Of Australia, David Malouf writes:

Its English was not the seventeenth-century English of the United States, with its roots in Evangelical dissent and the revolutionary idealism of the Quakers....It was the sober, serviceable language fashioned by writers like Addison and Steele and others to purge English of the violent and extreme expression, and political and sectarian hostilities, that had led to the Civil War....This was the language Australia inherited. The language of reasonable argument. Of balance. Of compromise.

Impossible to say whether a given author is subject to such forces, but Australian poet Stephen Edgar has developed a quiet, nonvolatile rhetoric of such balance and reason, and has reached such a level of syntactical control in this mode that he can write well about, and is at his best writing about, next to nothing: a woman lounging alone in a house on a hot day, some birds walking up the beach. Actors in these poems are frustrated from acting by futility, apathy, or anomie, and are thrown back variously onto what they see and what they remember, which may bring misery or happiness. The poetry therefore gravitates towards the action of the mind, and fits most comfortably into the uncomfortable gap between the senses and sensation:

The optic nerve still lives in paradise
And hankers to admit
Its innocent improbabilities.
The mind has paid that price
And always seems to see through seeing's wit
What was observed by Mephistopheles:
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
—From Optical Illusions

Life, especially at its quietest, is a brandy that must be sipped, even if it doesn't taste good.

Like Thomas Hardy, Edgar derives considerable impulse from the stanza form, and adapts to it a Latinate syntax that artfully defers and paces meaning. He gives image and metaphor limited play, because these devices are liable to run away with a thought he has other plans for. The poetry is under high compression, to be sure, and occasionally something leaks out the side: metrical considerations lead to a few stiff word choices (like "begem," "conflagrate," and "empetalled"), all the more evident because the diction is generally mellow.

Edgar is a bit too angular for his translations of Baudelaire, and an attempt to locate the metaphysics of two laboring porn actors topples over into decadence. Though not invulnerable to the rococo dangers of the style, he achieves, overall, a supple classicism that earns him a place next to the best twentieth-century American formalists. Nor is he in their image: more exposed than Hecht, more troubled than Wilbur, more Horatian than Merrill, he is as capable as all of these poets of weaving out of verse that fine grade of mesh that sifts from experience grains of meaning otherwise lost.

— D. H. Tracy