Poems by Charles Harpur

Charles Harpur is the father of Australian poetry, the first major poet born on the continent, writing from a place most nineteenth-century English poets had never seen and could barely imagine. This collection gathers the four volumes published during his lifetime: the sonnet sequence Thoughts (1842), which threads Australian light and landscape through the most European of forms; A Poet's Home (1862), a meditative extension on nature's relationship to the creative spirit; and The Tower of Dream (1865), a powerfully strange exploration of nightmare and the unconscious. Harpur wrote over 700 poems, but these four volumes contain his most deliberate artistic statements. He writes of the Australian bush not as exotic backdrop but as something deeply known, a place that shaped consciousness itself. For readers interested in where poetry begins in a nation, or simply in work that marries Romantic sensibility with new ground, Harpur remains essential.