ABSTRACT
Aotearoa/New Zealand’s literary modernism is commonly described in relation to the towering figure of Katherine Mansfield. Such a conception maintains the received sense that this modernism was inextricable from a European archetype, with colonial writers simply attempting to ‘make it new’ from a homegrown perspective. Yet this account only tells one side of the story, and excludes the more strikingly self-determined Māori writing that flourished from around the middle of the twentieth century.
These two strands of Aotearoa/New Zealand modernism—perhaps even two modernisms—are crystallised in two books published in 1964, one an academic study by a white settler academic, the other a book of verse by a working-class Māori poet: C. K. Stead’s The New Poetic and Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun. Stead buys fully into T. S. Eliot’s idea of tradition, referring to British poetry as ‘our literature’ and to ‘a people and its language’ as a single entity. Tuwhare, by contrast, sets out to shape elements of Polynesian myth into his own poetic ‘system’, adopting precisely the kind of ‘prophetic strain’ that Stead sets out to eschew.
In this respect, Tuwhare’s first book of verse appears anything but modern, and was indeed reviewed as a kind of late Romanticism, in both style and theme. Such an interpretation fails to recognise the problem of evaluating Tuwhare from an unduly prioritised alternative ‘tradition’; rereading Tuwhare’s first book of verse alongside Stead allows us to see the Māori poet as more of a modernist than has typically been understood. Within a Māori sensibility and style, Tuwhare’s early poetry reveals an active adaptation of certain techniques associated with European modernism—in his cadence, in his method of working myth into a personal system, and in his focus on the poetic image. At the same time, Tuwhare’s verse, inflected by his understanding of the centrality of race and class to Aotearoa/New Zealand modernity, relativises Stead’s assumptions about the nature of tradition and language and the social function of the autonomous artwork. Reading these landmark texts against each other, this chapter examines the complex ways in which Indigenous and settler aesthetics have interacted to produce a distinct literary modernism that is all too often mistaken in the emphasis placed upon European ‘origins’.
