William Hart-Smith (1911-1990): Poet of Two Countries (A GATHERING ON IMMIGRANT AND EMIGRANT Writers) (Critical Essay‪)‬

He rates not a mention in the new Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, nor in the Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. He is absent from all the current anthologies of New Zealand poetry: But William Hart-Smith, 'Australian poet' by virtue of his years of residence and publishing there, was for a time also 'New Zealand poet' and deserves again to be considered so. Omitting privately printed volumes of Hart-Smith's ten books, those of 1948, 1950 and 1955 were published in New Zealand, and the other books contain numerous poems that come out of his New Zealand experience (1924 to 1936; 1946 to 1962; 1978 to 1990). (1) Hart-Smith figured in New Zealand periodicals and anthologies from 1936 to the early 1960s--in Landfall, the Listener, and New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. Allen Curnow's Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) includes four Hart-Smith poems; Charles Brasch's Landfall Country (1962) has two. After Chapman and Bennett's Oxford anthology (1956) containing four poems, a fade-out had begun. In Vincent O'Sullivan's three editions of An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry (1970, 1976, 1987) and in Ian Wedde's and Harvey McQueen's new The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985), nothing. Australia seemed to have swallowed him up, or the Tasman, in years when it constituted a wide cultural gap or barrier. The case I would make about Hart-Smith's poetry involves claims for him as an introducer of American modernism into both Australian and New Zealand poetry. I also hope to show how his poetry belongs in the now-historic phase of literary nationalism in both countries, a phase which pondered questions about the land and what it might mean to belong to a country: Both countries, Hart-Smith is aware, belonged first to brown-skinned peoples with cultures of their own from which we might learn. My case for Hart-Smith as a New Zealand poet is based upon his poems 'Miri', 'The Hawk and the Hare', 'Shag Rookery', 'Swans on Lake Ellesmere', 'Fantail', 'Autumn, Port Hills', 'Marsden', 'The Polynesians', and 'Maori Oven'. (2) My case for Hart-Smith as Australian poet rests on a further half-dozen poems. I conclude with a remark about Hart-Smith as environmentalist and mystic.