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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Foreword

Foreword

The four lectures which make up the largest part of this book were written in 1966, as a product of the unusual leisure I had as Robert Burns Fellow in residence at the University of Otago. Each of them involves a further exploration of concepts which I have had in my mind for a number of years. In ‘Conversation with an Ancestor’ I am concerned perhaps chiefly with page 130 the search for the tree of Jesse, the sense of ancestral continuity, which the modern way of life tends to cut down and destroy; in ‘The Virgin and the Temptress’, with the tension between the rational conscience of an artist and the sub-rational conscience present in himself and his community; in ‘The Man on the Horse’, with a non-linguistic analysis of one of Robert Burns’s finest poems. The talk on ‘Literature and Belief’ falls into a special category, since it was written for and delivered to Catholic seminarists; but the gap between the point of view held by many of the clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, on social and moral issues, and the varied insights of modern artists, is, I believe, a source of dissociation in the mind of modern man, and the lecture may help some readers to bridge that gap. The painful issue of the existence of the Index of Forbidden Books, which I mention in the course of that lecture, is now a matter of past history, since the Index has been somewhat belatedly put on the shelf in the recent profound renovation of the Catholic Church; but I leave the issue as it stood at the time when I wrote and delivered the talk. The ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’ with which I conclude this book were gathered from several sources – the first section from an article I wrote for Landfall; the second, from another article first published in the New Zealand Monthly Review, which I later included in a revised form as part of a talk given to a group of post-primary teachers in Christchurch; the third, from a sketch originally entitled ‘Venus in her Western Bed’, published in a literary issue of Salient in 1955; the fourth, from a sketch called ‘Blue Peter’, published in the third and last issue of Hilltop in 1949; the fifth, from a sketch called ‘Some Time Ago’, published in Meanjin in 1955. These notes form, I think, the corpus of an unfinished autobiography, which I have no intention whatever of finishing, and may serve as a helpful counterpoint to the talks.