LITERATURE – POETRY

Poetry in New Zealand is the child of a marriage between inheritance and environment. The inheritance has immense weight – the whole body of English (and European) literature – a weight constantly increasing as literary influences continue to flow from overseas. The environment, an egalitarian society set in a landscape of arresting extremes, is immediate and pressing. A small number of poets, most of them still alive, have succeeded in subduing both inheritance and environment to the exigencies of an individual vision.

The major periods in the development of poetry run parallel to English literary history: mid-Victorian romanticism evolving into Georgianism in the earlier twentieth century (we missed, to our loss, fin de siècle decadence), and giving place to the more astringent accents of the post-Eliot revolution. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present-day, colonists have brought books and literary fashions with them; English publishers have supplied the local market; New Zealand authors have aspired to publication in London. Not a few early settlers were men of taste, for whom regular consignments of books and periodicals were a lifeline to culture. Alfred Domett, the author of a readerless epic Ranolf and Amohia (1872) had known Browning well.

Echoes of Romantic Revival

The verse written in the nineteenth century and, with few exceptions, until the 1920s, was a muffled and undistinguished echo of the Romantic Revival. A few volumes may be recalled now, largely for their historical and sociological interest; Charles Bowen's Poems (1861), Thomas Bracken's numerous and portentous volumes in the later nineteenth century (yet Bracken's “Not Understood” remains the best-known single New Zealand poem), Blanche Baughan's early twentieth century work, and, pre-eminently in this period, William Pember Reeves' (q.v.) New Zealand and Other Poems (1898) and The Passing of the Forest (1925). In the last years of the nineteenth century, too, Arnold Wall, began to publish his many collections, though his definitive volume, The Pioneers and Other Poems, did not appear until 1948. Today we are not tempted to greet these and other productions as the foundations of a distinctive New Zealand literature – which is not to say that a few agreeable poems may not be found in them.

Two subsidiary streams may be mentioned; the first a version of Scottish dialect verse running from James Barr of Craigilee (Poems and Songs, 1801–11) to Jessie Mackay (Poems, 1911), and not yet finally extinguished; the second the importation from Australia of the colonial ballad, a vigorous but debased form of versifying used to celebrate the feats of outback notables – gold diggers, drovers, swaggers, and the like. David McKee Wright (Station Ballads and Other Verses, 1897) was the most notable New Zealand practitioner.

Occasional successes on one side, nothing these writers produced, with the exceptions of Reeves and Wall, amounted to a distinguished achievement. That most of them lacked talent is probably a sufficient explanation. Critics have stressed other factors: the insipidity of the prevailing romantic fashion, the preoccupation of their society with concrete colonising tasks, and the inhibiting gulf separating their mental equipment (English and Scottish) from their situation (antipodean and bewildering). Few of them aimed high; those who did fell the more resoundingly fiat. Most were cripplingly self-conscious of their colonial status; many were engaged upon exacting careers – Bracken, Bowen, and Reeves were eminent politicians, especially the last.

The first writer to shake off this mantle of mediocrity, Katherine Mansfield, wrote verse a good deal less notable than her fiction. She spent her mature life in Europe, publishing there a volume of poems (Poems 1923), and setting an example of self-exile which many have followed, but not typically to the point of permanent expatriation.

Search for Significance

In poetry, the first voice of great distinction was that of an untravelled male, R. A. K. Mason. In the 1920s he wrote a small number of highly individual, carefully worded, and deeply melancholy lyrics, which were recognised, in the next decade (No New Thing, 1934, This Dark Will Lighten, 1941, collected the fugitive publications of the 1920s), as an important achievement. Alone among the poets who may be called modern, he shows no trace of the revolution contemporaneously effected in England and America by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His technical equipment is Georgian, his mood one of romantic despair, but his laconic accents quite his own.

In the same decade other poets were aspiring towards and, though less strikingly, achieving individuality. J. R. Hervey, J. C. Beaglehole, Eileen Duggan, Ursula Bethell, D'Arcy Cresswell, A. R. D. Fairburn, Robin Hyde – all to some degree refined their Georgian heritage and proceeded, most substantially in the 1930s, to write poems marked by authentic experience, professional competence, and intellectual stature. But by the 1930s the full impact of the Eliot-Pound revolution had been felt, and the lead was taken by those who assimilated these invigorating influences, and applied the lessons they thus learned to a more determined search for significance – individual, social, historical – than had before been the case. Five names may be singled out for emphasis: Fairburn, Ursula Bethell, and with them, Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, and Denis Glover.

