More clearly than with many artists, Baxter's life and work are interdependent. From the first a controversial and complex figure, he apparently contained within himself profound contradictions. Deeply moral, he flaunted the conventions of his society over and over again….

Finding much in New Zealand life to attack, he yet realized that his true personal center was inseparable from his own country. (p. 19)

His four books of poetry … were widely recognized as the work of a major talent. Presumably, had he been a British or American poet his name would now be much better known. Yet, although one of the finest poets of his generation writing in English, he made virtually no effort to establish a reputation outside the confines of his own small country. This circumstance derives from one of his great strengths, his rootedness in the land and community in which he lived. (p. 20)

Indications throughout Baxter's writings, at every stage, suggest that he was naturally disposed to a belief in God, and that for him the Christian religion was a matter of serious concern. (pp. 30-1)

Pervaded by spirituality as they are, his last writings continue to manifest such apparent contradictions [as Baxter's lifestyle itself did, combining the spiritual with the crude]. But they may be more apparent than real. Baxter had always been this kind of mixture, and at the end, many would say, his life was an integrated whole, the meeting of yin and yang. (p. 35)

Many key poems of Baxter's first volume, Beyond the Palisade, were written by the time he was seventeen…. Work contained in [the notebooks from which Baxter drew this volume] has a greater range both in substance and technique, than is revealed in Beyond the Palisade. Available to him was a considerably larger collection, looser and more colloquial in texture; the making of the book was a considerable act of self-criticism and self-shaping.

As it is, Beyond the Palisade displays versatility in polished use of short-lined quatrains and longer, more ruminative forms. Its themes include the force of nature ("Eagle"); nature's cruelty and menace …; man's cruelty within nature;… the difference between Maori and pakeha (white settler) in terms of belonging to the land, the poverty of pakeha existence in relation to it, and the consequent poverty of pakeha history. Dominating the whole book is a sense of isolated man in the clutch of mortality and cruel, indifferent nature…. (pp. 38-9)

[Baxter essentially] chose to continue his selection for his first published book so that it centered on New Zealand. From the notebooks he could have taken work concerned with war in Europe, or containing references to Van Gogh, El Greco, Napoleon, etc.—poems which (leaving aside the question of merit) would have given the book a different aura, a larger and more outward-looking perspective. Absent from Beyond the Palisade but present here and there in the notebooks is a certain lack of reverence, an attitude which was to prove so fruitful in Baxter's maturity. In 1944 he might not, perhaps, have made a better book, but he could have produced one equally competent and yet not so pervasively solemn as the one we have. Yet, reading both sets of material, one is convinced that right instinct led to his limiting of focus, refusing the easy light, attaching himself instead to a small group of symbols which grasp, intuitively, a New Zealand still empty of man…. To the end of his life and with ever-deepening commitment, Baxter believed in the need for the tribe, attributing the desperate state of society to the destruction of "the stubborn clans" and man's failure to rebuild them. In this respect he anticipated the work and attitudes of Gary Snyder and others…. From an early stage his work shows signs of his longing for a positive human community.

Two books, Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness (1948) and its successor The Fallen House (1953), established Baxter's reputation as a poet…. Within a very few years Baxter was to astonish with the lyric elegance and grace of much of his work, so that in later years critics coping with the jagged, spiky poems of the 1960s showed at first a tendency to hark back to the mellifluous sweetness of the early work. (pp. 40-1)

Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, pervaded by a youthful romanticism, is preoccupied for three-quarters of its length with the idea of death and with man's Promethean struggle amid life's solitariness…. Almost every poem deals with death and the grave…. From the charnel-house tone a casual reader might gather that here is another poet more than "half in love with easeful death"; but Death is "no barren cycle," rather "A truth as eternal as life is eternal". Sometimes the two attitudes, wallowing in death or incorporating it into the meaning of one's life, seem fused…. (pp. 42-3)

"Earth does at length her own sweet brood devour": recognition of this, the struggle to accept and assimilate it, is the chief ground of Baxter's early work. (p. 43)

Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness is, at its center, the locating and clarifying of a personal quest of the soul and, equally, it continues Baxter's discovery of his own voice as poet…. As [Allen] Curnow saw it, the older poets [of the country] had turned away from "assertions about New Zealand" in favor of more personal and universal themes. He concludes: "The way in which certain conceptions of his country haunt the background of Mr. Baxter's poetry, having receded from the positive foreground of older poets, encourages the belief that something of continuing effect was achieved by them." For a "tradition" of good poetry not more than a quarter of a century old, this was an important consideration! Baxter more than bore out the implied hope that he would continue to build and strengthen the national poetry. In later years he was to take an antichauvinist position in literary quarrels about New Zealand, but ultimately he was to prove much ampler, as a poet and individual, than both parties to the argument. (pp. 50-1)

The Night Shift (1957) [is] a joint work containing "poems on aspects of love" by Baxter, Charles Doyle, Louis Johnson, and Kendrick Smithyman…. Baxter's section, "Songs of the Desert," was described not unfairly by Erik Schwimmer as "a series of loudly intoned approximations," and it does exhibit Baxter's dangerous facility in employing the stock responses of decadent romanticism. Yet, inevitably, even these poems (and it has been said that Baxter's are the weakest in the book) have their moments of powerful perception…. (p. 51)

The first phase of Baxter's career may be seen as culminating in the publication of Poems Unpleasant (1952), another joint book, this time with Louis Johnson and Anton Vogt….

What Baxter shares with Johnson, here and elsewhere, is a faculty for seeing experience in mythological terms, for perceiving the archetype behind the commonplace….

Baxter's poems, still, are haunted by literary echoes …, and he is much preoccupied by, and skillful with, traditional literary forms. More clearly now he perceives the terrifying split between deadening habit and the forgotten "language of the heart."… Here again is the lament for the creative energy of the lost, whole, animistic vision. (p. 52)

Baxter was not an intellectually complex poet, but his vision of human experience goes far beyond the merely intellectual, and this is apparent even in his early work. His vision encompasses the child born to darkness, whose fall from innocence is his awakening to death. Without this awareness the child would dwell in the earthly paradise, but it is in his death-discovery that he becomes a man. By definition, man is his own destroyer. In life he can attain a temporary contact with Eden through following his sexual instinct. Through it he creates, but he does so in the knowledge that whatever is created by man must die. However, any one human death is not final and life itself is, in some sense, eternal. With this sense of the eternal, Baxter set out on his later journey, toward eventual fruitfulness. (p. 54)

Throughout The Fallen House poem after poem suggests fear of the outside world. For the protagonist entering the world (and the world entering him) becomes more deeply alone. (p. 58)

Poem after poem in The Fallen House shows advance on his earlier work, chiefly by increase of what Baxter himself later referred to as "experiential knowledge" which he thought the very basis of poetry. With a few lapses, they are based on detailed recording of concrete experiences. Since Baxter is primarily a maker of parables and perceiver of myths this adherence to the concrete is vitally necessary. He is not a poet of ideas, but of mythologized events…. His parable-making and mythologizing methods imply teaching and imply archetypes behind incidents. Concreteness, therefore, is of the essence. Strange and disappointing then that his next work, Traveller's Litany (1955), should fall into the twin snares of pastiche and generalization; all the more strange because he had, in the interim, spoken cogently on modern poetry in his MacMillan Brown lectures, published that same year as The Fire and the Anvil. (p. 62)

Traveller's Litany expresses Baxter's Marian devotion…. In what might well have been a major statement he contrasts Eros … and Mary, Mother …; but the sequence rises to no necessary order and, redolent of literary echoes as it is, makes uncomfortable reading as a devotional act. What it does is to bring into somewhat muzzy focus Baxter's sense of the split nature of woman. At the same time he was becoming progressively more conscious of man's split nature. In "Notes Towards an Aesthetic" he sees the split as between Orpheus and Promethus, figure of song and figure of power…. "Freedom to do good and evil" worked in Baxter's psyche in those years to make both him and his work appear extremely erratic; but beneath this had begun, it now seems, the slow awakening of an interior harmony. (pp. 62-3)

In Fires of No Return provides a quite coherent and full account of the talents of the young Baxter. Three poems in section 2 collected for the first time are particularly interesting: "Seraphion," "Elegy at the Year's End" and "Lament for Barney Flanagan." Never a proponent of art for its own sake (nor, I believe, of the New Critical dogma that art should be considered without reference to its creator), it is nonetheless possible that as late as 1954 Baxter saw art as the supreme human activity, the artist therefore as privileged. From different angles, in each of the three poems mentioned above is a convergence of life and art…. Baxter was much interested in the interconnections between artists' lives and their work. Speaking of Wilde and Villon, he makes the important observation that "their work was a creative recognition of precisely those situations which their vices had helped to create." (p. 66)

