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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Return to Tradition

Return to Tradition

These four poets have some common links of style – the somewhat muted philosophic verse with an accent on craftsmanship which serves Australian poets as a hold-all. One notes with interest a steady withdrawal to traditional forms, the sonnet, the four-beat line, the regular stanza. But John Blight’s competent sonnets are curiously bookish; Francis Webb’s carefully worked stanzas bring a lens of Thomist philosophy to bear on events both arbitrary and chaotic – the music of Bruckner, a kookaburra seen on television, the pains suffered by the inmates of a mental hospital ward; and John Thompson never quite leaves some kind of whimsical weekday pulpit.

The difficulty is, I think, that each poet (of the three so far mentioned) has tried to build poems from philosophical comment on particular events, rather than by striking a spark from the event itself, and letting the poem take its course. There are even fewer good philosophers than good poets in the world; and their combination in one man is a greater rarity. These poets write carefully, but in their work one rarely gets the impression that the event demanded the poem.

James McAuley is, however, a poet of quite a different fibre. One had heard his austere voice come remotely over the Tasman, telling the moderns to repent and return to regular metres, logical metaphors, and the forsaken grove of Dryden. It seemed the voice of a misguided antiquarian; and no less so when linked to a somewhat illiberal Catholic political mysticism. But Captain Quiros forces an unintended capitulation and assent – a successful short epic, in regular pentameters and seven-line stanzas, about the lifelong meditation and voyages of a Spanish navigator.

I have not read a poem like it, written in this century, and would have thought the job could not be done. But McAuley has done it, with a quiet success that elicits admiration and indeed some awe; for the poem is a very beautiful one, clear-cut, lucid, chiselled from the rock, with human force and robust melancholy, a work relevant to the mysteries of identity that afflict Australians and New Zealanders alike. The narrative has a truly oracular quality, as if the words were spoken by the figure-head of Quiros’s own ship. It is a formidable achievement.

1964 (330)