The poetry of Gwen Harwood was strikingly unconventional, yet for most of her career, she was not considered especially radical. This was partly because she tended to use traditional forms; in a time of experimentation, new forms – or no form at all – seemed synonymous with new ideas.
This was a misconception, of course. Harwood – a virtuoso of poetic form – could be outrageous in any metre. But she was quite content to pass for the “kindly, respectable” housewife-poet her readers seemed to want her to be. As she wrote in Littoral, she daily put on
