There has been very little commentary on Harpur’s sonnets (he wrote at least 100 of them, probably many more) or on Harpur’s satirical, political poetry. Two key political figures – William A. Duncan and Henry Parkes – encouraged Harpur’s poetic investment in the sonnet form; and their political and media affiliations helped Harpur to sharpen his poetic use of political satire more broadly. Milton and Coleridge gave him precursors for political character assassination in the sonnet and had already established a (Whig, Romantic) republican sonnet tradition which Harpur’s own sonnets imbued with a ‘colonial vernacular’. This paper looks at Harpur’s political satirical sonnets for Duncan’s Weekly Register in the first half of 1845, many of which were directed at Robert Lowe’s pro-squatter, anti-Gipps Tory newspaper, the Atlas – which had its own stable of satirical, political poets (Templar, William Forster, and Lowe himself). I look at a number of Harpur’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Senators’ – probably influenced by Coleridge’s ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ – and investigate the way his political satire works here. Particular political targets included William Wentworth (relentlessly satirised by Harpur) and Richard Windeyer, two of the colony’s most influential landowner-politicians. I also want to look at Harpur’s ‘Two Sonnets Addressed to James Macarthur, Esq.’ I place these sonnets in their immediate political context and look at their local, vernacular qualities. Harpur called the sonnet a ‘terse embodiment’ of feeling, a sober poetic form which must do its job (in this case, character assassination) forcefully and exactly. His political, satirical sonnets are therefore both restrained – just 14 rhyming lines – and excessive, making bad jokes, lampooning, ridiculing, remonstrating. They are snippets of historical ephemera, designed only for the moment. But – as far as Australian poetry is concerned – they made those early months of 1845 remarkably vivid and gave Harpur a level of political wit and authority very few poets ever achieve.
Ken Gelder is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His books include Reading the Vampire (Routledge 1994), Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne UP 1998: with Jane M. Jacobs), Popular Fiction: The Logic and Practices of a Literary Field (Routledge 2004), Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (Routledge 2007) and New Vampire Cinema (BFI 2012). He is co-author, with Rachael Weaver, of Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy (Sydney UP 2016), The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (Melbourne UP 2020) and, most recently, *Colonial Adventure (Melbourne UP 2024).