Australian verse, throughout much of the nineteenth century, occupied an uncertain place in a predominantly utilitarian society. Foreign models and publications dominated the limited local market, while a virtual absence of patronage left poets exposed to the vagaries of government service, or the endless demands “imposed by sheep, on an indifferent run in a bad season”. Nevertheless, colonial writers were keenly aware that many national literatures were relatively recent formations. They knew that the liberation of the German states from Napoleonic France coincided with a rich literary efflorescence, and recognised how Irish aspirations for independence were accompanied by promising endeavours to awaken the Harp of Erin. These were heartening examples, but they in no way lessened the trials caused, in the words of one poet, by an “exotic culture which dwarfs or destroys all home sympathies, and surrounds its possessor with the bleak atmosphere of local indifference”. Calls for political and literary self-reliance culminated in the emergence of popular balladists in the 1890s, when poetry reflected and helped to shape growing national sentiment. By the 1920s, however, this creative impulse was largely exhausted. Nationalists were again underlining the need for “some sort of civilization ... to be built up in Australia if we are not to remain a meaningless jumble of creeds, cliques, classes”, and by the 1930s the interlinking of literature and nationhood was complicated by formalistic considerations. Modernist literary trends had been slow to make a major impact locally, and a generation of fledgling poets, born mainly during or in the aftermath of World War I, attempted to reconcile international movements with the quest for personal and national authenticity. Their efforts in the 1950s and beyond contributed decisively to the emergence of a local literature, and lent to Australian verse a resonance and self-assurance, anchored unselfconsciously in either local or overseas settings, which had been largely beyond the grasp of their predecessors.