For all its brilliant moments, however, the last section of In Fires of No Return (the new poems) offers no clear development from earlier work, although a change is astir. Still the engagement with Christianity is not wholly unequivocal; concern for humanity is there, but somehow blurred, and often marginal; also present is continued lament for the lost simplicities of the past. New development is confined largely to the technical level. A new tone is beginning to emerge, which, heard in retrospect, is harsher, stonier, sparser. The rhetorical fullness and richness on display in earlier poems such as "Rocket Show," "The Bay," and even "Elegy at the Year's End" are giving way to a textural spareness evident in the book's title poem, in "Auckland" …, and in "At Akitio." Here are the first signs of change which resulted, within a few years, in the gristly directness of Pig Island Letters, a directness achieved with no loss of richness. Alongside these signs of what is to come, and making them harder to recognize, are moments of what [J. E.] Weir justly calls baroque rhetoric. The two combined gave some commentators the feeling that Baxter had lost genuine contact with his Muse, but the matter was before too long to become clearer. From this time on, there gradually comes into the foreground Baxter's engagement with … his society, which ultimately was to absorb his full attention. (p. 71)

[By the early 1960s] Baxter has arrived at "the middle years" for which are kept the knowledge of man's difficult struggle to find the fragments of his soul and piece them together. Becoming a Catholic convert did not, as he knew it would not, solve that problem but merely brought it more clearly into focus. (pp. 72-3)

Evidence of change begins with the "current" poems of In Fires of No Return. If one looks for marked change in the Asian poems of Howrah Bridge … one will find little obviously new. At first reading, despite their density of local color, they may seem somewhat disappointing, without new preoccupations or particular insights. Baxter's experiences of gruesome poverty in India led him to condemn social systems based on economic values, but for him this is not especially new, as witness such New Zealand pieces as "A Rope for Harry Fat."… What is new in the poems is a tone of voice, a sinewy quality which signals the banishment from then on of displays of rhetoric merely for its own sake.

Baxter has been much discussed as a consummate imitator of models…. More or less beneficent influences in earlier stages had included Auden and MacNeice, Yeats and Hardy. Even a cursory look at the early work shows that Yeats was on the whole a bad influence, Hardy a good one…. All the influences mentioned were formative, but [Lawrence Durrell] a different kind of poet from any of these (and indeed from Baxter himself) now helped him to make a quantum leap in finding his own true voice. (pp. 73-4)

Since Baxter matched a mellifluous and resonant voice with a mental tendency to mellifluence and resonance, [the] astringency learned from Durrell was a great boon and is a likely source of the change, a shift of consciousness toward a sparser, tauter attitude. The better new poems in Howrah Bridge … manifest the change…. (pp. 74-5)

What Baxter felt imprisoned by was man's schizoid condition in our society, that condition which he felt as "Pig Island."… [He] speaks of "the great white heart of Pig Island, that wild interior island of the mind," presumably … the precious animistic core of experience, which, for him, had ultimate value…. Baxter has two "starting-points". One is the remembered childhood paradise, the other that "man is a walking grave."… "Pig Island," then, inward and wild, is itself a schizoid conception. First, it is what the pakeha has done to Ao-tea-Roa; second, it is both the "tough" life to which man is condemned and the wrestling ground whereon he must fight for salvation, for the transformation of his mirage-laden desert into the green, well-watered garden. (pp. 75-6)

[With Pig Island Letters, Baxter] seems to reach an entirely new level of achievement, especially in the title poem. Old faults, shopworn rhetoric and stock response, still linger, but not importantly. Newly evident is a remarkable conjunction of tautness and freedom.

