Page:A New Zealand verse (1906).pdf/24

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Introduction.

the patriotic song has been attempted time and again, because none has yet been produced sufficiently worthy of its subject to claim admittance. Nevertheless, it happens that the selection epitomizes with fair precision the general range of New Zealand verse.

It is hard to say whether there are as yet any signs of a distinctive school of New Zealand poetry. Circumstances in the State are against the development of any consciously united effort. As has been said, there is very little local reading for the local writing, and each writer is a law unto himself in the choice of models, and responds to influences flowing anywhere out of the whole corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature. Again, there are no literary coteries in New Zealand, and the geographical configuration of the country will always prevent much centralization in any division of national effort. The great weekly newspapers, which are the striking feature of New Zealand journalism, either ignore verse almost entirely, or else duly fill up half a column a week out of their eighty pages with whatever in a more or less metrical form shall come to hand, and apparently with a catholic absence of discrimination: both plans are alike detrimental to the interests of poetry. Lastly, there is no accepted leader for such a school to follow. Domett has taken rank in

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