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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry

Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry

The emergence of national poetry depends on a mature attitude toward the past. By this, I do not mean the analysis of the schoolbook historian, but the attitude implied by these lines of Auden –

The strings’ excitement, the applauding drum
Are but the initiating ceremony
That out of cloud the ancestral face may come.

page 66

The analogy between the processes of art and the ritual of tribal magic is an exact one. Both enable catharsis by discovering shape in history, thus relieving the isolation of the individual. I suggest that for New Zealand poets of the nineteenth-century the ancestral face was considerably blurred. The poetic legends of a man like Domett spring no doubt from a wish to discover a shape in the past of his adopted country. But for pioneers their past was an English one and their poems were written in an idiom unsatisfactory for the English contemporary scene, and quite unsuited to determine their approach to New Zealand landscape or antipodean society. They had two choices: to continue writing in an English tradition dissociated from their actual geographical and historical situation; or to begin the immensely difficult task of forging new symbols in a country whose landscape was alien and whose intelligible past was shorter than their own lifespan. One poet at least did achieve this integration at a crude level – David McKee Wright. He borrowed the sentiments and terminology of the Australian ballad writers. Significantly enough, his worst poems are poems of exile; his best do in some measure reflect the comfortless semi-nomadic existence of the swagger, rabbiter and worker on gold dredges. The continuation of a Scottish verse-tradition in Otago did bear some fruit. For example, the work of John Barr expresses adequately the situation of the transplanted Scotsman; and certain of Jessie Mackay’s poems have a genuine ballad quality. But most of our nineteenth-century poets achieved at best an uneasy amalgam of Tennysonian lyricism and New Zealand provincial journalism. The dissociation of poetry from memory and sense-perception may account for the almost universal antipathy or indifference of our people towards it. Unfortunately, after McKee Wright there has been no vigorous undergrowth of ballad poetry. Without even the shadow of a folk culture our poets and poetesses have been forced into ivory towers. Before the new school of the Thirties, or at least before the first poems of R.A.K. Mason were published, the verse output had become feeble in quality, aligned with a feeble tradition.

It has been held that for a New Zealander to see his country clearly it is necessary for him to leave it. There is truth in this view, but it does not necessarily entail a geographical change of place. One is separated just as surely by an education which has its roots in English culture as by twelve thousand miles of sea. When I was at primary-school the class-room murals represented the English seasons, with lambs and green fields in April, and the verse used most was not even Australian ballad poetry, but that of Walter de la Mare. Undoubtedly there has been a change of heart among our educationalists. But, excepting Eileen Duggan, the poets writing in the Georgian tradition do not seem to have been able to breach this Chinese wall and meet their country on its own terms.

The new movement began in the universities, almost without parentage. It gathered force through the work of Denis Glover, A.R.D. Fairburn, Allenpage 67 Curnow and others, with amateur printing presses as midwives, until by the time of Curnow’s anthology in 1945, a fresh view of New Zealand history had emerged – clearest perhaps in the verse of Glover:

Gold pollinated the whole town,
But the golden bees are gone –
Now round a country butcher’s shop
The sullen blowflies drone.

Some have turned their eyes to remoter history. In particular Charles Brasch drew and has since drawn his symbolism from the natural landscape of these islands, discovering images of pain and serenity in geological form and process. And Curnow has developed his own mythology where Time and God seem interchangeable persons:

Or out of God the separated streams
Down honeyed valleys, Minoan, Egyptian,
And latterly Polynesia, like ocean rains
Flowing became one flood, one swift corruption.

Though McCormick lays emphasis on this aspect of New Zealand poetry, it seems to me that New Zealand poets have shied away from sociological themes. The only notable exception is Fairburn, who combines social criticism with a back-to-nature philosophy in his sequence Dominion, which is still our finest long poem. But although we have tended to write more readily of mountains than of marriage, and in the language of Wordsworth rather than that of Browning, a hundred years is long enough for our society to have acquired a shape of its own. And not always by a complete break with the situation of our ancestors. The peasant clansmen of the Western Highlands of Scotland became the clannish farmers of Otago. The Otago hills and sea coast are not unlike the hills and sea coast of Argyllshire. So I have been fortunate enough to find the readymade myth of longbearded Gaelic-speaking giants distilling whisky among the flax from time immemorial. The ancestral face is very familiar to me.