A Most Fruitful Period

The achievement of these writers, and of some of their contemporaries, was summed up in an important anthology A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45 (1945 and 1951), edited with a critical introduction by Allen Curnow – probably the most important volume of verse yet published in New Zealand. It contains work of great seriousness (relieved only by the humour and satire of Glover and Fairburn), considerable technical proficiency, and a frequently restless energy. The restlessness arose (and continues to arise) from a feeling of alienation, in part from contemporary society, a feeling of isolation, personal as well as geographical, a feeling that nothing (apart from the poetry itself and personal relations) could be taken for granted. This was well attuned with the contemporary mood of the country: the early 1930s saw prolonged depression, the later 1930s a drift to war – insecurity was national and international. The personal despair which prompted Mason in the 1920s, took, in the next decade, an added, social dimension, one that is of great importance in the satire of Fairburn, the lampoons of Glover, and the historical myths of Curnow. Brasch and Bethell were a little apart – more private, yet also concerned with a context of time and place. In yet other, but still related ways, Dowling, Hervey, and Duggan, all three notably religious and even moralistic, probed into the nature of their situation. From all this anxiety, this idealistic yet open-eyed seeking, emerged a small body of carefully shaped verse, which, a quarter century later, marks the most fruitful period in the history of New Zealand poetry.

A. R. D. Fairburn

The most various was Fairburn. He was a prolific controversialist, and much of his verse is polemical. Dominion, republished in Three Poems, 1952 (a flawed poem, but even Fairburn's flaws have value) was his most ambitious single work; it contains an analysis of New Zealand at once historical, sociological, and personal. Marx and Douglas cast heavy shadows across this verse; the technical debts owed to Eliot and Pound are sometimes too apparent. But at its centre lies a deeply felt joy in man and nature, and a sharply experienced grief at the perversions of history and society. There is a tension always present between the poet as hedonistic contemplative, at home with friends and with nature, and the poet as reformer, compelled to be an agitator by his conviction that society must be remade in the image of nature. His lyrics, many of them unusually strong and musical, are most readily found in Strange Rendezvous (1952).

Allen Curnow

There is less polemic in Curnow, more meditation, and that of a stronger intellectual fibre. There is satire in some early poems, but his work leaves current perplexities for their historical origins and spiritual essence. Curnow's most important books are Sailing or Drowning (1943), At Dead Low Water (1949), The Axe (1949), and Poems 1949–1957 (1957). His imagination was caught by the figure of the navigator, either Polynesian or European, where journeyings connected New Zealand to the greater world. He dwells, too, on the way in which discovery at a point of time postulates a future in part determined by world history at that point. The other determinant is the thing discovered, the island, the colony, the island nation. From discovery stems colonisation, and from this a prolonged tension between the settlers and the land. The complex inadequacy and grief of a people in a land where they remain alien is a theme in much of Curnow's earlier verse, much of Brasch's, and of the long essays of M. H. Holcroft (collected under the title Discovered Isles in 1951), essays which take the first steps towards a critical evaluation of the verse of these two watershed decades.

Denis Glover

To say of Glover that he looks one way to Fairburn and another to Curnow, is not to deny his sharp individuality. His graver poems, especially in The Wind and the Sand (1945) and Sings Harry (1951, 1957) look to the Curnow-complex of habitat, society, and individual, but without the underpinning of ancient myth. His satire has affinities with Fairburn's, but it bites less and mocks more, it has less economic theory, and it lacks (as Fairburns' does not) any overtone of hysteria. The “man alone” (the title of a novel by John Mulgan, also from the 1930s) is a recurrent protagonist in this verse: a melancholy, self-sufficient, hard-bitten (but not unsentimental) questioner who probes, not just the follies of society, but its basic assumptions.

Charles Brasch

Charles Brasch, in his early verse a good deal more subdued than these contemporaries, is comparable, though thoroughly individualistic. More cosmopolitan in habits and outlook, he was also more explicitly concerned with problems of civilisation and culture. An early title, The Land and the People (1939), and two later ones, Disputed Ground and The Estate (1948 and 1957) point to the nature of his preoccupations. The land and the people, at odds with each other, need to be wedded by habits and rituals which will ease the rawness of each; the country (so at one level; at another, the nature of man) is ground disputed over by the demands of its inhabitants and its own resistance to change. A man's estate is all he has to reckon with; a territory where inheritance and environment meet, conflict, and (it may be eventually) merge.

