I Do Not Expect You to Like It

Published when he was only eighteen, his first book got him noticed right away; soon he became his nation’s leading poet, lecturing (and raising hackles) across the country. He changed his style drastically several times, becoming not just a celebrated literary man but the famous head of a scandalous commune, and a public voice for the dispossessed. A devout Catholic, he enjoyed a reputation as a libertine; a noted drinker, he became an apostle of Alcoholics Anonymous. A master of academic technique, he considered himself an heir to Scottish bards; he also embraced non-European folkways, renaming himself in a local language. His last publications made him his country’s closest answer at once to Dylan Thomas, to Robert Lowell, to Walt Whitman, and to Allen Ginsberg; his sudden death occasioned national mourning.

The poet is James K. Baxter (1926–1972), of New Zealand, and most Americans—no, most Americans who read modern poetry—have never heard of him. Why? New Zealand is far away and small; Baxter never visited the United States; parts of his work sound defiantly local, keyed to New Zealand’s social and political history, as Yeats keyed his work to Ireland’s. Other parts of Baxter’s work, though, belong to the international 1960s, with its embrace of intuition, its flight from institutions, its attention to the young. To read Baxter’s best poems is to enter an English-speaking culture that bears surprisingly little relation to the contexts most American readers know. It is also to enter a passionate, tormented psyche, and to find an original verbal world.

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If Baxter poses barriers for non-Kiwis, his work also holds special pleasures for Americans. The fight for an original national voice, founded in part on local landscapes and seasons; tragic mid-century tapestries of Catholic symbols; “confessional” self-abasement; poems as tools for late-sixties radicalism; and the open-ended process-poem, meant to end when the poet’s life does—these in America represent separate generations, from Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Flannery O’Connor to Charles Olson and Adrienne Rich. Baxter moved through them all within twenty-five years. (You could argue that Lowell undertook a similar journey, but he’s about the only American who did.) Baxter’s sense of Original Sin, and his self-dramatizing drive towards humiliation—derived, if you like, from AA, or from Catholicism, or from his defiant life-history—set his poetry above almost all the others that took up, during the 1960s, one or another Utopian program: the way we behave and the way we ought to behave, our bad track record and our lofty hopes, remain simultaneously visible. (By contrast, American poets most associated with the late sixties—Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, even Rich—tend to ascribe only the best intentions to themselves and their allies: it...