this would be quite interesting to say the least (keep in mind that even in the 1960s, it was a struggle to obtain American books in Australia). Imagism was vaguely known of in Australia, and much derided, but Travers’s doesn’t follow imagist tenets. I’d love to see some future research into exactly which free verse poetry Travers was aware of. She also worked occasionally with the longer line to good effect:
Loss
Gentle little cat, why do you go stealing swiftly past my hands stretched for your caressing?
Once you crept adoring to my arms, and music slumbered in your mouth as you slept content.
Is it that you guess that he, in the darkness, woke my mouth from dreaming to a yearning
hunger?
Are my hands no longer worthy your caressing? Must I weep for ever, tender little cat!
A higher more rhythmic style can be seen in the following neo-paganesque poem of death’s acceptance:
Pan’s Answer
It is I, Pan, behold me, brother!
Blind, foolish mortal, beloved,
Have I not held you in my hand’s deep palm
Since first you sought me
As a trembling boy
Within the garden of your first love’s eyes?
When you have wept in pain,
And flung your hands
Groping for light,
My arms have borne you through a sea of doubt
And kept you faithful.
I have laughed to hear you
In the quiet night
Crooning of love,
White Psyche in your arms,
Sobbing with ecstasy,
You who have been love’s lover down the years:
I have loved you in happy, quiet places,
On the high hills I piped my melodies
Goldenly
That you might catch some strain
And weave it into beauty for the world.
Proudly
I stood beside you while you cried
Against the hypocrites and barren fools
Who knew me not—
Then, too, I loved you!
And now you stand
Upon the edge of Life
Which you call Death…
Are you afraid, brave soul,
Who have lived fearlessly,
To pass the gate and come to me at last?
Ah, no! Hold fast, hold fast now to my hand,
Your brother Pan shall guide you through the darkness!
But she’s superior in her low-style, exploring everyday life and human-to-human connection, as in the following deeply Australian poem, which I think is her best:
On a Verandah
We skim
Light-footed over the fragile surface
Of emotion,
Talk of the weather, countless books,
New friends
And old, old jokes.
While underneath it all
Our sobbing hearts cry hungrily
The searing words, which, cowards that we are,
We dare not speak!
In February 1924, after 7 columns of “A Woman Hits Back”, containing around five poems each, and more than 30 poems published outside of the column in The Bulletin and The Triad, Travers left for London to seek fame and fortune. In The Triad’s announcement of her departure, we are told that by the time she reaches London, her book of verse, “Bitter-Sweet”, will have been released by Kirtley Press, run by John Kirtley & Jack Lindsay. Such a book never seems to have existed however; there is no record of it in any library that I can find. A clue to this comes 10 years later in 1934 when Nettie Palmer, one of Australia’s top literary critics, writes the following:
It must be ten years since Pamela Travers went to London. In her youth here she was versatile and skilful, and the overshrewd suggested that she was just another pen-name for Frank Morton. Steadily, through the last ten years, Pamela Travers has been proving that she is nobody’s pen-name.
Apart from the breezy journalism on which she lives —her “Letters from Russia” will soon appear in book form—Pamela Travers has been uttering her own vision of life, using original verse-forms of increasing subtlety and power. In recent decades, many poets writing in English have taken Verlaine’s broad hint that rhyme should be suggested, not emphasised. The reader should be made aware of a flickering, rhymed pattern, not jarred by hammer-strokes.
…
Directed towards a new bondage, a new freedom, these devices and a score of others are all used today by poets capable of the most exacting Spenserian stanzas or intricate Gilbertian pattern. Among them is Pamela Travers. Gently daring, not in the matter of rhyme only but in the wayward metre, she writes a girl’s “Prayer in a Field,” with stanzas like these, the first and last:
Saint Anthony, my little cow
with the sedate and comely air,
you remember? Her horns were round
and bent like thorn boughs, and there were
dun shadows patched upon her grey,
that when she moved
along the bushy dappled ways
you could not tell her from the wood;
….Have you no girl, Saint Anthony,
to bend back into Heaven’s lawn
and kiss until your mouth is dry
for a bowl of milk or spring water?
If you’d been under a girl’s cloak,
Saint Anthony, now
you’d know the thirst in Michael’s throat
and bring me back my little cow.
This was one of four poems by Pamela Travers in Alida Monro’s striking new collection, Recent Poetry. To possess more of her work you need to have been an assiduous clipper of reviews, such as the short-lived, masterly “Irish Statesman” and the current “New English Weekly.” Long ago, her published verse will have amounted to a bookful, but it seems she is her own severest publisher’s reader, rejecting and postponing. The first book of her selected poems will be important.
Ah, so one of those poets who rejects and postpones their own publication. It’s interesting to see these new lines of poetry from 1934, showing us something of how Travers’s practice developed in London; notably she has abandoned the line-initial capital letters of her Australian years. Given she already had a bookful of poems when she left our shores, how much more must she have published after a further decade of writing? And after 1934, and the success of Mary Poppins, how much longer did she continue writing poetry until her death in 1996?
Palmer was surely right that the first book of Travers’s selected poems would be important, except of course that it still hasn’t appeared nine decades later! Somebody needs to gather up these poems from The Bulletin, The Triad, The Irish Statesman and the New English Weekly, and put them into book form. Presumably as the author of an important series of novels her papers have been carefully preserved, so there will also surely be the opportunity for discovering unpublished work. I look forward to the first book of her collected poems, which will be important.
Alex McKeown is a Tasmanian poet and translator. His work has appeared in Meanjin, Island, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite and The Canberra Times. He is the author of We Leave Gaps (Walleah Press, 2025) and translator of Love in the Fields (Penteract Press, 2022).