Ursula Bethall

For Ursula Bethall (Collected Poems, 1950), as for Brasch in his different way, the individual's simultaneous rootlessness and rootedness in his environment, was an analogue of man's whole temporal life; earth, to this deeply Christian poet, was a transient lodging, though still a true home. Wherever she saw herself and her fellows – in a suburban garden, on the Canterbury Plains, or sailing to a new colony – she saw them sub speciae aeternitatis. Her concern with the particular places and times relates her to Brasch, Fairburn, and Curnow; her religious basis links her with J. R. Hervey and Basil Dowling. In each of these two a moralistic trend is combined with a corpus of nature poetry. Dowling's neatly turned evocations, and Hervey's infrequently fluent but always deeply felt probings into the human predicament, seldom had the thrust of the best contemporary work, though both added greatly to their stature in the 1950s, Dowling in Canterbury (1949) and Hervey in She Was My Spring (1955).

It was the distinction of these poets to be the first New Zealanders to write consistently well; they were competent, and their verse arose from authentic experience of themselves and of their world. Their successors have not rivalled their achievement. How much their quality owes to their concern with their country is a difficult point. There is, au fond, no reason why a poet of importance should not write for his lifetime out of his interior world, though the effort to think in a vacuum might in the end exhaust him, as, perhaps, it exhausted Mason, and a later and more extreme introspective, Charles Spear. But it is a fact of additional significance that these poets did look hard at their country, and that their country exists in their verse, the poems produced subsequently as well as in the 1930s.

Curnow's myth of discovery and conflict rose to a climax in two works, Landfall in Unknown Seas and a verse play, The Axe. Since then, his work has had less external reference (though, always, the most “external” poems sprung from an interior impulse) as in At Dead Low Water and especially Poems 1949–57. But his later plays, his light verse, and some serious poems, are more explicitly satirical and even didactic than anything in his earlier work. Fairburn wrote to the end of his life with rare consistency; “To a Friend in the Wilderness” (printed in Three Poems) continued the debate between the reformer and the escaper, and affirms the individual's duty of involvement with common humanity. Glover, with less panache than in his early days, continues to dwell upon lake, mountain, sea, and stream, and upon the men who have achieved fellowship with them. Hervey ended his career with unexpected passion in a group of intimately personal poems (She was My Spring), poems centred upon his wife and her death.

Brasch's later years have been unusually fruitful. Uneasy homelessness marked much of his early verse; in later poems, especially those in The Estate, it has been balanced by the discovery of symbols of permanence and rest. In the achievements of settler ancestors, in the accomplishments of artists, in the quality of friendships, he has found occasions of equipoise between tensions, resting places in a pilgrimage through flux. The tone may be overly solemn, the spirit too relentlessly dedicated, but the achievement is considerable.

The Contemporary Scene

Only two poets, James K. Baxter and Kendrick Smithyman, made their mark in the 1940s and in subsequent years in a way that put them beside, say, Curnow and Brasch. Yet, in this very period, there has been an unexampled profusion, with new poets emerging as the older wrote on. It is difficult, with any of the new writers except these two, to point to any solid body of work, but such a verdict must be no more than provisional, for they are young enough to become what they are not yet, figures of major importance. No formula can cover all the new names. But many of them go about their work in a professional spirit; they have written good poems and are likely to do so again; they are receptive to new directions set overseas, some too impetuously so; they are individualistic, rejecting equally the sailing orders into the future issued by their forerunners and their contemporaries. Out of the swarm, a few individuals may be isolated – which is to say, wagers may be placed on likely winners, on the basis of current form.

Much of Baxter's and Smithyman's verse continues to look inquiringly at land and people. But they dispense with any theory or mythology evolved for this special purpose. Concrete and common experience underlies many of their poems – for Baxter the Otago of Scottish settlers and gold diggers, and the southern mountains; for Smithyman the North Auckland of mangrove swamps, missionaries, and colonists. Keith Sinclair, another Aucklander, has a fairer claim to be considered Curnow's successor; a distinguished historian, much of his verse (but that not the most notable) broods upon missionaries, settlement, Maoris, and racial war.

