Kendrick Smithyman - Career

Career

By 1944, his poetry started appearing regularly in journals in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States, quickly establishing his reputation in New Zealand as one of the leading poets of the nation's post-war generation. This status was confirmed by his inclusion in A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923–50 (1951), edited by Allen Curnow. Thereafter, Smithyman's poetry made it into all significant anthologies of New Zealand poetry.

Smithyman was closely associated with other writers in Auckland, such as Robert Chapman, Maurice Duggan and Keith Sinclair.

In August 1946, at Auckland, Smithyman married the poet Mary Isobel Neal (née Stanley; 1919–1980), whose first husband had been killed in the war. The couple had three sons. He dedicated his first books, Seven Sonnets (1946) and The Blind Mountain & Other Poems (1950) to her. From 1946 to 1963 he was a primary and intermediate teacher at various schools in the Auckland area, where he specialised in teaching children with learning difficulties. In lectures and articles he promoted special needs education for psychologically impaired and high-achieving children, and the training of special-education teachers. Smithyman also attended Auckland University College sporadically, as a part-time student, but did not stay to get a degree. When the Education Department refused to allow him a leave of absence to work on a book of literary criticism, he resigned his position in 1963 and that year took up a teaching position as a tutor of English at the University of Auckland. From 1964 to 1965 he also edited and presented a radio programme, Perspective: A Programme of Critical Writing

Intellectually curious and widely read, Smithyman assimilated a wide range of poetic influences, especially post-war Anglo-American modernism. The English poets T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and Americans John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore were all influences. He initially avoided some of the preoccupations of earlier New Zealand poets with landscape and colonial history. He was also fascinated by 17th century poets, especially John Donne. At this time Smithyman wrote ironic, anti-Romantic love poetry thick with syntactical complexity, dense argument, and many references. "is poetry, above all, was academic in style. Smithyman's verse was notorious for its knotty language and allusive obscurity." Many of the poems from this period were eventually collected in Inheritance (1962) and Flying to Palmerston (1968).

The early 1960s he spent less effort on poetry and more on literary criticism, notably A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (1965). The book's description of the aesthetics and practice of Auckland poets, whose work he dubbed "academic" (including M. K. Joseph, Keith Sinclair, Mary Stanley, C. K. Stead, and the later work of Allen Curnow), also provided insights into his own outlook and poems. "This idiosyncratic book — the first full-length study of the subject — analysed the Romantic affiliations of earlier New Zealand poets, and pointed to subtle regional differences (especially between Auckland and Wellington poets) in his own generation," according to Peter Simpson.