Poets Without a Tradition

Extract

Poetry has always a hazardous existence, is rarely held or formed in an adequate organ of words; it is too easily dissipated or clumsily fumbled back beyond the mind’s grasping. To be continually a poet, even under the most favourable conditions, requires great power and self-consecration. Today conditions are nowhere very favourable, and least of all in young countries such as Australia and New Zealand. To be a poet anywhere, but there even more, a man needs genius, or the dedication more usually found in saints.

That these countries have not an excessive share of genius, and that their writers are as mortal and divided as all the world, is the evidence of two recently published anthologies, one of Australian and the other of New Zealand verse. The intention of the editors in each has been to trace from its beginnings the evolution of a distinctly national idiom, to show the growth of a poetic tradition which is characteristically ‘Australian’ or ‘New Zealand’. In each case they have felt that the poetry of their country began to come of age in the 1930s, with the result that the earlier writers are offered mainly as an historical background to the larger number of poems by living authors. That there should be so many living writers of verse (about forty in the Australian book, and twenty-seven in the New Zealand) persistent and skilful enough to have won recognition even in their own country, shows at least the presence of a vital desire for creativity, a vital desire for poetry.