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Today is the birthday (well, not really, she'd be 126) of Dorothea Mackellar, the writer of
My Country, arguably Australia's best-loved poem. (It's still under copyright so I can't reproduce the text here, but it's there in the link and well worth a read.)
Thinking about this made me wonder what people in other countries consider their defining poem. Anyone care to enlighten me?
It could be worse
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I read Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned County (a play on words from one of the lines of that very poem), and enjoyed his travels in Austrailia. Living in the US, while we may have some iconic poets I don't know if we have a defining poem.
Maybe Frost's The Road not Travelled for the view of individualism here. I might lean toward Bukowski's The Genius of the Crowd (but I can be jaded). Other options: WCW The Red Wheelbarrow or Whitman's Song of Myself.
Nothing directly about the country that I can think of.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson
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All wonderful poems -- I read Song of Myself at university and was absolutely blown away by Whitman's technique and insight. (I'm not such a massive Bukowski fan but I say that quietly, because people get violent... still, his bitterness in The Genius of the Crowd is very pleasing to my cynical self)
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I like maybe four Bukowski poems. I hate maybe um everything else by him--so no violence from me.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson
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happy birthday dot.
thats a hard question that needs thinking about
