Abstract
Since the days of the Silk Road exchanges between East and West, Asian philosophical and cultural ideas have been a magnet for rare pilgrims of the arts and lay scholars like Australian poet Harold Stewart (1917-1994), who, leaving Australia in the early 1960s, sailed to Japan to settle permanently in Kyoto, a city built on a thousand years of Buddhist learning. Stewart made a singular effort to shift his source of inspiration exclusively to Asia in the belief that Australia’s future lay under Australasian skies. This high degree of cultural immersion produced an exclusive oeuvre of Asian-centred writing crowned by two epic poems, a tradition unknown to classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. His large body of writing positions Stewart as the unacknowledged precursor to forty years of Australian poetic responses to Asia, even though his final and perhaps most challenging narrative composition Autumn Landscape Roll, a “Buddhist Divine Comedy” with sources predating Dante by 1800 years, remains unpublished.
Highlights
Since the days of the Silk Road exchanges between East and West, Asian philosophical and cultural ideas have been a magnet for rare pilgrims of the arts and lay scholars like Australian poet Harold Stewart (1917-1994), who, leaving Australia in the early 1960s, sailed to Japan to settle permanently in Kyoto, a city built on a thousand years of Buddhist learning
McAuley of the “Ern Malley” hoax of 1944, remembered as Australia’s world-famous literary scandal,1 brought Stewart more than his share of notoriety. This incident cast a long shadow over his reputation and continued to haunt him through the 1980s until his death in 1994
“Saint Ern” had duly achieved literary canonisation as a modernist hero with poems that continue to be published in the current anthologies, while Stewart’s own Asian-themed work remains obscure and largely unknown
Summary
Since the days of the Silk Road exchanges between East and West, Asian philosophical and cultural ideas have been a magnet for rare pilgrims of the arts and lay scholars like Australian poet Harold Stewart (1917-1994), who, leaving Australia in the early 1960s, sailed to Japan to settle permanently in Kyoto, a city built on a thousand years of Buddhist learning. Immersed in Asian culture since childhood and living in Japan for the final twenty-nine years of his life, the poet wrote two verse epics that are panoramic depictions of Mahayana Buddhism, unprecedented in English-language poetry, alongside a volume of shorter poems and two collections of translated haiku.
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