POETRY IN NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 775, 28 May 1954, Page 5

POETRY IN NEW ZEALAND

Sir,-While appreciating the not intemperate tone of Mr. Bruce Mason’s letter, I think he is somewhat unreasonable in expecting a full-scale discussion of his own two brief poems in a 500word review of an anthology containing almost 100 pieces-a review which, furthermore, gave its fair number of "likes" and "whys." In any case, he has mistaken the reason for my references to "Georgian" and "Imagist" characteristics. As the context seems to me to make plain, I was concerned to question the editor’s claims for the originality, independence and "daring to be themselves" of his new poets, by pointing out that a good number of them had written pieces which look back to the moods and styles of earlier modern schools, and which would not be out of place in, say, Kowhai Gold. This is not, in itself; a bad thing. Both good and bad "Georgian" poems are being written today, as they have been in the past. But I find it significant that this style, and similar ones prevalent in the New Zealarid poetry of the first 20 years of this century, should be so marked among poets claimed to be discovering new horizons, and moving in new directions from a supposed "continuous tradition of formalism." In much the same way, even the faults of several poets "old" and "new," are curiously reminiscent of older modes, that of the "Spasmodics," for instance. For the information of the entertainingly ill-tempered Robert Thompson, the "Spasmodics" were a group of 18th Century versifiers, Bailey, Dobell, Alexander Smith, and others, whose work was characterised by modish vagueness, a pretentious vocabulary, debasing of the poetic coinage (my illustrations of which from Poetry Year-Book Mr. Thompson has naively Freudianised), and perhaps most significant of all, in its relation to much current New Zealand verse, the mistaking of the materials of poetry for poetry itself.

J. C.

REID

(Auckland).