Untitled

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 652, 4 January 1952, Page 5

Sir-There is not a poem in the English language which could stand up against such criticism as-deliveted by David R. Watson against James K. Baxter’s poem "To a Jet Pilot." The canons of such criticism are purely: subjective, in this case, matters of personal prejudice, against which there is no possible | appeal to objective standards. Were the critic to read the poem more carefully, he would find many of his rhetorical er ie answered in the text: Watson’s only references to obsae standards are made in ‘such meaningless and, emotional terms as "coriflict between the accepted poetical ‘technique" afd "a certain rhythm pertaining only to péetry in the T. S. Eliot style." What this "accepted". style is, ahd by whom it is "accepted," is: left to out "imaginations, and from™ that Mr. Watson wants to lead us to the slaughter of Baxter. If blind veneration i is your critic’s chief bugbear, then ‘blind criticism such as his, is mine. Only blind criticism would make obnoxious statements, from such ot 0868 proofs; favouring the works of med "genuine artificers" as opposed " the work of the "pseudo-intellectual’’ "pretentious aspifant."~ Such adjectives -ate those favoured by the philistine to express his irritation at those places of the heart and mind where his own -enfeebled powers of. thought and expression "fail to penetrate.

LOUIS

JOHNSON

(Wellington).