Animism is an essential factor in the artist’s view of the world. The generative power of poetry comes largely from the rediscovery and revaluation of childhood experience. The loss of the animism of the child and the savage is probably the greatest privation we must suffer in a materialist technological civilisation. And conversely the greatest gift that the arts have to offer is a linking of this submerged animism with our immediate affairs. Freud contends that in Art the pleasure principle and reality-principle are amalgamated, one reinforcing the other – fantasy put to work, as it were. However that may be, a spontaneous animism lies at the roots of good naturepage 68 poetry. It is apparent in the work of Glover and Brasch, in the best poems of Hervey; and lately in the work of Alistair Campbell. In Campbell’s poetry, however, there is a new breakaway. Both in his work and that of recent poets published and unpublished, the stereotypes established by older poets have been broken down and, broadly speaking, a new school has come into the open.

For an analysis of recent trends in New Zealand poetry I intend to limit myself to the five years which have elapsed since the first edition of Curnow’s anthology. During that period there has been if not a revolution at least a significant evolution. First, there are the collections of the Caxton Poets Series; Hart-Smith, Brasch, Hervey, Curnow, Dowling and my own work. But Christopher Columbus, though a major attempt in myth-construction, is New Zealand poetry only by the accident of its being published here. The poems of Brasch, Hervey, Curnow, despite their obvious merits, do not show a significant change of theme. I have chosen perhaps arbitrarily, five events which justify the statement of a change of view in recent poetry. The establishment of the literary periodical Landfall edited by Charles Brasch; the publication of Alistair Campbell’s first book of poems; the publication of Basil Dowling’s third book of poems; the publication of Ursula Bethell’s Collected Poems; and the performance in Christchurch in 1948 of Allen Curnow’s verse-play, The Axe.

There have been literary periodicals in this country before Landfall; but none of these have managed so well to combine a high literary standard with a breadth of selection. Apart from the value of essays, reviews and editor’s notes, Landfall has made possible the immediate appearance in print of poems which would otherwise have circulated only in manuscript among a small group. The cross-fertilising effect of this rapid communication cannot be measured, but must be considerable. There is of course the danger of a stereotype – Landfall poetry has tended to be subdued in tone, impeccable in technique. The editor has had the courage to set his standard by that of the periodicals of Great Britain and Ireland. Landfall has not been an arena for experiment: its mood has been one of sober critical liberalism: it has been a constant factor in stabilising literary judgment where too much is flux; and it has contained from time to time the best work of New Zealand poets and prose-writers.

The more extreme and experimental aspects of New Zealand poetry are apparent in Arachne (née Hilltop), an irregular periodical issued under the aegis of Victoria College. Most of the poets contributing have had their best work printed in Landfall. It has been valuable as a catalyst, promoting the combination of many elements; or to change the metaphor, as a ground for testing crops. Through it, and by personal contact, a group of younger poets writing in Wellington have experienced that indispensable exchange of ideas which leads to better judgment and a genuine impetus. The poetry of W.H.page 69 Oliver, P.S. Wilson and Alistair Campbell, whatever their dissimilarities, has this in common – it is a fresh start, drawing from earlier New Zealand poets only that material which seems relevant to a new situation. The work of Hubert Witheford contained in his recent volume, Shadow of the Flame, published by Pelorus Press, is of a high standard and draws on European models for its form and Asiatic theology for its dialectic rather than from immediate influences. The shortly-to-be-published verse of Louis Johnson follows American technique; for Johnson is predominantly an urban poet. This group of poets, if it can be called a group, seems in the main to have stepped free from the schizophrenia of the New Zealander who cannot distinguish himself from his grandfather. I believe a new and valuable stereotype is in process of being formed: the view of national history held by the poet who has grown up in entire acceptance of his environment, truly inhabiting the country. There are limitations in this view; but it does have the prime virtues of honesty and consistency.

Alistair Campbell is the outstanding poet of the Wellington group. His direct, sometimes extravagant rhetoric shows to its best advantage in the elegy first printed in the Landfall of December, 1949. The energy of his poetry is its most remarkable feature:

Now he is dead, who talked
Of wild places and skies
Inhabited by the hawk;

Of the hunted hare that flies
Down bare parapets of stone
And there closes its eyes . . .

Of the Lion Rock that lifts
Out of the whale-backed waves
Its black sky-battering cliffs . . .

