Poetry in New Zealand

In the Elizabethan era statesmen and parsons were poets also; not all of them poets, it is true, but no one would then have been in the least surprised if a Prime Minister should produce a mediocre ode, or soldiers sing a passable ballad. Perhaps Tradition has damned us. Shakespeare was modern in his own day; we are often parasitic growths on the works of Shakespeare. Anyhow, a serious poet seems now a queer bird, one tolerated for his readiness to sing at intellectual dinner-parties. And so poetry is regarded as a delicate academic flower, to be shielded from the harsh winds of the world and criticism alike; or else is churned out to fill gaps in magazines. Painters or musicians, though regarded as inessential luxuries, may be granted a social status somewhere between head clerk and school inspector, but the man who puts down POET on the census form can only raise a good laugh or a shake of the head.

Yet despite their vague taint of disrepute, poets still flourish in England page 16– and, I have heard, even in America. Why then has poetry, and indeed all literature, so insecure a footing in New Zealand? Sparsity of population is no valid excuse. Small nations have had their great writers. Would a Rimbaud or a Dylan Thomas be deterred forever by the early closing time of our pubs? I think not. The insecurity has deeper roots.

Poets in New Zealand will find the same problems of technique that all poets have found elsewhere; and as elsewhere, their material must in the last analysis be found latent in their own emotional reactions to persons, conventions and natural objects. But there is one drain on the integrity of the New Zealand poet which remains peculiarly his own – he is torn between two worlds.

Our forefathers were transplanted Englishmen or Scots, who brought along with their rocking-chairs and agricultural implements, some knowledge of the literary standards of their own period. These were as much their own as the aforesaid utensils. We, however, look to an England we have never known as centre of our mainly synthetic ‘culture’; while our real lives are rooted in these islands, and flower day by day. We are waiting to be born yet will not leave the womb. Especially do our universities turn Home-ward. An intellectual snob may find this thin air bracing, but a poet or an artist must choose here and now whether he is a transplanted Englishman or a New Zealander. If the first is his choice, why stay? If the second, then he must accept as his own and explore with a free mind our shifting and amorphous modes of living.

When that first hereditary wound is healed, one can find here in New Zealand all the drama needed for a thousand novels, plays, or poems. For the world is here, not somewhere over the horizon. The West Coast bushmen fell heavy timber; miners hack out coal, are buried under falls, strike for safer conditions; the deserts and oases of the night life of the town are there for any man to walk in; the shepherd rides alone over ranges, cashes his cheque, and spends a week in the D.T.’s; the middle-class home keeps up appearances, men and girls grow up in their private worlds, the young couples make love in the sandhills beside the beating sea; the old woman remembers what no one else can. All the world is here, waiting for us to heal our own blindness. A free mind and heart, that is the impossible request.

The successful poet will be anarchic in his thinking and feeling. For to understand his world he must understand himself, and an authority fully understood is an authority lost. But this is the land of Authorities: Government, Church, Monopoly, Democracy, Every-Decent-Man. So he is likely to seem a rebel.

Burns was a rebel, his rebellion undermined by his own unresolved guilt. As Chesterton says of Browning – he changed his convictions but not his prejudices. Nevertheless, with what freedom he did attain he discovered the world’s great songs.

All technical influences, modern and traditional, should be acceptable topage 17 us. A good poet has little fear of disturbing his digestion. But the contributors to such as Kowhai Gold have subsisted too long on gruel to be able to change their diet. Invective would indeed be out of place, for they exist where many exist, in that attenuated limbo between Home and here. This much I will remark – that the best New Zealand poems need not differ in any essential from the best poems of England or America; that if pohutukawa trees and rata find a way into their glossary, this will be an incidental occurrence and not an evidence of childish and self-conscious posturing.

For the poet, childhood memories are a sure and inexhaustible reservoir. I myself grow lyrical at the smell of petrol, recalling camping trips among the lakes. South Island mountains and tussock land became then part of my own flesh and blood:

My soul is lost and buried here
Where the wind breathes on barren farms
Or inland waters, waves on worn shingle. (‘To a Poplar Tree’; see note)

It sounds rather forced, yet it is emotionally a fact. Many New Zealanders are similarly immersed. The vastness and inhuman quality of our inland plateaus and those wastes of water that surround us, like a house that will never be lived in, are likely to make our best landscape-poems death-poems. Thus Glover’s

Lastly, that snowfield, visible from Wanaka,
Compound their patience – suns only brighten
And no rains darken, a whiteness nothing could whiten –

is no mere prose statement or flowery conceit, but emotion communicable in no other words. For words are interwoven in the very fabric of our minds and they can be made to bear thus a burden beyond their factual meaning.

Lyrics will be found to fall roughly into two categories – love-poems and death-poems. A New Zealander will show in the first kind his own insecurity, since he must shield the candle-flame of his emotion against the enmity of the very elements. They will be the more direct, as Fairburn’s ‘O flame and shadow of remembered time’, but the second class will be the more numerous. For we are more often out of love than in; and when that current, by which Nature supplies free to the grey globe of the mind her light and colour, is diminished, one falls back on that stratum of primal melancholy which underlies all deep emotion. Perhaps the hundred ages of impotence before death and pain to which primitive man was exposed, are a hereditary source of this surrender and resignation. We may count on hearing often in New Zealand poetry the ring of the old ballad –

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Half owre, half owre to Aberdour
’Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens
Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.

In comparison with lyricism, metaphysical poetry seems harsh, reminding one of Art, the handmaid of Religion. But in fact a lyric can be subtle only by implication; both lyric and metaphysical poem must be at hand for the poet who has grown emotionally mature. Thus, though Byron in his simplicity is stronger than Donne in his complexity, no grown man can escape Donne’s ‘Else a great Prince in prison lies.’

Allen Curnow has written some excellent metaphysical poems. One notices in him a sure word-control, essential to this kind of writing. And if one desires a clear-cut and unbiased view of New Zealand poetry, one will find it in the introductory essay to his recent anthology. He has experimented with the creation of a myth from the peculiarities of our sensitivity to the passing of time. We are time-conscious because every year must bear us out of the fantasy-world of English seasons or Scots traditions, further into our here and now. So his creation is necessarily incomplete – I think his Biblical allusions bear richer fruit.

We cannot afford to be bound to the past; the price is too great, that of parasitic atrophy. For no one can teach us to live, men were no wiser then than now. The poet’s right is that of every man and woman: to stay alive. He may find himself at times the only man out of grave-clothes. Fears shape our lives, religious, economic, social. We call them Duties, and then wonder why the bog is so sticky. In a world of free men the fisherman or ploughman might compose his own poems, and think little of it. But in a world of go- getters, bosses and employees, authorities and obedience, ideals and sin, only the man civilised to the point of simple spontaneity is likely to write poems unselfconsciously. The man without a master is the good citizen – for what man is fit to be a master? He will also be the good poet.

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