Dominant is the thirteen-part "Pig Island Letters". It must have occurred to Baxter, since he adopted and developed the form, that the sequence is suited to his particular bent of mind, his tendency to return to, and meditate upon, the same few concerns. Technically influenced both by Lawrence Durrell and Robert Lowell, Pig Island Letters is distinctively Baxter's and is, besides, free of the formal stiffness and artificiality of his youthful "Cressida" and the pastiche mauve dolors of Traveller's Litany. Most eloquently, it is a weighing and judging born of "experiential knowledge." (p. 76)

By the end of his life Baxter clearly felt that there was some special grace (I mean the term, if I may, somewhere between its aesthetic and religious connotations, sharing in both, not fully committed to either)—some special grace in failure and destitution. (p. 80)

Much of the feeling of Pig Island Letters centers on lack of love, on frustrated lives. (p. 82)

The sense of inner destitution continues growing…. Present also, as it is throughout Baxter's later work, (in this case in "East Coast Journey") is an explicit death-wish, whose primary cause is loss of the youthful vivid sense of nature ("Waipatiki Beach"), so that one has arrived at Nada, the cold hub, "The absolute unmoving hub," from which the only refuge is in the hollow listening place…. (p. 83)

The Man on the Horse is easy to fault as a single work. Apart from the strong force of its author's personality, it has no unity. Rather is it a source book, full of rich insight and observation, composed typically with a deceptively casual air. Outside his poems, it is our prime firsthand document on "Baxter the poet," its ad hoc presentation being characteristic of the man and his sense of the purpose of poetry as expression of "experiential knowledge." (p. 85)

Before publication of the rather odd "selected poems," The Rock Woman in 1969, The Lion Skin, a group of eleven short poems, was issued…. Most of the poems deal with the marital relationship, and do so in a discursive way which has the air of self-parody. Once again, as in the cases of Traveller's Litany and The Night Shift, Baxter had put together as a single work a highly unsatisfactory batch of poems. Looking over the span of his career one discerns an undulating pattern, with periods which suggest a diminished alertness. Perhaps this accounts for the effect of The Rock Woman, a disappointing retrospective selection of the work of a quarter of a century. (p. 87)

From very early in his career, Baxter believed that the link between artist and society is close, and necessary. He suggested that "the analogy between the processes of art and the ritual of tribal magic is an exact one. Both enable catharsis by discovering shape in history, thus relieving the isolation of the individual."… He saw the artist as "a cell of good living in a corrupt society."… (p. 88)

Much of his work suggests that his human world is experienced as chaos, for which his repeated image is "the lion's den"—thus, in Pig Island Letters a poem is "A plank laid over the lion's den." Man's struggle is to reduce chaos to life-giving order, though Baxter does not finally make clear whether, as he sees it, the individual imposes order or simply discovers an order already inherent in nature. Whatever the case, he began by seeing poetry both as the means of individuation and the expression of the journey toward individuation.

A poet of varied moods, modes, and approaches, Baxter by and large is subjective, expressionist; but he is not merely confessional, even though at one stage in his career he admired, and learned from, Robert Lowell. His seminal early reading of Jung confirmed his sense that day-to-day experience has much more than its surface significance, hence his lifelong habit of parable-making and his declaration that consciousness itself can only assimilate "the crises, violations and reconciliations of the spiritual life in mythical form."… He is not "confessional" if only because he sees himself as typical or paradigmatic as well as individual. In some part, too, his mythologizing is exploratory, an attempt to locate and clarify his own archetypes.

Another part is his effort to locate himself in the world. When still very young, he concluded that in searching for the true self, the discovery of a home in nature, identification with a place and a past are vitally necessary. (pp. 88-9)

Much of his first book, Beyond the Palisade, concerns the natural New Zealand environment, the pakeha ancestors failing to make a home there, the land remaining a "cold threshold land" still overshadowed by "the weight of an earlier and prehistoric isolation." Brooding Nature is felt as indifferent or hostile, ground of man's suffering and defeat. This passive, oppressive sense of it continues in Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, but the landscape is more peopled and there are more localized, specifically human experiences. By 1951 Baxter felt clearly that animism is essential to the artist's view of the world, his greatest contribution being the linking of "submerged animism with our immediate affairs." A few years later, in The Fire and the Anvil, he declared it the poet's task to lay bare "the animistic pattern which underlies civilized activity."…

Animism he took to be characteristic of the child and the primitive, and he believed that poetry's vital force derived from rediscovering and revaluing childhood experience, which was at one with nature in "the paradise of childhood," Eden, the lost garden. In contrast, New Zealand's natural environment was experienced by the pakeha intruder as remote, impersonal, indifferent, an obstacle to his material possession of the land. (p. 90)

As Baxter sees it, there are two very different kinds of adult in modern society. These are natural man and bourgeois man, and each is incomplete….

