Harold Stewart

Harold Frederick Stewart (14 December 1916 – 7 August 1995) was an Australian poet and oriental scholar. He is chiefly remembered alongside fellow poet James McAuley as a co-creator of the Ern Malley literary hoax.

Stewart's work has been associated with McAuley and A. D. Hope, belonging to a neo-classical or Augustian movement in poetry, but his choice of subject matter is different in that he concentrates on writing long metaphysical narrative poems, combining Eastern subject matter with his own metaphysical journey to shape the narrative.

He is usually described by critics as a traditionalist and conservative but described himself as a conservative anarchist. A witty and engaging letter writer, many examples have been retained by the National Library in Canberra. Leonie Kramer in The Oxford History of Australian Literature, p. 371, grades the literary quality of Ethel's letters as equal to those of Patrick White, Peter Porter and Barry Humphries.

Stewart was raised in Drummoyne, in the western suburbs of Sydney. He came from a comfortable lower-middle-class background, and his father, employed as a health inspector, had a keen interest in Asia. Stewart displayed early promise as a poet after enrolling at Fort Street High School at the age of fifteen in 1932. Before attending Fort Street he studied the trumpet at the Sydney Conservatorium High School. A subtitle honouring Claude Debussy in 'Prelude: On the Quay,' written in the last year of high school, demonstrates that music was a formative poetic influence and one that provided a sense of organisation for his later poetry, which is most apparent in the fugue-like thematic structure of his spiritual autobiography By the Old Walls of Kyoto. The reference to Debussy also points to the significant influence the French Symbolists had on shaping the affective Gothic mood of his early poetry.

Fort Street was established in 1850 as an academically selective public high school reserved for intellectually gifted students. He got to know James McAuley at Fort Street and the budding poets shared a common interest in literature which provided the foundation for the exchange of ideas and the opportunity to develop a friendship. McAuley won the school Poetry Prize in 1933, while Stewart achieved the same honour in the two years that followed. In a letter to Michael Heyward, he writes: "Jim and I were not good friends at Fort Street, but rather rivals".

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