POETRY IN NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 773, 14 May 1954, Page 5

POETRY IN NEW ZEALAND

Sir-My grouch against Mr. J. C. Reid’s review of the Poetry Year Book is less tetchy than Mr. Robert Thompson’s in a fecent issue. I did not use any suspect’ imagery, and the term "spasmodic," though not applied to me, I would accept as a not inappropriate label to my slender gift. I would quarrel however with the term "Georgian" with which I and two female colleagues were summarily despatched. Were we being praised or gently reviled? So much of contemporary aesthetic writing is fuzzed about with these threadbare counters, that I find myself floundering in it. I take it that we are writing poems in a style which recalls a group of poets who published immediately before the first world war. And so what? Did our poems give Mr. Reid any pleasure? For that surely was our aim. Or did he loathe them? We do not know. From my ivory tower (vintage 1912) I ask Mr. Reid in future critical appraisals to state squarely what he likes, and what he hates, and why.

BRUCE

MASON

(Wellington).

Sir-The stock reaction of certain of our poets to criticism of their work is to diagnose neurosis in the critic. Mr. Reid, whom Mr. Thompson suspects of "a preoccupation at repressed levels," is

' not the first to be told as much. I don’t know whether Mr. Reid is neurotic or not, nor does Mr. Thompson, nor, possibly, does Mr. Reid himself. The question is "not only irrelevant to a consideration of whether his views are right or wrong; it precludes any discussion at all, except at the infantile "You are" "I am not" level. No one will deny that a person’s opinions are more often formed irrationally than logically, but that cuts both ways and it is no help at all to start Freud-slinging.. What matters igs not why an opinion is held, but whether it is true. "It is better to answer a man’s opinions than to question his right to express them," as you remind another correspondent.

DENNIS

McELDOWNEY

(Upper Hutt).