ARGUMENT OF POETRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 654, 18 January 1952, Page 5

ARGUMENT OF POETRY

Sir,-‘M.H.H.’s" review of Poetry Year Book (Listener, December 21) made various references to a commentary of mine which Mr. Johnson had asked me to write to introduce four poets he had decided to feature. I hope you will allow me to clear up some misunderstandings that have been created. In this commentary my purpose was to grapple, within the very short space given me, with the problem of the growth of a national literature. I did not reject Mr. Curnow’s views, which I consider very important, but I saw a limitation in those views in that they seem almost to ignore the fundamental and universal emotions which are the basis of all literature. I admire the verse of R. A. K. Mason and various others and am quarrelling with theories only. For instance, your reviewer says "it is through the immediate and local that a poet expresses what is distant and universal." Now, I agree that the impulse or inspiration behind a poem can almost invariably be traced back to something immediate and local, at least in part, but I don’t think he meant that. I think he meant the symbolism and subject of the poem must be immediate and local and the implications may then be universal and generalised. Surveying in my mind the great poetry I know, I cannot see how such a theory can be entertained. Of course, some. poetry uses "immediate and local" subject matter. Yeats wrote poems in Ireland, as well as Byzantium. In many of the great poets the local and the universal occur in an indissoluble mixture. In New Zealand, for very good reasons, there was a generation which concentrated on the local and immediate. I said there was a tendency now to move in the other direction. This does not reflect on the poetry of the previous period. I would say, in your reviewer’s own words, that the new developments in New Zealand literature represent "an extension of method and theme." Now, if I should say that Mr. Baxter’s or Mr. Campbell’s verse represents a new departure, for New Zealand, in handling of rhythm, or Mr. Witheford’s in the exploration of evil, or Mr. Johnson’s in the exploretion of sensuality, then I am not denying that nobody has really shared R. A. K. Mason’s

capacity for pure song, or J. R. Hervey’s warmth and humanity. New. developments in poetry are hard to describe: some would emphasise the greater complexity of rhythmical structure and the concern with the hidden regions of the mind. Others would emphasise the developments which are. paralleled in England such as the pursuit of purity and essence by eliminating history, sociology and description, New Zealand poets naturally spend the greater part of their reading time on work written abroad, A direct derivation of Baxter from Curnow and Witheford from Brasch is out of the question; the twolines of descent, New Zealand and English, must both be considered, The tendency of the new generation, both in England and here, is towards the moulding, sometimes stylising, of universals. I attempted in my dommentary to interpret the four poets we rather arbitrarily selected and to bring them and the partly local, partly international movement they represented closer to the public.

E.

SCHWIMMER

(Te Marua).