POETRY IN NEW ZEALAND
Sir--If Mr. Thompson has another ilook at Mr. Reid’s criticism of his | poetry, he will find that Mr. Reid was | careful to remain within the limits of literary criticism. He commented on the "image stammering and too literary responses," "the verbal legerdemain" and if he quoted the anatomical terms which Mr. Thompson and others employ 'in such profusion, it was to show how | these poets were merely using the current fashionable idiom, with little evidence of poetic insight. He charitably
refrained from applying to the poets concerned the Gospel maxim, "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." In transferring the argument to the realm of ethics, Mr. Thompson is therefore drawing a red herring across the track, to divert attention from the question of his literary competence. His suggestion that Mr. Reid is the victim of repression is mere personal abuse. His use of the term "moral McCarthyism" is an appeal to popular prejudice. Would he, I wonder, apply the term to Christ’s condemnation of lust (Matt. 5, 28)? As for his suggestion that Mr. Reid accepts "the rather irrational belief. that the body is the source and symbol of evil," he can disabuse himself of that idea. Mr. Reid is a Catholic, and it is Catholic doctrine that the body and sex are good, and that the source of evil is the will. Sex is good, but it is not, as some of our poets seem to imagine. the Summum Bonum.
G.H.
D.
(Greenmeadows).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 774, 21 May 1954, Page 18
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252POETRY IN NEW ZEALAND New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 774, 21 May 1954, Page 18
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