SOURCE: Sturm, Terry. “New Zealand Poetry.” In A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by Neil Roberts, pp. 293-303. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

In the following essay, Sturm offers an account of New Zealand poetry, stressing that although other forms of writing have existed alongside it, it is the poetry of New Zealand that most consistently reflects the ongoing cultural debate in that country.

A generation ago there would have been widespread agreement about the general shape an account of New Zealand poetry would take. It would have confined itself to poetry in English, and identified a development in two phases: a colonial period of largely Anglophile mimic-verse, lasting from the beginnings of European settlement in the 1840s until the early decades of the twentieth century, followed, in the key decade of the 1930s, by the emergence of powerful nationalist impulses, aligned to modernist developments overseas. These transformed the...