‘Interest’ in Les A. Murray

Abstract

In almost any of his literary reviews, and in many of his essays, we find Murray distinguishing between good and bad poetry, between what gives pleasure and what does not, and thereby assuming and working with an economy of profit and loss. The system of exchange does not end there, though, and one of the interesting things about 'interest' is that it lets us glimpse the steady circulation of Murray's work and its contexts: the sorts of things he finds interesting enough to write about, the ways in which the concept 'interest' works in his writings, and what interests literary and cultural critics in those writings.