Private Grief, Public Joy
HOSE who deal in literature as critics or lecturers are apt to be absorbed with the question of form at the expense of the values and ideas which are the subject matter of, say, poetry. Mr. Bob Robertson, over 4YC, in two talks called "Waiting for the TaniwhaCases of Uneasy Conscience in New Zealand Writers." reversed this procedure. The talks were good in that they unified a great deal of work which was shown to have more in common than one would at first suspect, and stimulating because they drove one to consider afresh one’s own relationship to New Zealand poetry. I wondered, however, at the use of the word "gloominess" as a description of our poetry. It seemed a concession to a false but popular attitude which simply resents the deeper themes. And oddly enough my own feeling was caught in a phrase from Milton's "Tl Penseroso,"’ read by Philip Smithells after the first talk, in which the poet suggests that black is "staid) Wisdom’s hue." To have these melancholy or prophetic thoughts, yet be unable to voice them in song or poetry, would indeed be gloom; but poetry is the magic device through which a private grief becomes a public joy to all who under-
stand it.
Westcliff
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540827.2.19.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 788, 27 August 1954, Page 11
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214Private Grief, Public Joy New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 788, 27 August 1954, Page 11
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