Of the waterfall that raves
Down a bare mountainside
And into a white cauldron dives.

The control of a near-speech rhythm seems second nature to Campbell. His view of South Island mountain landscape is essentially animistic; and the hesitancy of many older poets is shorn away. I would compare it with some of the serious verse of Denis Glover – in particular the ‘Sings Harry’ lyrics. This kind of poetry, however, requires a quite unusual degree of mental energy; and the returns are small for a vast expenditure. It may be admired but not easily imitated. When the daemon is absent, problems ofpage 70 technique are most prominent: and technique is a matter of tradition. It may be the kind of tradition exemplified by Byron’s ‘Don Juan’; or that of Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’; or that of Masefield’s ‘Everlasting Mercy’. A good tradition is like fat: it can be clarified and used indefinitely. Thus Basil Dowling’s poetry, though of the Georgian school in its origin, has all the marks of strength and clarity. He has been most influenced in technique and ideas by Andrew Young, who may well be the best English nature poet of this century. Superficially his poems are exquisite miniatures. But Dowling has clarified the fat of the Georgian tradition on a slow fire first lighted by Herbert and Traherne. He is wider in sympathy than Andrew Young, and though essentially a metaphysical poet, holds less tightly the reigns of his imagination. His early work was often marred by excess of feeling amounting to sentimentality. Upon this excess he imposed a rigid and formal technical structure: usually rhymed stanzas. There was little indication that he would emerge to the controlled lucid speech-rhythms and free manipulation of images apparent in the best poem of his third book. I feel justified in quoting one poem in entirety:

The Trapped Hare

This morning I found a hare gaoled alive in a gin,
One red forepaw held bitten in clenched iron.
With ears laid back and large eyes full of woe
He crouched on the scoured floor of his open prison
Resting, poor creature, and gathering strength for his struggle.
Set him free, urged my heart, but my mind made excuse
As it will often at sight of familiar wrong.
My hollow sophistry said, End his pain –
Better to enter life maimed, pleaded those eyes.
So I dallied too long between thinking and doing
Until the practical farmer came without scruple. Then the hoarse feminine scream and spinal blow
And the limp body dangling downward dishonoured;
Sagacity brought low and swiftness stilled
By braggart jaw set wicked in a gap.
There will be other hares, but never this one seen
Glad in his freedom some sweet evening
Skirting a boundary with easy idle stride,
Or squatting lord of his hundred acre domain,
Hind legs like skis and tall ears up
And coat of ruddier brown than ripened corn.
No more, no more, this beauty and wild grace,
And I go sadly, troubled with grief and guilt
page 71 That I stood by, a dumb witness consenting
To the murder of an exquisite work of God.

This is nature poetry of a high order. But what is most significant is the use of a new method in New Zealand poetry – the application of a stone- cold-sober technique to an intense and actual situation. The technique is almost that of prose: what makes the poem valid is the accurate delineation of moral intangibles.

In the writing of a poem, there are two possible methods of approach – the first is passive, where the poet is in a sense possessed by his theme and lets his daemon direct him. The results are in some cases excellent, in most cases not so; for the daemon, like all familiars, comes and goes at will. The second is active, the method of Dowling and also of Brasch in his latest work, where the poet dissects analytically the live flesh of experience and wrings meaning and beauty from the most intractable material. It means a wide extension of the field of poetry, ideally the situation which Dowling is approaching, where every poem written is a good one. Writing of this kind could result in a rebirth of narrative poetry, the verse novelette.

Much of the significance of Dowling’s poetry is indicated in a phrase from ‘Canterbury’, the title poem of his third book – ‘This is my holy land of childhood’. I believe that in this aspect, as in many others, his poetry resembles that of Ursula Bethell.

Mr Baigent has remarked in a Landfall review of her Collected Poems that she ‘was born in England, but spent her childhood and early girlhood in New Zealand. Her seventy years were divided almost equally between the two countries, and she remained throughout her life as much an English-woman as a New Zealander, firmly conscious of what each country had to offer. The poetic expression of this twofold loyalty is not a limiting nostalgia, a sense of exile from the one or the other, but an acceptance of both which enriches her awareness of the New Zealand scene.’ I suggest that though she accepted both, her attitude was profoundly different towards the New Zealand setting; that by means of her poetry she rediscovered the sensuous elements in childhood experience, and did this in terms of the Canterbury landscape. I suggest also that to her strong ethical sense her poetry must have seemed in some degree forbidden fruit:

Above that gate the downs. I see them now,
I see them gentle brown and amethyst.
Our grownup guests the landscape viewed
And commented – Lovely! Perhaps a sketch?
My eager praises added met with prompt rebuff.
Too young, too young to notice lovely views.

page 72

The conflict of a rigid code of morals and manners and an acute sense of natural beauty and richness in relationships is not entirely reconciled in her poetry.