Natural man and bourgeois man is each a "half-man," and "the poet as family man" experiences a double portion of Original Sin, for he is conscious of his participation in each half and finds himself involved in a hopeless struggle to integrate the two, though he is instinctively nearer to natural man…. (p. 91)

Social criticism began to occupy a central place in Baxter's poetry in the mid-1950s; from that time on he employed the poem as a weapon in dealing with a variety of social problems. (p. 93)

Some of the young Baxter's poems evoke the particular characteristics of New Zealand: mobs of sheep, beer-drinking, "the earth-wave breaking / to the plough."… Such poems [as "Farmhand" and "Elegy for an Unknown Soldier"] capture neatly enough the innocence of a young man who does not know himself, scion of a land spiritually and historically impoverished and yet obscurely felt to be his, and behind this the double inarticulateness, of the man and of the land itself. Baxter never ceased, in some measure and in some part of himself, to share these pieties; but it was not his, nor his hero's, fate to remain "effortless and strong."… What he discovered he began to discover early and it haunted him. At first intermittent, these were early glimpses of the desperate absence of, and desperate need for, agape—a lack which he felt was importantly at the center of his own experience and that of his society. (pp. 100-01)

From start to finish Baxter's work is permeated with biblical allusion. Many of the references to Adam tend to portray him as the type-figure of unfallen man, content yet in Eden, to whose company one prays to return…. (p. 106)

That curious small collection The Lion Skin takes the lion's death as its governing metaphor, with the protagonist as Samson. Although most of the poems here concern marriage, the group opens and closes on the theme of drunkenness, and the lion skin may be seen as the whole urban way of life. (p. 108)

Examining the various facets of the Baxter "hero" is, in a sense, a way of approaching his themes and a way of recognizing that man is at the center of every one of them. As we have seen, he was conscious of the "traditional" New Zealand figure of "man alone" which he discusses at some length in The Fire and the Anvil. Typically he sees the figure as hobo or social outcast, who is sensitive to the need for "single vision," unifying love, and who is driven by that sensitivity, his isolation forced upon him by his inability to respond to pressure to conform socially. "Man alone" is the artist sans artistic capacities, and the artist, because he has made the same discoveries about the crudity of social stereotypes, will sympathize with the "man alone." (pp. 110-11)

Perhaps the real heroes, the real center, of Baxter's work are the destitute…. Contemporary society, he felt, is joined by the mere illusion of togetherness, but the necessary condition for struggle toward truth is solitude without separation. (pp. 111-12)

A tribesman cut off from his tribe by a peculiar and special gap, [Baxter's poet-hero] is the revealer of what lies under the surface, or one who discovers in his cage of mirrors facets of the unexpected and lays bare human depths for all to see.

His type of the poet-hero is Burns…. Burns, for Baxter, was the poet as natural man, or, rather, in whose consciousness natural man fought hard to hold off the straitjacket of respectable burgherdom. Not conformity to social mores, not being a "concerned citizen" offering his contribution to maintenance of the status quo, but recognizing the true nature of his own selfhood and the selfhoods of others … this spirit governs the whole presentation of "The Man On the Horse," his fine exegesis of "Tam O'Shanter" and apologia for the life and work of Burns.

Nevertheless he came to feel that poets must "learn to live like other men," bridging the gap, waiting for the "moment of art" which "can never stay."… (pp. 113-14)

References throughout his work to friends … show how great a value Baxter placed on friendship. Eventually this was to grow for him into the central heroic quality aroha—the power of love, the capacity to forget self and put all the force of one's being into a concern for "Thou."…

A sense of loss … is at the core of Baxter, and, in consequence, his hero is a seeker, be it for "The wild lost city of a mother's love," "the bay that never was," or the wholeness all too briefly glimpsed in childhood. From this lost "single vision" the human being is apparently condemned to traverse the "black swamp" of adolescence, to survive the death of "the first Adam" in himself, and to mourn for his "lost estate." Somewhere within himself the hero carries a vision of fullness and this vision is an element in his very destitution…. (p. 115)

