Blue Corner and Red Corner, Metropolis and Province: Literature and Education in Contemporary Australia

Abstract

'It is a grave mistake—politically, morally, tactically, strategically, pedagogically—in any way to defend poetry by promoting its remoteness or its professional status, such as that is. If literature is a passage to a world elsewhere for some, for many (including most of the people who write it) it is a passage to the world we inhabit: and that is just as true of the Iliad as of a novel reviewed in the paper. If literature is a passage toward the world we live in, instead of away from it, it must necessarily be moral, in the loose sense of the word. That is not 'ridiculous' at all. If literature is a form of thought, it is one clearly quite distinct from rationalism and philosophy, the canons of which are notoriously unhelpful when brought within its frontier.'