Notes on James K Baxter

Source: James K Baxter: A Portrait by W.H Oliver

The Ballad of Calvary St

‘Both “National Mum and Labour Dad” go slowly mad in a sick society. But the origin of the
social disease lies in personal disorder. Life is sour, not because there is poverty and
injustice, but because “Yin and Yang won’t ever meet / In Calvary Street.”

It was not because systems fail to work that there was anguish, boredom and lawlessness, but
because people fail to relate. His domestic poems (by far the dominant kind of the early
1960s) as well as his political ones explore this failure.

Tomcat
In this poem Baxter the house-holder observes Baxter the untamed but still domestic animal:
The old fool
Stood, body hard as a board
Heart thudding, hair on end, at
The house corner, terrible,
Yelling at something. They said
‘Get him doctored.’ I think not.
This, indeed, was his only solution to the problem. Church, state, family and neighbours
could protest as much as they pleased; he would not get himself doctored.

Pig Island Letters

- the major work of the early 1960s – largely concerned with the problem of keeping
the ‘sinful’ Baxter alive – “the other/convict self” with the “poet as family man.” He
believed these two selves made a whole man
- The poems show acceptance of human disorder and mortality, patience in the face of
pain and an effort to understand the human predicament

Important aspects of Baxter’s work (another source)

MYTHS

He expresses the human condition in terms of his own experience and refers to this as
mythologizing. He defined a poem as a “microcosm which contains in symbolic form the
known universe of the man who writes it.” He has suggested that poetry presents the crises,
vibrations and reconciliations of the spiritual life in mythical form. For him, the poem was a
kind of safety valve, a way of putting chaotic experiences into some kind of order. “The
poem is a plank laid over the lion’s den.” Ideas of myth making lie just below the surface of
all his poetry. References to Latin, Greek, Polynesian mythologies crowd his poems. At its
best this style creates a feeling of genuine universality, e.g. in ‘Wild Bees’.

NATURE

His first published poems were concerned with nature. To Baxter, hostile nature was often
a projection of hostile society. His attitudes were reinforced by those of the Romantic poets
whom his father admired. Nature is an “unintelligible goddess”. Her appearance is
foreboding and often hostile, her ways strange to mankind. He also sees God revealed in
nature. In ‘High Country Weather’ he sees Nature as bringing comfort and tranquillity to the
solitary man. In ‘Haast Pass” he sees Death and isolation in Nature and turns to man, warning
himself of the dangers of isolation.

RELIGION

His solution to his own and society’s problems was Christianity. His religious poetry is
most successful when written in close conjunction with the natural scene (e.g. ‘Matukituki
Valley’) or when it helps to define his attitude to society (e.g. ‘Calvary St’). He draws from
religion a store of themes and images.

SOCIETY

Baxter felt his role to be that of a social commentator. His attacks on social ills are
directed especially against monotony and violence of contemporary life. He detested
violence, racism, imperialism, totalitarianism and militarism.
He believed the Puritan ethic has contributed greatly to the monotony of modern living and
affected our approach to education, work and relationships. He defended with charity and
sympathy people in society (e.g. drug /alcohol addicts, homeless etc) whom the Puritan ethic
would condemn.

SENSE OF LOSS / SEARCH FOR AN “EDEN”

No other NZ poet has used this theme so effectively. In his earlier poem it is a lament for a
lost childhood, e.g. ‘At the Bay’. Later, it is the pain of society and his own suffering.
Christianity and a stoic resignation are the only ways he could counter the pain of loss. He
believed that an Eden or paradise lay in the future after death.

In later poems the sense of loss gives way to a sad but calm awareness of the necessity to
accept reality. In the course of his search for Eden Baxter had begun by looking for
childhood and innocence but ended by embracing adulthood and the prospect of death. This
search has given rise to a paradox, i.e. he sought life and found death and the acceptance of it
(real maturity).

STYLE AND FORM

This has altered considerably over the years. Early poems were strongly influenced by the
Romantic poets (Hardy, McNiece, Dylan Thomas, Yeats and later Lawrence Durrell and
Robert Lowell). Baxter initially imitated their style. He employs a variety of verse forms
e.g. ballad, range of rhyme schemes.
Later work shows a progressive loosening of the stanza line. His best poems give an illusion
of spoken language without the carelessness of colloquial speech. He often uses natural
objects as symbols. Imagery is often mythological and nearly always rich in association. He
himself said that the “I” of his poems was not always autobiographical but a dramatic “I”.

