Draft Introduction to ‘The Innovators’

It seems right to me to distinguish three stages in the development of New Zealand poetry: a more or less immature stage, dating from the time of European settlement until the late Twenties or early Thirties of this century; an era of mainly mature writing, covering at least ten, possibly as long as twenty years, from the late Twenties until the middle Forties (the writers of this period are the ones with which I will be chiefly concerned in this talk, under the group title of the ‘Innovators’) and a stage which is still with us, from the middle Forties until the present day. Poets of this last group I intend to call the ‘Broadeners’, a clumsy title perhaps, but one which expresses the way in which many of them regard some of the general qualities in their work which distinguishes them from those who came before them.

I would grant that my categories are unsatisfactory; that there is an great deal of overlapping; that some poets might reject the categories entirely and claim that each poet must be considered on his or her merits without reference to any real or imaginary time-chart; yet descriptive criticism, like poetry itself, requires provisional notions or hypotheses which have to serve until better ones are found. And apart from the basic necessity that a hypothesis should be developed as far as possible to meet the facts of the situation, there are two other qualities – elegance and fruitfulness – which I would hope to retain in my own critical appraisal, and welcome in the critical work of others. They are likely to be to some extent contradictory. For example Mr Curnow’s austere, frequently penetrating, always elegant critical hypotheses, as they are offered to us in his Introduction to the first Book of New Zealand Verse, and as they are further developed in the Penguin book, while they command my respect, displease me by a lack of fruitfulness. It would seem to me that he is an unfatherly Noah: his ark is built too small, and he has decided to exclude from it not only the animals which are in any degree deformed or feeble, but certain tribes also – the spotted, the species formed by mutation, the page 46 long-necked, those with six legs, those which have loud mating cries. On the other hand, the comments of Mr Smithyman, in his recent book A Way of Saying, or of Mr Johnson in his regular foreword to the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, have seemed to me less elegant but more fruitful. These critics have consciously or unconsciously taken to heart Herbert Read’s dictum that only a generous eye can see what a work is.

Ungenerous criticism may spring from several causes – the tendency of the young critic to knock down his own image of an established older writer; the tendency of the older critic to lambast the young who have departed from what he considers the suitable literary norms; but equally, of course, from a strong desire for ideal excellence. It is perhaps unfortunate that so many of our part-time critics are also writers in their own right – because, having already strong opinions on the course they themselves should follow to write well, they will tend to project these opinions unconsciously on the work of others, and so produce prescriptive rather than descriptive criticism. Even the short history of literary criticism in New Zealand is strewn with examples of prescriptive opinion. Why should one avoid prescribing in matters of literary method? I think, because one can very suitably describe what a writer has written, and express opinions on his success or lack of success; but, because the creative act is itself one of free or even unique choice, in which the writer cannot himself know what to do next until he finds himself doing it – this element of walking on water makes it actually impossible for another person to prescribe what should be done. One does not tell a man how to court a woman, or a poet how to court his Muse. The territory is always unexplored. If a poet takes a critic’s advice, the result is invariably one of complete mental blockage, and instead of good poems, or bad poems which could be improved, he will produce non-poems, monstrosities without a centre.

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