Denis Glover

To say of Glover that he looks one way to Fairburn and another to Curnow, is not to deny his sharp individuality. His graver poems, especially in The Wind and the Sand (1945) and Sings Harry (1951, 1957) look to the Curnow-complex of habitat, society, and individual, but without the underpinning of ancient myth. His satire has affinities with Fairburn's, but it bites less and mocks more, it has less economic theory, and it lacks (as Fairburns' does not) any overtone of hysteria. The “man alone” (the title of a novel by John Mulgan, also from the 1930s) is a recurrent protagonist in this verse: a melancholy, self-sufficient, hard-bitten (but not unsentimental) questioner who probes, not just the follies of society, but its basic assumptions.