Perhaps more than any Australian poet of the 20th Century, John Tranter, who died last Friday at the age of 79, was guided by a relentless desire to experiment. His earliest admiration was for the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and he soon discovered John Ashbery, who ultimately became his most important influence.
Tranter was dissatisfied with the Australian poetry scene he encountered in the mid-1960s. He rejected what he saw as a political and aesthetic conservatism, with its roots in an Anglo-Irish tradition and little sympathy for the French innovators of the 19th century or more recent developments in the United States.