Whereas in his early work Baxter lamented man's loss of the capacity to float untutored on the waters of Chaos, later an acceptance of that loss and a search for comradeship in loss clearly became his protagonist's goals. Beyond that, in the late work, is the acceptance of, indeed the looking for, death. In Freudian terms the early longing for lost childhood and the late willingness for death derive ultimately from the same source—the tendency of all living things to return to an inorganic state. From Pig Island Letters onward Baxter seems to hold that, in his journey, the individual must learn to accept the reality of his own personal death. (p. 116)

Just as Baxter distinguished between natural man and bourgeois man, he perceived a comparable division in woman. The line of division is not as clear, however…. [In] addition to his seeming antithesis between Venus (or Delilah) and Mary, there are traces of the idealized Beatrice and her antithesis, living metamorphoses of the "kitchen god." (p. 118)

Baxter's whole view of woman was traditionalist. Sometimes Pauline, more often he held the Augustinian attitude that, "Through a woman we were sent to destruction; through a woman salvation was sent to us." (p. 123)

[For] Baxter both the not-self and the subconscious were female, the first both beguiling and threatening, the second "protective and maternal," both merging in the projected mother-figures of his poems. This digression on the mother, however, would be incomplete were we not to note that the human mother-figure eventually gives way to Gea, the Earth Mother, in whom are the source and order of creation. (p. 125)

Although Baxter's ultimate devotion was professedly to Mary,… he recognized the force, the inevitability, and even the positive value of Venus. For full humanity, it seems, both the Baudelairian and Christian levels of love need to be experienced. (p. 133)

Of the twenty-odd [plays Baxter] wrote … few, if any, are as accomplished as his best poetry. (p. 134)

James Bertram offers a succinct summary of observations Baxter made to a postperformance discussion group: "He said that his central purpose was psychological, that he had intended to present compulsive characters acting compulsively; that he preferred Strindberg to O'Casey; and that Aristotle was out of date."… [He] changed his mind eventually about Aristotle …; but the shift, according to his explanation of it in a lecture, was toward subjectivity: unity of action means "a coherent myth" expressed in terms of local knowledge and experience; unity of time is the lifespan, the "permanent now" of Everyman; unity of place is the stage itself, a little universe whereon the members of the audience project "the communal drama of their own minds." By no means a faithful interpretation of the Aristotelian unities, these definitions offer useful enough guidelines to Baxter's drama.

Very often one has the impression that it is he, the playwright, who is the "projector." The focusing consciousness of his first play, Jack Winter's Dream, is an externalized counterpart of himself in the form of a narrator, a mechanism which … he developed along lines established by Dylan Thomas in Under Milkwood. Thomas' influence combined with that of Synge to produce a Baxter variant of pseudo-Celtic prose-poetry…. (p. 135)

Over the years, the use of language in drama continued to be a preoccupation of Baxter's….

[Although he never succeeded in creating fully authentic stage dialogue,] few New Zealanders can have been more conscious of the colloquial speech of their countrymen. Of a piece with his own involvements, he was particularly aware of the idiom of what he sometimes called "pub conversation."… In writing dialogue Baxter seemed to feel easiest with an idiom which was basically proletarian, but heightened by a rich sense of poetry. (p. 136)

As a young writer [Baxter] was ridden and carried away by rhetoric, but in [his] late works, at his best, he has more control over the functional use of language. In The Temptations of Oedipus, words, language, have become a theme. (p. 137)

[Baxter's] first play was a radio play, and this demanded a specific approach. He told the Listener, "In a radio play … all those things that would otherwise, on the stage, be visual—gesture, setting and appearance of actors—must find emotional equivalents in the spoken word. That is why the poetic prose method is very suitable." Obviously, it was innately Baxter's notion that the equivalent had to be "emotional."… Baxter was well aware of the subjectivity of his plays, the likelihood that many of his characters emerged, horned or hornless, from what he once called his "menagerie of interior selves."… [He] believed that the participation of actors, playwright, and audience, all three, is subjective. (pp. 137-38)

All that has been said thus far may suggest some weaknesses of Baxter's technique. One is a tendency (confined largely, but not entirely, to the earlier plays) toward "poeticality"; another is a fault attributable to his central view of literature, that it affects men's conduct, or ideally should do so—he is at times inclined to be discursive. A countervailing tendency is for the action, at times, to be perfunctory. (p. 139)

