Towards the Source: from Poems (1913)

Brennan is one of the first legendary figures in Australian literature. Unresponsive to, and uninfluenced by, the forces of nationalism and radicalism that dominated the contemporary Australian scene, he was a literary enigma standing apart from his own social and literary milieu, finding instead a literary affinity with the French symbolist writer Mallarme ... he is clearly part of the international mainstream of writing that gave rise to poets such as T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. - The Oxford Companion to Australian LiteratureTowards the Source can be seen as a kind of extended envoi, at once a setting-out - we are embarking on the livre compose, the composed book - and an introduction to the place or situation that book is setting out from. In this sense, it begins in disillusionment - all its references to a lost Eden, to being cast out, to one's being now condemned to a kind of lonely exile - but there is, within this, a kind of paradoxical hopefulness... One Eden may be gone, but there are signs - experiences, moments in one's being - of the existence of another, toward which one might somehow find one's way. - David Brooks, from his Introduction.