"To a Mountain" (1880) is a poem by Australian poet Henry Kendall.

It was originally published in the poet's collection Songs from the Mountains in 1880 and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.

The poems is also known as "Dedication : To a Mountain" as it was placed as an introductory poem for his collection.

Critical reception

A reviewer in The Australasian noted the poem's "feeling of the calm majesty of nature" in a review of the poet's collection Songs from the Mountains.

Judith Wright, looking at Kendall's work in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry called it "deeply interesting, because in it, for the first time, Kendall transcends his central and tormenting preoccupation, his yearning for peace and the past and the Eden-rivers of his childhood, and (literally) looks down on his dream-valleys from a new height."Preoccupations in Australian Poetry by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1965. "Chapter II: Henry Kendall"

Publication history

After the poem's initial publication in Songs from the Mountains in 1880 it was reprinted as follows:

An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Bertram Stevens, Angus and Robertson, 1907 The Golden Treasury of Australian Verse edited by Bertram Stevens, Angus and Robertson, 1909 An Australasian Anthology : Australian and New Zealand Poems edited by Percival Serle, R. H. Croll, and Frank Wilmot, Collins, 1927 New Land, New Language : An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1957 Selected Poems of Henry Kendall edited by T. Inglis Moore, Angus and Robertson, 1957 The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall edited by Thomas Thornton Reed, 1966 A Treasury of Colonial Poetry, Currawong, 1982 The Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature edited by Leonie Kramer and Adrian Mitchell, Oxford University Press, 1985 Henry Kendall: Poetry, Prose and Selected Correspondence edited by Michael Ackland, University of Queensland Press, 1993

See also 1880 in Australian literature 1880 in poetry

References