SOURCE: Murray, Stuart. “Writing an Island's Story: The 1930s Poetry of Allen Curnow.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 25-43.

In the following essay, Murray notes that in the 1930s Curnow was primarily interested in definition, and the author explores Curnow's position as a “founding father” of a national literature of New Zealand.

In 1935 Allen Curnow published a small booklet entitled Poetry and Language, limited to 150 copies and overseen by the Caxton Club Press, the forerunner to the Caxton Press, in Christchurch, New Zealand. The booklet is a collection of eight sections, largely a series of notes, that seeks to outline Curnow's early theories on the relationship between poetry and language, and their position in a wider cultural context:

A thing must be made of something. Poetry is made of language. A thing must be made for something. Poetry is made for the pleasure and stimulation of the...