Beyond Kerguelen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| "Beyond Kerguelen" | |
|---|---|
| by Henry Kendall | |
| First published in | The Sydney Mail |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Publication date | 19 June 1880 |
| Lines | 84 |
| Full text | |
 Beyond Kerguelen at Wikisource | |
"Beyond Kerguelen" (1880) is a poem by Australian poet Henry Kendall.[1]
It was originally published in the The Sydney Mail newspaper on 19 June 1880,[2] and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.[1]
Critic J. Howlett-Ross, in a short essay about Kendall's work, noted that this poem "is one of the poet's most characteristic pieces of work. It has a wealth of words and use of them not inferior, I will venture to say, to the copious and marvellous diction of Swinburne."[3]
In a review of the poet's collection Songs from the Mountains in The Australian Town and Country Journal a writer made some extravagant claims, noting that the poem "is in the author's most characteristic style, and is of a very high order of writing, with lines in it, here and there, of weird wildness, that probably no living writer has excelled."[4]
Michael Ackland emphasised the darkness in the poem saying that it is "appropriately described in terms of absence, antithesis, blindness and chaos – stock attributes of spiritual darkness."[5]