Compilation and annotation – these are the strategies of the taxonomer, and while important, they do not much help to close up the distance between the reader of today and the poetic climate of the 1950s. Even his contemporaries greeted his work with puzzled respect. In Poetry Australia’s tribute issue to Webb, A.D. Hope admits that his early attempts to read Webb’s poetry ‘were baffled by what I called the opacity of their meaning’. Interestingly enough, Hope goes on to link Webb’s poetry with that of the Russian Osip Mandelstam, who shares Webb’s gift for remoulding language with idiosyncratic force. However, unlike the lyrical Mandelstam, Webb is above all a dramatic artist intent on capturing the universals of existence in an atmosphere of epic grandeur. His temperament was attracted to heroic figures – Ben Boyd, Ludwig Leichhardt, St Francis, Socrates, Edward Eyre – all great explorers of interior landscapes. This in itself opens up a daunting gap between today’s reader and the text. When poetry in 1991 cheerfully celebrates the eloquence of the Spontaneous Poetickal Personality in lines such as ‘I plunge my hands back in the suds / and rinse my lurid underwear’, how on earth does one relate to the elevated tone, lofty purpose, and intellectual enterprise of something like ‘The Canticle’?

As the editors themselves point out in their introduction, it is certainly time for a re-evaluation of Webb’s poetry, but no attempt is made here to point out the nature of such a task. (Griffith’s just published critical biography may well tackle this.) Despite some contemporary paranoia about critical theory’s ‘overwhelming’ influence (they are right, of course – much theory is infinitely more poetic than your average poem), it could certainly help to open up Webb’s work to a wider audience. Pioneers in this field, such as W.D. Ashcroft, endeavour to explore how the poet creates meaning in order to then go on to elucidate what the poem might possibly mean. Hope complained that ‘one needs more clues than the poet thinks to give to a private world and very personal associations’. My complaint is that annotational detective work, even of the highest standard, is ineffective without the more comprehensive insights of literary theory.

Vincent Buckley offered up a valuable insight when he described Webb as ‘the most metaphor addicted poet in this country’. For Webb, metaphor is not an isolated figure of speech. It resembles more closely a figure in music, a distinctive motif that occurs throughout the text in a series of variations. This ability to extend metaphor into a structuring principle can be seen clearly in the first stanza of ‘Note to a Freudian’:

All through winter the puny, virginal rose
Sat tightly, hunched up, and the libidinous earth
Faithfully nursed her through long months of repression:
But these strumming indeterminate winds and snows
Were the drunken censors: flurries and drifts of mirth
Pealed through to the roots of her dazed somnolent passion.

This rewriting of the life-cycle of a flower in psychoanalytical terminology neatly mimics the psychoanalytical desire to find itself everywhere and in everything (the rose, that’s Oedipus too!). The metaphor ‘these strumming indeterminate winds and snows / Were the drunken censors’ appears cumbersome until the word ‘censors’ is illuminated by Freud’s theories of wish-fulfilment and censorship. A crude example, no doubt, but one which illustrates the marvellous and cryptic coherence of the poetry. Once the metaphorical outlines are made clear, something of the ‘unenclosable experience’ begins to filter through.

But again, this gives the impression that Webb is merely erudite, and not a singer, a mystic. For Ashcroft, Webb ‘is less concerned with instant communication than with enticing, prodding, guiding the consciousness along a path of involvement towards his own vision’. So be it. Until the work of Webb is made more accessible to us, let us be buffeted by the beauties and the complexities of the language, the subtle music of the rhythms and rhymes. The path may be long and obscured by time, but surely such a path is bound to entice explorers of poetry to traverse its still largely unchartered extent. Despite the clamour of our dim and shouting vortex, one hopes that Cap and Bells will inspire some new discoveries.