Baxter sees man in apocalyptic religious terms; he is more concerned with mankind self-exiled from heaven than with New Zealanders isolated in the South Pacific. The Fall is the one myth in his poetry. Eden is often translated into the unreflective immediacy of childhood experience; the Fall is the consequence of experience, especially the experience of sex. Two consequences result. First, Baxter clings, often with a zeal little disciplined either by thought or metre, to the lifelines thrown from heaven into the seas of human life – here his Catholicism is important. Second, he has a compassion for those wrecked upon the rocks of social convention – the drunks, the deviates and the rejects of a success-dominated society, those who preserve in their outcast condition a shred of integrity to guard them against the greater, cosmological, Fall. In this he is close to the otherwise much different verse of Louis Johnson. His themes apart, the most important thing about Baxter is his sheer ability and virtuosity. He has covered the whole range from ribaldry to prophecy, from satire to lyric. Many of his best poems witness the marriage of these modes; he can manage shifts of tone within a single statement without losing that unity of tone which is the true accent of his personal speech. Blow Wind of Fruitfulness (1948), The Fallen House (1953), and In Fires of No Return (1958) contain his best verse.

Kendrick Smithyman is considerably less approachable – though, in fact, the cadences of his verse owe a good deal more to conversational speech and less to bardic rapture than is the case with Baxter. But in his poems the language of common speech, while preserving the accent of its origin, is transformed into a verbal music of unusual complexity and range. The syntax is frequently formidable, the flow of thought intricate and even tormented. This is to say that the reader must work hard with Smithyman, but he may do so, as often as not, in the sure knowledge that he will be rewarded for his pains. His themes cannot be epitomised briefly; there is, most accessibly, his North Auckland spiritual map-making, but this is merely one among many. Love, death, youth, age, war – these are, in a general way, his subjects. His output has been considerable, but, apart from one collection, The Blind Mountain (1950), is scattered. But it already amounts to a significant achievement.

For the rest, one must speak of occasional rather than consistent achievement, with the qualification that in all probability the best is yet to be. Five poets, at one time associated with Wellington, show in their work the continued impress of English, American, and European influences. Louis Johnson is the most prolific of these. The titles of his books, The Sun Among the Ruins (1951), Roughshod Among the Lilies (1951), New Worlds for Old (1957), indicate the apocalyptic violence of this verse. Here there is more energy than subtlety, and a number of misfires, but, at its best, the verse is sharply individual, mordantly eloquent, wide in range and deep in thrust. Patrick Wilson (The Bright Sea, 1951) is altogether different. His poems are ostentatiously quiet and even-toned; his rejection of eloquence, his deliberately oblique approach, are in themselves mannerisms. But some brief lyrics are quite flawless, and his homage to Yeats (Sailing to Ballisodare) is in itself a chapter in New Zealand literary history. Nearly the whole of Alistair Campbell's output is contained in a slim volume (Mine Eyes Dazzle, 1950) of shapely love poems crowned by an impressive elegy, itself a love poem. W. H. Oliver's Fire Without Phoenix (1957) is much concerned with mutability and loss, and the context is at times naturalistic, at times historical. Finally, and a good deal more romantic than his contemporaries, is Hubert Witheford (The Shadow of the Flame, 1950, The Falcon Mark, 1951), a poet at once ornate and elusive, whose poems are almost all myths of destruction and renewal.

Two poets, Charles Doyle (A Splinter of Glass, 1956) and Peter Bland (Three Poets, 1958), have, since they are themselves recent arrivals, personalised the myth of the colonist crossing oceans to islands. Three women have achieved distinction: Mary Stanley, passionately domestic, Ruth Dallas, a careful carver of rural cameos, and “Paul Henderson”, voluble, but at times full of raw power.

Some poets have been so sharply individual that they defy even the rudimentary classification attempted here. M. K. Joseph (Imaginary Islands, 1950, The Living Countries, 1959) is indeed, as considerable a figure as Baxter and Smithyman. He is, to an extent, a “university wit” whose carefully modulated verse ranges from grotesques to lyrics. Like Ursula Bethell, Baxter, and Witheford (in sheer intellectual exactitude he scores over them all) he sees man caught between time and eternity. In religion, art, custom, he finds bridges from world to world. Charles Spear (Twopence Coloured, 1951) is a “sport”, but a valuable one. His brief lyrics depict with gemlike precision the contours and inhabitants of a symbol-world. Each jewel is exactly cut and delicately mounted, and it shines.

In the work of all these poets, except Spear, the context of New Zealand is clearly recognisable, but there is no explicit intention to complete a project of spiritual cartography begun earlier. That project is in fact being carried on, but it is a by-product of the separate concerns of individual poets. The country may be seen in the verse, but this is (to vary Adam Smith's saying) a case of private intentions leading to public benefit.

by William Hosking Oliver, M.A.(N.Z.), D.PHIL.(OXON.), Professor of History, Massey University of Manawatu.