Background
James McAuley and Harold Stewart were both, in 1944, in the Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. Before the war they had been part of Sydney's Bohemian arts world. McAuley had acted and sung in left-wing revues at Sydney University. Both preferred early Modernism to its later forms. McAuley, for example, claimed that T.S. Eliot's Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock (1917) was genius, but the subsequent Waste Land (1922), regarded by many as Eliot's finest achievement, was an incoherent mess. Both men lamented "the loss of meaning and craftsmanship" in poetry. They particularly despised the well-funded modernist poetry magazine Angry Penguins and were resentful of the precocious success of Max Harris, the magazine's founder and editor.
Harris was a 22-year-old avant-garde poet and critic in Adelaide, who in 1940, at the age of 18, had started Angry Penguins.
Read more about this topic: Ern Malley
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