James K Baxter: New Zealand's

Greatest poet
Article on life and poetry of James K. Baxter.

It seems that almost every poet writes about their childhood. James K Baxter,
unanimously New Zealand's greatest poet, is no different in this regard, except that he
was writing poetry while he was a child; he wrote his first poem at age seven and
completed six hundred between the ages of sixteen and twenty. Pacifist parents, the
sparse yet beautiful southern landscape of New Zealand's South Island, a dislike of
traditional education and a difficult adolescence (described by the poet as a "testing
time"), not unfamiliar colours in any poet's palette, yet nobody had written about these
topics before in New Zealand, making Baxter an immediate, uniquely indigenous
voice that has yet to be surpassed.

Named after a founder of the British Labour Party, James Keir Baxter was born in
1926, Dunedin, New Zealand, to talented, pacifist parents; his father Archibald was
tortured for his beliefs during the First World War and later wrote a book about the
experience; his mother Millicent was the strong-willed, university educated daughter
of one of New Zealand's top academics. Family fable has it that his father prayed that
he might have a poet for a son.

An able, although not highly motivated student, Baxter was more interested in reading
and then imitating almost the entire English poetic Atcannon than his school
curriculum; particularly the moderns—Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis;
later on Dylan Thomas. He entered university a year early at seventeen, the beginning
of what he later called a "long, unsuccessful love affair with the Higher Learning."
Already at this early age a distinct poetic voice was emerging, and in 1944—still
seventeen—he published his first collection of poems Beyond the Palisadeto critical
acclaim; six poems selected for the very first A Book of New Zealand Verse. He also
won the Macmillan Brown literary prize, coincidentally named after his grandfather.

Now recognised as a major emerging talent, Baxter quit university to gather raw
material for his poems from the experience of life, working for several years in
factories and on farms, as a sanatorium porter and copy editor; also beginning a life-
long struggle with alcoholism. A child raised on Greek myth and symbols, he
incorporated Jungian symbolism into his poetry after visiting a Jungian psychologist,
then began a lifelong commitment to religion after baptising as an Anglican. He
married a Maori woman, Jacqueline Sturm—a fine poet and writer in her own right—
then struggled for the rest of his life to fulfil the conflicting roles of husband, father,
employee, religious seeker and poet—frequent separations from his wife the result
despite a life-long love for her.

Religion, love, myth, the New Zealand landscape and society formed the backbone of
Baxter's poetic themes, and probably in that order; later explorations would include a
conversion to Catholicism, partially assisted by the writings of C.S. Lewis; visiting
Japan and India on a UNESCO scholarship, where he was haunted by visions of the
poor and destitute; leaning Maori; and in the final years of his life leaving his family
with only a bible in hand to follow a dream-vision to found a spiritual community in
the Maori settlement of Jerusalem, where people
"would try to live without money or books, worship God and work on the land."

Baxter once described his poems as "part of a large subconscious corpus of personal
myth, like an island above the sea, but joined underwater to other islands", and
elsewhere commented that what "happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is
mythology." He saw himself as touching and embodying a broader, mythic
consciousness, at times spiritual as well; when delivering mail around the hills of
Wellington as a postman he would imagine the heavy mailbag on his back as the cross
of Christ.

Like his contemporary Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Baxter was a man of letters
who attempted to put his words into action:

"It is the business of a poet, I think, to be destitute as well as honest. He may have
money; but he should recognise that it is dirt. He may have prestige; but let him hate it
and wear it like an old filthy coat. Then he may be able to stay awake a little better.
Love will not harm him, though. It will slice him open like a fish, and hang him by
the heels, and let the sun into his private bag of dreams and idiot ambitions. He will
think he is dying when he is just beginning to wake up."

Baxter's greatest works of poetry include Pig Island Letters, Jerusalem Sonnets
andAutumn Testament; he also wrote numerous plays, books of criticism, religious
commentaries and one novel.

New Zealand is only a nice idea for most. Even for those who live in New Zealand it
is more of a concept than a living reality, an unconscious experience of a land as
unknown as the nature of our true selves. We admire New Zealand on postcards and
in still and moving image, but few in a nation of recent settlers have attempted live
and embody New Zealand, to truly understand what it is and then explain that to
others. James K. Baxter attempted to do this, and his vision of New Zealand was at
core a profoundly spiritual one.

Alone we are born

and die alone
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
over snow-mountain shine
upon the upland road
ride easy stranger
Surrender to the sky
your heart of anger.
High Country Weather)