Ursula Bethell’s rediscovery of New Zealand develops from the diary form of her garden poetry to the wide sombre sweep of ‘Levavi Oculos’ and ‘Burke’s Pass’. For her as a Christian the natural world was the mirror and self-revelation of the Holy Spirit; that, not in an abstract sense, but in minute and concrete particulars. Hence she could look on mountain and sea coast as the intimate features of a beloved person. And she came to inhabit this country more deeply perhaps than any before or after. The consummation of her nature poetry is contained in the ‘Six Memorials’, where the images of bird, tree and season, become symbols of personal grief and more than personal hope.

Her poetry is without parallel in New Zealand; and likely to remain so. The combination of strong intellect, strong feeling and strong faith with great technical resource is rare. Though succeeding writers may profit by her use of assonance and speech-rhythms, these are not new things. The new thing in her verse is her (to use Eliot’s term) ‘raid on the inarticulate’. She has a phrase in one of her earlier poems – ‘It is the dumb Cosmos learning speech’. Though she would very likely have disclaimed the role, Ursula Bethell seems at times a prophetess. The ancestral face of New Zealand history was plain to her. The struggle of the pioneer with the land; reconciliation, as the features of the country possess the conscious or unconscious minds of its inhabitants; and the certain transience of human affairs (in her case complemented by the ambiguous certainty of resurrection) – these matters are clear in her poetry; and we can learn from them.

Though Ursula Bethell’s first book of poems was published in 1929 I have thought fit to consider the publication of her Collected Poems as a new event. For the organic development of her thought is clearly apparent there as it is not in the same degree in separate volumes. And her death puts upon us the responsibility of assessing her poetical estate.

We have developed traditions in prose and poetry; but in drama as yet we have only the hungry mouths of dramatic societies waiting to be fed. There has been no native drama. Hence the performance in 1948 of Allen Curnow’s verse play The Axe has a double significance, from the point of view of the literary critic, and also as the seed of a new tradition in drama. Curnow has had to bore his own wells, and much of his work has been regarded as gratuitously experimental which was in effect pioneering. In The Axe he has drawn on the Greek tradition of the chorus, as revived by Eliot. The influence of Yeats appears rather in a certain stiffening of the rhetoric of chorus and speech than in the shape and symbolism of the play. A reviewer has remarked with some reason that the symbol of The Axe itself is more contrived and less telling than the symbols of sea and island, where Curnow has undoubtedlypage 73 found a situation archetypal for the Polynesian and for us. He has expressed his own intuition of the situation of islanders more adequately than I can do in his preface to the Book of New Zealand Verse and in certain passages of this play. Those who study The Axe will find allegory within allegory, in the manner of Melville rather than of the 15th and 16th centuries – in particular the fate of the island-city to which Davida, the representative of a Mosaic Christianity, brings not peace but a sword. Against the harsh necessity of Moral Law stands Tereavai, the ageing and impotent magician, whose imprecations cannot save his own life, yet whose gods are a hundred times more powerful and malignant when disbelieved. Auden has summed up the situation. When the last dragon has died and ghosts and goblins are museum-pieces – then the invisible power is free to work through hysteria and neurosis – ‘Ravish the daughters, drive the fathers mad’. Numangatini the gods destroy for his pride, his hubris. I feel that for Curnow as for D.H. Lawrence the Original Sin is consciousness – his pre-Adamite lovers, Hema and Hina, learn fear only with the first shadow of Mosaic Law; before that their unconsciousness is their innocence.

Despite weaknesses of dialogue, the play came to life on the stage. Though writers may use themes very different from Curnow’s, The Axe is an earnest of New Zealand drama to come.

