Visit from a Poet

‘James K. Baxter will continue to enjoy the widest repute in his native land,’ wrote Allen Curnow in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. To the one hundred sixth formers who heard his lecture at the end of May, ‘widest repute’ seemed something of an understatement.

The lecture began with a brief survey of New Zealand writing up until the Thirties. The tradition which Thomas Bracken and his associates tried to establish was dismissed as a bad one, and N.Z. writing during this period was broadly described as Victorian and pastoral.

With the Thirties began a stream of N.Z. conscious poetry which has been developed through to the present day. When dealing with individual

N.Z. poets, Mr Baxter displayed a remarkable talent for summing up in a single apt phrase the particular character of the writers; R.A.K. Mason, for example, was said to be ‘melancholy and truthful’, Denis Glover expressed apage 747 psychological poverty in N.Z. society’, and A.R.D. Fairburn ‘values the good earth’.

Mr Baxter’s treatment of individual writers was discerning but sympathetic, and in analysing the N.Z. environment from an artist’s point of view, he displayed that same sensitivity and acuteness which we had already seen in The Fire and the Anvil.

Taking as his basic premise the fact that poets must write about what they know, Mr Baxter showed that N.Z.’s egalitarian and materialistic environment could not often produce good writing apart from satire.

When speaking of his own work, the poet’s integrity as a writer and his deep appreciation of the Faith became quite obvious.

As a climax to the evening, Mr Baxter read to us his ballad, ‘Lament for Barney Flanagan’, and then, at a request from the floor, ‘A Rope for Harry Fat’.

The memory of this most informative lecture, coloured throughout by a touch of wry humour, is something which I, like many other sixth formers, will hold for a long time. We are all very grateful to Mr Baxter and offer him our heartiest congratulations upon his being awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship.

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