[Hal] Smith makes a parallel between Baxter's drama and the poetic drama of Lorca, suggesting that both sacrifice possible psychological depth in their characters to the use of characters as symbols. In this respect, the strength Baxter's poetry undoubtedly gained from his mythologizing and from a life-giving consciousness of the "mythical substratum" available in Greek myths and legends proves to be a weakness in the plays, for it leads to a predetermined (and consequently static) structure. (p. 140)

The most important influences on Baxter's playwriting … were the two French dramatists Sartre and Giraudoux and the classical Greek dramas…. [Sartre's] The Flies and Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates were [Baxter's] "spring-board" in adapting from the original sources for his Greek plays (Mr O'Dwyer's Dancing Party, The Sore-Footed Man, The Bureaucrat, and The Temptations of Oedipus), because he had realized the dangers of attempting direct translation…. From Giraudoux in particular, a master of parallel and antithetical dialogue, he learned the technique of having characters together onstage, each expressing himself, as it were, in a different key, failing to communicate because each was narcissistically confined in his own world.

When we turn to the substance of Baxter's plays, particularly his themes, we find ourselves on familiar, perhaps richer, ground. A list may make this clear: free will, death, religion, drunkenness, commitment, destitution, words, love, materialism, community, the lost garden, bureaucracy, marriage, existentialism. Perhaps the center of that ground is "the enigma of human freedom". (pp. 142-43)

[The] question of freedom is complex, and the condition is composed of both commitment and detachment. Perhaps for this reason The Temptation of Oedipus seems the most resonant of all Baxter's plays, for in it Oedipus is shown as, first, "condemned" to destitution, he has fallen. What the play comes down to, though, is an exploration of his discovery of the "freedom" inherent in suffering. (p. 144)

Love and the various forms of lack-love, anti-love and vacuity are also central themes in Baxter's drama, though one of its thematic weaknesses is that the negative seems always much the more dominant. (pp. 144-45)

Human bafflement and inconsistency are integral to The Temptations of Oedipus, as also is a critique of materialism. Oedipus is torn between kingship and brotherhood; Ismene confuses eros and agape. Part of the dire message is that the seekers after wholeness dwell in confusion, whereas the hunters for material power are clearheaded….

[Religion] is a major theme in Baxter's plays. (p. 146)

Having rejected sociological and "realistic" forms of drama, Baxter eventually cleaved to another myth-form, the Christian liturgy. In a beautiful image in his introduction he describes The Band Rotunda (a location reminiscent of altar and tabernacle) as formally choral and episodic. (p. 147)

[The] focus of drama, for Baxter, always comes back to the nature of selfhood, which is why he considers all drama "religious," for he felt that all self-projections were manifestations of the gods within, a showing forth from "the incurable pantheism of the human soul," and at the same time from the abyss or the void…. It is at the hollow center that the individual must discover himself. Baxter's attempts to project that center onto a theater stage are notable, at their best, for a somber poetry, a probing vigor, and genuine compassion. (p. 148)

[Baxter] had a double view of nature. As he put it in "Literature and Belief": "The whole visible creation, which we are bound to believe is the work of His Hands … shows magnificent, delicate and exquisite art in every detail."…, Alongside this he continued in a fatalistic view of human experience: the world we are presented with (or, at least, perceive) is Chaos manifest, once we have left "the green inn." Amid that chaos Jesus and Mary are consolation. (p. 149)

Christian feeling permeates the texture of the new poems in Howrah Bridge and Other Poems, together with the view of human experience implied in the title of "Ballad of Calvary Street." What is endured in Calvary Street now begins to acquire possible positive value, that of personal destitution, of humans enduring the "fire / Where affliction makes them whole."… Passive resignation is more dangerous than the self-flagellation of a St. Simeon Stylites. The maxim Baxter puts in the peddler's mouth in "The Tempters," "Thirst, obey, endure," speaks for more than mere passivity.