I have chosen to speak of recent trends in New Zealand poetry because the earlier trends have been and are discussed often in critical writing, in W.E.A. groups and in lectures. It is difficult to assess the work of one’s contemporaries, and it cannot be done without treading on corns. My own work is conservative; and I may tend to overvalue the formal aspects of poetry. If I have neglected the work of recent poets (such as Ruth Dallas) it is because I am not yet familiar enough with their work to form a balanced judgment. I speak most of the Wellington group because I am acquainted with their verse and know it to be sane and vigorous.

It is to poetry as yet half-formed that we must turn in order to make prognostications for the future. For example, the publication of Wellington Training-College, Verse 1950, contains much verse of talent and energy. Anton Vogt, himself a commendable poet, has been the mainspring of a younger group, and helped to edit their work. Publications of this kind give the unformed poet the opportunity to test his or her powers in competition and in the light of criticism. And poetry may be highly imperfect in form, yet contain a spark of genuine insight. In and outside our universities there are many younger writers trying their hand, receptive to new influences, and forming that vigorous undergrowth without which the maturer poets are isolated and in a large degree rendered ineffectual.

Lately I was crossing the Straits. The wind leant the boat over; and as we came to the deep water off the Kaikouras I thought that if the Friday and Monday boats were sunk New Zealand literature would suffer a severe loss.

page 74

But we might be inclined to overestimate the setback. If every writer who has published a book in this country was rolling among the seaweed, a new generation would no doubt take over. One of the functions of artists in a community is to provide a healthy and permanent element of rebellion; not to become a species of civil servant. The younger writers are at least aware of this necessity.

I come now to what I feel to be the basic problem of the poet in New Zealand, and no doubt elsewhere – that of social criticism. In what degree should a poet be the entertainer, and in what degree the physician of his society? Plainly, a physician who has no bedside manner will get the sack. Again, a poet may feel no necessity to communicate a social philosophy: he may be content to state as adequately as possible his intuitions concerning personal relationships and natural events. But I feel that the protest of the socially minded critic is justified. We are (I speak of the human family, not only of Western civilisation) in the midst of great calamity, physical and spiritual. The poet or prose writer who turns his eyes from the fact of human suffering is involved in self-betrayal. We have greater need of prophets than we have of mechanics. Yet to submit one’s mind to an inadequate doctrine of morals and politics is equally maiming.

In this country we are in a peculiar situation. New Zealand is now an island in more than geographical terms. Our standard of living is high, while that of the peoples of Asia and Europe is appallingly low. We are removed from the immediate scene of war and starvation. It is possible without obvious absurdity for our politicians to call our country a Happy Island, in some degree a just one. But poets are different from politicians; their value depends solely on their insight. If they do not speak the truth, they may live unmolested – but their work will perish. I believe that our island is in fact an unjust, unhappy one, where human activity is becoming progressively more meaningless. The mere statement of this observation has a salutary effect. The pioneering dream was of a Just City. If we suppose that this dream has been realised we condemn ourselves to the ultimate nonentity of false prophets. If we state the truth (that we now live in an Unjust City) we thus purge ourselves of a lie commonly held to be truth and begin to speak meaningfully.

There is another image besides that of the City, an image of peculiar cogency for New Zealand poets – that of the Wilderness. In the work of poets such as Curnow, and many others, it is the Sea, the marine desert which surrounds our island City. The actual purgation which comes from the Wilderness is borne out by the often unconscious testimony of sailors and mountaineers. For the poet, whose besetting sin is usually pride, it provides a situation where he is inevitably humbled by the grandeur of natural law, and can lose the itch for flattery; also, a sojourn in the Wilderness means a period of enforced temperance. And from this situation the City is seen in its true light, as the world of triviality and injustice. Were the City a just one, thepage 75 significance of the Wilderness would still remain, as the mirror and symbol of the power of God which cannot be contained in human thought or human society. I hope I may be forgiven for quoting from my own work – in this case ‘Poem in the Matukituki Valley’:

Sky’s purity, the altar cloth of snow
On deathly summits laid; or avalanche
That shakes the rough moraine with giant laughter;
Snowplume and whirlwind – what are these
But his flawed mirror who gave the mountains strength
And dwells in holy calm, undying freshness?

