Double Exposures

This chapter examines how the impetus of ‘backgazing,’ as Australian poet R. D. FitzGerald put it in his ‘Essay on Memory,’ becomes a compelling force within the general framework of modernist poetry. It traces how this retrograde vision was developed not only in FitzGerald but also, in different ways, by his fellow Australian poets Kenneth Slessor and A. D. Hope. It also considers how this counterclockwise strand of modernist poetics runs in parallel to the work of canonical modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, whose interest in various versions of the antipodal has not been so clearly charted.