Abstract:
The aim of this thesis is to highlight the importance of New Zealand women's poetry, especially as it pertains to the poetry and poetics of the five New Zealand poets comprising this thesis: Blanche Baughan, Eileen Duggan, Ruth Dallas, Elizabeth Smither, and Michele Leggott. This thesis is an attempt to offer one possible alternative to the narrative of New Zealand literature that was accepted in New Zealand throughout much of the later part of the twentieth century (after 1945 when Allen Curnow published his first anthology of New Zealand poetry with its extensive introduction). In this thesis I have considered a different way in which the narrative of New Zealand poetry could be written. I acknowledge that this is merely one of many alternatives but in doing so I have chosen poets whose writing lives span the twentieth century, not to show a developmental situation over the century but in order to demonstrate that, even though some of these poets' works no longer draw a large readership, and although the most overt narratives have been constructed by men, nevertheless women have been writing poetry in New Zealand for an entire century and they have written with a particular construction of New Zealand and its literature in mind. What I discovered through my research and writing of this thesis was that the female poets I have chosen have constructed what is essentially a fascinating account of New Zealand and its literature, that they have constructed the female in New Zealand as independent, innovative and humanitarian, and that most of these constructions occur within the texts of these women's poems which is why they are often unacknowledged or unrecognised. This thesis has enabled me to discover a range of narratives that intersect to form the matrix that Ian Wedde was the first to identify in 1985. This thesis is one attempt at further interpretation of that matrix.
