No Patriotic Poetry

This century has produced no patriotic or militarist poetry of any merit, Mr James K. Baxter told a meeting of the Voice of Women. Mr Baxter, who is the Burns Fellow in residence for 1966 at the University of Otago, took as his theme ‘Poetry of War and Peace’. Quoting freely from Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Roy Fuller, Keith Douglas, W.H. Auden, and from New Zealand poets including Denis Glover and John Weir, he said that twentieth-century poets had written as civilian conscripts, describing wars whose causes they did not fully understand.

In a striking interpretation of W.H. Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’, he page 95 stressed the poet’s description of the three negative forces most apparent in modern civilisation – monotony, atrocity, and anarchy – and discussed the social causes and effects of the peacetime tensions that make war more likely.

Mr Baxter’s talk and readings provoked a lively discussion among the members of the group, chiefly about the ways in which social education might help to dispel international hatreds and negative political fantasies.

1966 (389)