For many years, Thomas Pringle was referred to as the "father" of South African poetry in English. It suited the liberal-humanist scholars of the greater part of the twentieth century to place at the head of South African poetry in English a man whose Enlightenment ideals, Evangelical values, and Augustan-Romantic style accorded with their own conceptions of the nature and function of poetry. More-recent scholarship, however, has come to the conclusion that although Pringle is indeed a seminal figure in the gallery of South African poets, the origin and development of South African poetry in English is more complex and diverse than allowed for by the teleological notion of Pringle as its progenitor.

There are two ways of considering Pringle's importance as one of the earliest English-language South African poets. The first is to regard him as having pioneered the adaptation of the British poetic tradition to African...