Again we arrive at the crucial Pig Island Letters, the whole framework of which is religious, beginning from a sense of human circumscription. The human universe is "God's body blazing on damnation's tree," and the Christian life is seen in each case as taking form from Christ's Passion. (pp. 151-52)

In Jerusalem Sonnets (1970) [Baxter] established the serviceable two-line unrhyming stanza which became the chief medium of his Jerusalem poems, the line itself at core a pentameter shaken loose of formal restriction…. The work's strength is certainly not in "making it new," and Baxter here further confines (and defines) his scope by adhering to the fourteen-line sonnet length, even though otherwise ignoring the traditional form. If he is not "masturbating his ego" (in a phrase of Simpson's) he is very much at the center of the sequence, what he does and what he suffers. But there is a new kind of integrity. Rhetoric has been burned off, and the simplistic has become simplicity. As Murray Edmond justly says, "by the time of the Jerusalem Sonnets Baxter didn't give a damn about his style as he had in the past. The mask of style—the accepted notion of what poetry is—has been dropped to reveal the man himself, guileless."…

No peak moments of high rhetoric grace these thirty-nine sonnets. What matters is what Baxter is thinking about and, equally, how: his devotion to the Lord (a Christian Lord, but Maori in His names: Te Atua—God, Te Ariki—Christ …). (p. 155)

The sequence has unobtrusive shape, beginning with the protagonist's sense of his own suffering…. His concerns are poverty of self, seeking comfort in God, its elusiveness in this life, but the rare moment always possible of love shared. (p. 156)

The four sonnets which close the sequence rise to a remarkable pitch of eloquence, at once controlled and free. (p. 157)

[An] immensity of judgment, a lifetime's, is in the texture of these poems. Here Baxter's notable rhetoric is completely in service to the conviction of his whole experience; yet he is no propagandist, no proselytizer. Clearly, graced with moments of high simple beauty, the sequence gives an account of his spiritual struggles and his vision of a tribe. For all the suffering which permeates the work, we witness in it the overt beginnings of a profound metamorphosis.

In Jerusalem Daybook (1971) Baxter again used his newfound "sonnet" form but in conjunction with other verse-forms and heavily interspersed with prose. (p. 158)

The whole book is pervaded by the spirit of humility, poverty (destitution), and acceptance. If we are to remain within our customary categories, it is perhaps more a religious work than a work of literature. Interspersed with poems, the prose has no rhetorical pretensions and no particular distinction, unless directness and clarity be so regarded. The matter of it derives from Baxter's lifelong concerns, here dealt with in a spirit of culmination. (p. 159)

Two-thirds of Autumn Testament (1972) is taken up with the title poem, which otherwise resembles Jerusalem Daybook in being a mixture of prose and poetry. (p. 163)

"Autumn Testament" (the title poem) is a rambling poetic and meditative journal, without particularly striking coherence as a piece of writing, but rather held together by the spirit of the man who wrote it. A recurring concern, especially in the early sections, is with the need for food, a perhaps not unconscious parallel with the need for spiritual sustenance. (p. 164)

His ultimate message (and Baxter's late work is undeniably a message) is simple enough, namely, that "Fear is the only enemy" (sonnet 46). Fear of the natural self has, all along, been root cause of the puritanism Baxter fought.

The closing sonnet of this fine sequence (sonnet 48) is intensely interesting in relation to Baxter's whole career. It is a total acceptance of all the negative elements in himself and in life. The spider, tantric goddess, is Spiderwitch, the temptress, in profounder form—a manifestation of the Terrible Mother, or Great Mother…. In his concluding lines Baxter seems to merge this creature with the judging God …, but the daunting image is offset by the prayer and by the tone of acceptance which pervades the whole latter part of the poem. (pp. 166-67)

Because, taken together, the Jerusalem writings constitute Baxter's greatest literary achievement, it is tempting to see them as climactic. But it is both to misunderstand and undervalue them if we consider them merely as pieces of literature and merely as a culmination. As Murray Edmond noted, the barriers of mode broke down—between prose and poem, between letter and diary, essay and sermon, between mere writing and life itself. Not so much an "adjunct" (Edmond's term), these writings are an integral part of a whole life, one which lived out its early aim, to be "a cell of good living in a corrupt society." (p. 168)

Charles Doyle, in his James K. Baxter (copyright © 1976 by G. K. Hall & Co.; reprinted with the permission of Twayne Publishers, A Division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston), Twayne, 1976, 189 p.