Introduction

Abstract

Colonial poetry reminds us that the genre once commanded a broad audience that consumed poetry for pleasure and instruction, that it influenced moral, social and philosophical reflection of the day, and that writing poetry routinely accompanied—even contributed to—a busy public life. In this, the last collection of essays on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New Zealand literary lives, we consider that most persistent yet changeable genre: democratic in one period, hieratic in another; demotic, high-brow, vulgar, refined, political and quietist for different audiences and different historical periods. The problem in New Zealand’s literary history has been that the judgements of one period favouring serious and strenuous poetry presenting a relatively high social threshold for readers have overwhelmed the preference of an earlier period in which poetry was discursive, digressive, undisciplined and widely read. The purposes of these essays are: to offer the lives and poetry of those born in the colonial period the due attention they warrant—that is, to be read in terms appropriate to their own time—; and to consider those born as the colonial era closed in the early twentieth century who went on to inhabit a climate vigorously at odds with the world of their grandparents.