The Penguin Book of Australian Verse

In his introduction to this volume editor Harry Heseltine provides a number of "basic principles" he followed in making the poetry selections represented here. He had not attmepted "to make every previous collection obsolete", rather "to supplement and complement that sense of what is central to our poetry which earlier collections have helped to form."

He makes no "apology" for including a number of "standard anthology pieces", though he does point out that where T. Inglis Moore compiled a volume of 278 pages of verse from the earliest colonial works up to the time of Mary Gilmore (see From the Ballads to Brennan), he, Heseltine, had made do with 50 pages of material from that period.

His aim was to include "the best poems written in this country since 1788".^[3]