HOPE FOR NEW ZEALAND POETRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 229, 12 November 1943, Page 10

HOPE FOR NEW ZEALAND

POETRY

from a Winter Course faik Dy

PROF.

I. A.

GORDON

from 2YA

O-NIGHT I want to say something on the poetry that has been written in this country in recent years, and in particular the verse that is characterised by a rather special use of the word Modern. Modern in this special sense doesn’t just mean written in the last few years, It implies in addition that there is a new technique and a new point of view. Eileen Duggan, for example, is a contemporary New Zealand poet, and one writing fine verse, too. But we couldn’t call her modern in this narrow sense of the word. Well, then, what is this special sense of the word Modern when we talk of modern poetry? A glance at the development of poetry in England in this century will help us. The 19th century type of verse, of which I was talking last week, persisted down to the early years of the Great War, but among the other unheavals produced by the war, there came also a change in poetry. If you think of two of the most important English war poets of that period, the change is clear enough. Contrast Rupert Brooke with Siegfried Sassoon, the one eager, youthful, patriotic, and expressing himself in smoothly-flowing verse, the other bitter, disillusioned, expressing himself in ‘satiric phrases. There you have the end of the old type and the beginning of the new. During the same years, the poets known as the Imagists, both in England and in America, were throwing overboard conventional scansion and conventional rhyming, After the war, the new poetry culminated in The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot, who combined in that remarkable poem the new modern technique of unrhymed verse, the new modern realistic and often disillusioned approach to life’s problems, and the new acceptance of ordinary life with all its dullness and prosaic-ness as fit material for poetry. And Eliot made a poem out of it, too. That was in the nineteen-twenties. In the ‘thirties, this distinctively modern verse developed in the hand of a group

of young men-Day Lewis, Spender, Macneice, and Auden form the outstanding quartette-as an instrument of great poetic power. Freedom from restraints of conventional metre and complete acceptance of contemporary life as material for poetry-these were the dominant motifs of this most recent. development of modern verse. It was essentially anti-romantic and very eften politically tendentious. Our Own "Moderns" Turn now to New Zealand, and you will find that the story has been similar. Although here, as in England, certain poets-and these not always the minor poets-have continued to write in the 19th century traditional manner, a second and very distinctive group in the last 20 years have written in what I might call the modern manner, and have among them produced some very fine work. Among the most significant names are those of Allen Curnow, A. R. D, Fairburn, Denis Glover, R. A. K. Mason, and Anton ‘Vogt. Not all of

these write in the samé way, not all of them are modern in the same way. Sometimes the new attitude is betrayed by the manner in which a poem is written, sometimes by a choice of subject or a use of language or imagery which would have been unacceptable to an older generation of poets. But as a group they can, in spite of individual differences, be treated together. Their first distinguishing feature is their awareness of what is happening in the world round about them and their strongly anti-romantic reaction to it. They accept completely the language and the imagery of everyday life. Here is Curnow ‘talking of the New Zealand countryside: Bush falls like waves, there is little you can hear But the stumbling flight of pigeons And the buried anger of a truck’s ; last gear Pounding in gorges the heat-massive ee where the flight of the pigeon and the sound of low gear are accepted equally for poetry. Now to an older poet-say Tennyson, with his "moan of doves in immemorial elms’-the pigeons were poetic, but low gear (if there had been low gear in those days), was prosaic. This is only one example. If you read these newer poets you will find dozens, all symptomatic of a change that has affected poetry in New Zealand, in England, and in America, Social Rebels The second characteristic of these newer poets is their attitude to the social structure. They are against the rich and hotly for the poor, They tend to attack explicitly or implicitly much in the established order of things, and this attitude was intensely sharpened by personal experiences of the Depression. So you will find that their poetry tends to be tendentious, either propaganda for an order they hope for or satirical attacks on the order they dislike. It is symptomatic that Anton Vogt called his first volume of poetry Anfti-All That. That is just the impression one gets of much modern New Zealand poetry. It is anti-all that. So we find that Allen Curnow’s first. important volume of verse-Not in Narrow Seas (1939)was a series of satiric comments on the development of Canterbury Province, A. R. D, Fairburn’s yolume of 1938 called Dominion, is largely concerned with the Yepression and the poverty that went with it. As an example of this bitterly conceived poetry, look at Fairburn’s To a Rich Man, and for an example where there is the same tendentious spirit, but where the bitterness has mellowed and made the verse more lyrical, look at Denis Glover’s skilful poem, The Magpies. Influence of the Depression The Depression had a profound influence on New Zealand poetry. It produced a seriousness that had not existed before, and as the best commentator on New Zealand poetry has said(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) M. H. Holcroft in his two excellent studies, The Deepening Stream and The Waiting Hills-in the Depression the poets had time to think. But unfortunately it sometimes seems as if one or two of them have never thought since. At the present day one gets a little weary of the Depression sketches that continue to be produced. Still, there are signs of a change. A few years ago, R. A. K. Mason, who is cne of the finest writers of lyrics in the country to-day, could write of his poetry in these terms: For my bitter verses are Sponges steeped in vinegar Useless to the happy eyed But handy for the crucified. "Handy for the crucified" -that was in 1934. But.in his most recent verse published in 1941 and especially in a lyric entitled Flow at Full Moon, Mason has moved into a world that bears all the appeatances of being a happier one. A. R. D. Fairburn, too, has never lost a lyric grace that he has always possessed even in his most satiric moments. The two are beautifully combined in recent poems like Zo Daphnis and Chloe in the Park. But the poet who has made the greatest strides in recent years is Allen Curnow. Starting like most of the others with verses that were mainly undergraduate rebellion against the established order, he has matured both in outlook and in technique. Those of you who heard him read a few weeks ago from 3YA his poem on the Tasman celebrations, had an opportunity of judging how well he surmounted that most difficult of all tasks, the poem written to order. Curnow’s most recent Volume, published in 1941 and called Island and Time, is an attempt to see New Zealand against a background not merely of its own history but that of time itself. Time for Curnow has become a sort of symbol of the living past and the living present. In his poem called Time, he gathers all that symbolism together. And finally, just to illustrate the wheel coming full circle, look at his House and Land, a beautiful elegy for the passing of an old order by a poet who a few years back was attacking the past with sardonic vigour, These are a few samples to show you that poetry in New Zealand is a very real thing, living and developing among us, looking forward as well as looking back. A few years ago, Day Lewis wrote in England a book called A Hope for Poetry. I think the time has arrived when a volume might well be written called A Hope for New Zealand Poetry.