This chapter considers how understandings of poet and nation in Australia are divided between the settler institutions of literature and poetry and Indigenous traditions. For white Australia, nation functions as a mythic and political collective, while for First Nations people, it is an alien, oppressive framework that ignores sovereignty and is of short historical duration. The chapter considers how colonial and early Federation poets conceived of Australia as a nation in relation to the global North while post-Federation poets like A. D. Hope and Ania Walwicz identify and critique a national consciousness from quite different standpoints. The chapter includes an analysis of a proposed poetic preamble to the Australian Constitution that was defeated by referendum, along with a move to become a republic. The chapter outlines the recognition of Indigenous land rights through the Mabo decision (1992) and its impact on literature. Lastly, it considers how contemporary Aboriginal writer Evelyn Araluen satirically rejects ongoing national mythologies in her recent work, Dropbear (2021).

This chapter offers a short sketch of poetic output with special reference to the Roman provinces Achaea and Asia, and with an eye on how far we can differentiate ‘professional’ poets from virtuoso amateurs.

This closing section offers a brief reflection on how to start exploring the rich and varied history of poetry in English.

This chapter focuses on the early British reception of Ibsen. It begins with Edmund Gosse’s early initiatives and Ibsen’s introduction to the English-speaking world. The next phase involves a group of socialists and feminists who in the 1880s made Ibsen their own, including Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner and George Bernard Shaw. Towards the end of that decade Ibsen experienced surprising success in book form, not least through William Archer’s translations. His breakthrough on the British stage came in 1889 and was followed by a number of intense years with many productions and publications. One notable feature of Ibsen’s stage success was the strong involvement of a number of actresses, who even took on the stage-management of his plays, not least Janet Achurch, Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea. The most notorious event involved the 1891 performance of Ghosts at the Independent Theatre and involved brushes with the censor, while the production of Hedda Gabler was celebrated as a critical success. After the fierce cultural battles over Ibsen in the early 1890s, a swift canonization followed. The last part of the chapter briefly charts Ibsen’s association with the independent theatre sector, his place within the commercial London theatre and key publishing ventures.

Two generations away from slavery in her own family, Carrie Williams Clifford was born in the free state of Ohio in 1862. She came of age during Reconstruction and watched conditions for African Americans erode in the Jim Crow era. Cognizant of the way white Americans were crafting historical narratives to elide black presence and freedoms, she resisted by highlighting the richness of black history, including women’s history, in her poetry, journalism, activism, and theatrical performances. Like her white colleagues in the suffrage movement and male colleagues in race work, Clifford used history to claim self-representation in a world in which African Americans confronted powerful forces attempting to define their place in the nation.

The chapter shows that Emerson and Whitman refined their poetics by probing the truth claims and reality effects of photography. It expands our understanding of American romantic literature by connecting the romantic concern with intuition, firsthand experience, and organic expression to the emergence of photography. Claims to authenticity and immediacy were central to the reform efforts of the transcendentalists because they enabled them to resist social conventions, to counter the commercialization of literary culture, and to renew literature’s democratic ethos. The chapter identifies photographic discourse as an important testing ground for this orientation. Emerson repeatedly reflected on photography to think through the relations between knowledge and mediation and to define the cultural role of literature. At first, he held that the camera’s capacity to record optical reality without distortion realized his ideal of intuitive insight and original expression. His attitude towards photography grew more ambivalent, however, as his commitment to a poetics of process deepened. Seeking to represent a world in flux, Emerson grew wary of photography’s stabilized records of reality.