Therefore we turn, hiding our souls’ dullness
From that too blinding glass: turn to the gentle
Dark of our human daydream, child and wife,
Patience of stone and soil, the lawful city
Where man may live, and no wild trespass
Of what’s eternal shake his grave of time. (CP 86)

I do not advocate that we should all put on sackcloth and ashes. But I think it reasonable and necessary that poetry should contain moral truth and that every poet should be a prophet according to his lights. In our time there has been a dangerous split between the moral and aesthetic factors in art – on one side doctrinaire expression, on the other side so-called pure art. The position of the Romantic poet inclines to that of the pure artist. His social aim, if expressed, is that every City should become a Wilderness. The aim of the doctrinaire artist, Christian or Communist, is that every Wilderness should be contained in the Just City. My sympathy is with the former, as I consider conformity a great deal more dangerous than non-conformity. But while Romantics refuse to speak in terms of any relationship but the sexual one, we must take our lead from the doctrinaire philosophers.

The typical dilemma of the modern poet is one of divided aims. A man who is working as a schoolteacher, a tradesman, or a Government official in a society which he knows to be unjust, cannot dare to think clearly on moral issues; for the society is part of his physical and even psychological security. If he breaks with the society and departs into the Wilderness in customary Romantic style, then he loses brotherhood with all but similar outcasts. What Justice demands is something more difficult – that he should remain as a cell of good living in a corrupt society and in this situation by writing and example attempt to change it. He will thus and only thus escape the isolation of the Romantic.

A bad convention, stemming from the last century, has accustomed writers to a purely aesthetic role. There is no reason why a poet should not earn hispage 76 living as a rabbiter or as a university lecturer, so long as he does not develop a split personality. But there is reason why he should not join the propaganda department of the Government, fountain-head of dullness and half-truths. It may become increasingly difficult to remain intellectually independent: the thick fog of irresponsible journalism which issues from newspapers and broadcasting stations is hard to withstand; and American humanism has weakened our educational system and even our Churches. But some of the puritan virtues are still with us. New Zealanders will, I think, take notice even of a bad preacher: so a good prophet, if one should arise, might gain a hearing.

The impetus and mood of the movement of the Thirties, here and in England, came from a new concept of social justice; and with this concept to guide them, poets were able to write emphatically and with some measure of optimism of the necessity for a just society. But the slow death of enthusiasm has left them only the most personal values. The best poets have turned from society to the wilderness. Glover, who has to my mind written poetry of greater formal perfection and emotional depth than that of any other New Zealander, has summed up the situation in a recent poem:

While all around us ancient ills
Devour like blackberry the hills,
On every product of the time
Let fall a poisoned rain of rhyme,
Sings Harry.
But praise St Francis feeding crumbs
Into the empty mouths of guns.

What shall I sing? sings Harry.
Sing all things sweet and harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea.

I have no blueprint which may help to lead New Zealand writers further than the bad alternatives of sentimentality or nihilism. But I believe that recent events in New Zealand literature indicate that men and women of goodwill greater than mine may yet speak prophetically and sanely to a wide audience.

I would like to draw together in a brief summary what has been a somewhat rambling address. Firstly, I consider that poets must have something of the attitude of the imaginative historian; and in this country only recently have our poets tackled with some degree of success the problem of writing in terms of their own history and their immediate environment. Secondly, I consider that the animism of the child and savage is an essential ingredient of goodpage 77 poetry; and that this element is most marked in the work of recent poets. I have chosen five events in the poetry of the past five years, which to my mind illustrate the trends of contemporary New Zealand poetry – the establishment of Landfall; the publication of Campbell’s first book, Dowling’s third book, Ursula Bethell’s Collected Poems, and the staging of Curnow’s verse-play, The Axe. I have chosen to discuss Dowling’s work as peculiarly representative of recent changes in the work of older poets; Campbell’s work as a sign of vigour and excellence among younger poets; and Ursula Bethell’s because like Yeats she had the power to be a contemporary of every age-group. Curnow’s play I have chosen as the first example of successful verse-drama in this country; and the establishment of Landfall as the nucleus of higher standards in our poetry as well as in other literary forms. The fresh mood and direction of recent poetry is extraordinarily difficult to pin down to a single phrase or even a single work. I am aware that I have dealt with the development of ideas rather than the development of verse-forms; mainly because to me verse-form seems a tool for sharpening ideas.

I have no excuse to offer for the gratuitous addition of my notion of the function of the poet in modern society, and particularly in this country. But I feel that such considerations are especially relevant at the present time.

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