"THE SUNLIT HOUR"
Sir,-There are several wild inaccuracies in the letter by Margaret Kelly about my tadio review of Ruth Gilbert's The Sunlit Hour. Your correspondent’s zeal has run away with her memory. She maintains that I "could point to no technical fault or emotional falseness." Certainly I did not deny the poet’s verbal graces; but my complaint was precisely on the ground of "emotional falseness," particularly in Ruth Gilbert's religious poetry. Your coftespondert also charges me with "unnecessary cruelty directed at the tragedy of Robin Hyde." My. exact words, in context, were: "Are men suspicious of intelligent women? Yes-but other women are more so. One can seé how the woman writer is pushed towards crankiness, cowardice, nullity. One saw how Robin Hyde was driven into a corner." I suggest that the tone of this statement is sympathetic, not cruel. Nor did I refer to "a Women’s Union of Writers." Nor did I speak of "biological expefiences," but listed among the special temptations of a woman poet "the temptation to moralise about her biological function." I had in mind Ruth Gilbert’s "The Blossom of the Branches," in which she identifies her (poetic) attitude in childbearing with that of the Madonna at the Nativity. On these various inaccurate grounds your correspondent bases her ch*g es of "absurd megalomania," "un 4sary cruelty," "vulgarity," "poetic de¢potism," "bad taste," "slippery rhetoric." An angry woman is a bad marksman.
JAMES K.
BAXTER
(Wellington).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19560329.2.12.5
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 869, 29 March 1956, Page 5
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238"THE SUNLIT HOUR" New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 869, 29 March 1956, Page 5
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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