The Hedge and the Labyrinth. A Holistic Vision of Dorothy Hewett´s poetry

Dorothy Hewett´s poetry follows a complex architecture, a structure which encompasses her personal beliefs and the guiding lights that consciously and unconsciously led her life, while it also draws and deploys core elements from the literary tradition of Western culture. The primary image that pervades her poems is the garden, which is either the place where many of her poems occur or a significant component in others. Hewett´s garden retains several of the characteristics of the primordial garden, such as innocence, abundance and placid solitude, but it also partakes of its Romantic nuances, which, after all, are the same as in Eden but enhanced by feeling and intensity. The garden as literary locus sets the pace of Hewett´s poetry in that it links myth-making with literary tradition, the pillars that sustain the body of her poetic reality. This triangle, myth, tradition and reality, incorporates the main topics that the Australian writer inscribes in her work, and, while each corner retains its thematic substance, it also reflects the other two, thus giving unity to the whole poetic process. As Bruce Bennett pointed out as early as 1995, "place, appropriately conceived, is a meeting ground of mental, emotional and physical states and as such is a suitable focus for the literary imagination" (Bennett: 19).

Abstract licence: CC BY

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