Earlier New Zealand Poetry

In speaking yet again from a public rostrum about New Zealand poetry, I feel unhappily like a guide to the Waitomo Caves, or to those other glowworm caves whose name I cannot remember, on the shore of Lake Te Anau. On the face of it, I am qualified for the task – most of New Zealand verse writing is familiar ground to me, and I have the special interest and perhaps the special insights of a practitioner. But I have conducted a number of parties over the duck-walks and up and down the ledges, and the sound of my own voice no longer fully convinces me. New Zealand poetry does not belong to me except in the narrow sense that I have contributed a small quota of poems to its total corpus; having no permanent or strongly held theories about the criticism or the composition of poetry, and indeed desiring none (since such theories seem to me to have little nor no bearing on the practice of poem-writing, or the fruitfulness or the development of my own work and the work of others).

I speak truly as commentator, observer, even as raconteur, and nearly always most falsely as the informed and conscious evaluator. If I tell you something that Denis Glover said to me in the Gladstone Hotel in 1948, page 44 the odds are that some grain can be gathered from my chaff, whereas if I speak more abstractly, attempting to distinguish broad patterns of thought among writers, or currents in New Zealand social development, the dust from the chaff may suffocate us both. Thus my approach will be in the main fragmentary and anecdotal, depending on the analysis of particular poems, and my own limited contact with the poets concerned.

Still at the mouth of the glowworm grottoes, I am aware of the difficult presence of another older, tougher guide. I refer to Allen Curnow, one of our most intelligent and sophisticated poets, with a deserved reputation as a critic and anthologist. Curnow and I first met each other in 1948, when he was a senior reporter or sub-editor (I forget which) on the Christchurch Press and I was briefly a copyholder on the same newspaper. At that time he was already beginning to shift from a poetry of personalism and romantic feeling to a harder, more intellectual, anti-romantic mode of thought, to what then seemed to me a poetry of riddles and aphorisms, which I admired but felt no urge to emulate; and he was preparing the first edition of his valuable anthology for publication. I remember with gratitude his personal encouragement given frequently during walks in the small hours, after the newspaper had closed down for the night, and he was going to his house in the suburbs, I to a hutch alongside a garage which I was renting for eight shillings a week. On account of his enthusiasm for the arts, amounting to a religio of sorts, he was prepared to share his thoughts freely with a younger, scruffier, and more ignorant practitioner. I remember in particular his mentioning Yeats’s idea of a college for poets, conducted somewhat in the manner of the ancient Druids, where poets could learn their craft with some priestly connotation, and his own ambition or fantasy that such a college might exist in New Zealand. Perhaps it was no more than the stray thought of a tired man, letting his imagination wander after a hard day’s work; but I am inclined to see it as more than that – as a tendency in Curnow towards a hieratic view of the poet’s function, as a natural compensation for the intellectual loneliness which weighed heavily on the New Zealand poets who began writing in the Thirties, and as evidence of a ritualistic turn of mind. The point about ritual is that one ritual will inevitably exclude another. The poet as hierophant will tend to regard new rituals, or new variants of the ritual to which he is accustomed, in a negative light. I offer the suggestion in a spirit of compromise, outside the heat of controversy – since Curnow’s interpretations of the methods and motives of other New Zealand poets seem even to a critic as unaggressive as Kendrick Smithyman to be prescriptive as well as descriptive, and the force and elegance of Curnow’s arguments have had a much wider influence than his wholly legitimate practice as a poet – I offer, as it were, an explanation which allows a reader to set aside some part of Curnow’s thought as private and hierophantic, while accepting the bulk of his interpretation. Smithyman’s comment on Curnow’s relation to M.H. page 45 Holcroft is illuminating –

. . . Over the years Curnow, as has been shown, has endorsed a sentence of Holcroft’s, ‘Their task is to acclimatise the muse . . .’, which Curnow has represented as describing and not prescribing what poets are to do. If it is a way of describing what poets are to do, simple or not, it is not a very good way of describing their ‘task’. Nor is it altogether irrelevant if we observe that a number of poets failed to see that it was at all a description which applied to what they felt about their writing and their responsibilities. Rather than being descriptive, Holcroft’s language is prescriptive. In taking over Holcroft’s sentence Curnow regrettably takes over the prescription attached to it . . .

1966? (385)