James K. Baxter

James Keir Baxter (29 June 1926 – 22 October 1972) was a New Zealand poet and playwright. He was also known as an activist for the preservation of Māori culture. He is one of New Zealand's most well-known and controversial literary figures. He was a prolific writer who produced numerous poems, plays and articles in his short life, and was regarded as the preeminent writer of his generation. He suffered from alcoholism until the late 1950s. He converted to Catholicism and established a controversial commune at Jerusalem, New Zealand, in 1969. He was married to writer Jacquie Sturm.

Early life Baxter was born in Dunedin as the second son to Archibald Baxter and Millicent Brown and grew up near Brighton, 20 km south of Dunedin city. He was named after James Keir Hardie, a founder of the British Labour Party. His mother had studied Latin, French and German at the Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney, the University of Sydney and Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Baxter and his brother were not baptised, On his first day of school at Brighton Primary School (now Big Rock Primary School), Baxter burned his hand on a stove and later used this incident to represent the failure of institutional education.

In 1936, when Baxter was ten, the family moved to Wanganui where he and his brother attended St Johns Hill School, and the following year they moved to England and attended Sibford School in the Cotswolds.

Baxter began writing poetry at the age of seven, and he accumulated a large body of technically accomplished work both before and during his teenage years. Between 1942 and 1946, Baxter drafted around 600 poems, saying later in life that his experiences as a teenager were painful but "created a gap in which the poems were able to grow". In this year, Baxter also won the Macmillan Brown Prize for his poem "Convoys". The prize was coincidentally named after his Scottish maternal grandfather, John Macmillan Brown.

Baxter's work during this time was, as with his contemporary compatriots, most notably the experimental novelist Janet Frame, largely influenced by the modernist works of Dylan Thomas. He was a member of the so-called "Wellington Group" of writers that also included Louis Johnson, W.H. Oliver and Alistair Te Ariki Campbell. Baxter typically wrote short lyrical poems or cycles of the same rather than longer poems.

After his eighteenth birthday on 29 June 1944, like his father and brother, Baxter registered as a conscientious objector, citing "religious and humanitarian" grounds. The authorities did not pursue him however due to the late stage of the war.

Marriage and later career In 1948 Baxter married Jacquie Sturm at St John's Cathedral, Napier, and his developing interest in Christianity culminated in his joining the Anglican church and being baptised during that same year. He completed his teaching course in December 1952, and subsequently published his third major collection of poems, The Fallen House. In 1954 he was appointed assistant master at Epuni School, Lower Hutt, and it was here that he wrote a series of children's poems published later as The Tree House, and Other Poems for Children (1974).

Baxter and his wife had a daughter, Hilary, in 1949, and a son, John, in 1952. Through the late 50s and 60s Baxter visited the Southern Star Abbey, a Cistercian monastery at Kopua near Central Hawke's Bay. Baxter admitted however in a letter to a friend that his conversion was "just one more event in a series of injuries, alcoholism, and gross mistakes".

Later in 1958, Baxter received a UNESCO stipend to study educational publishing and began an extended journey through Asia, and especially India, where Rabindranath Tagore's university Shantiniketan was one of the inspirations for Baxter's later community at Jerusalem, New Zealand. In India he was reconciled with his wife and contracted dysentery.

In the late 1950s and 1960s Baxter became a powerful and prolific writer of both poems and drama, and it was through his 1958 radio play Jack Winter's Dream that he became internationally known. It was performed as a radio play with incidental music by Ashley Heenan, which he then worked into a suite of "nine portraits for orchestra", recorded in 1958 by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer. The play was performed with the NZSO playing Heenan's incidental music in "an epic and almost oratorical rendition" in the Wellington Town Hall as part of the International Festival of the Arts, 1988.

The first half of the 1960s also saw, however, Baxter struggling to make ends meet on a postman's wage, having resigned from the Department of Education in 1963 and refused to take work as a schoolmaster.

Jerusalem In 1968 Baxter claimed in a letter to his friend John Weir that he had been instructed in a dream to "Go to Jerusalem". He also adopted the Māori version of his name, Hemi. Three days later on 22 October 1972 Baxter suffered a coronary thrombosis in the street and died in a nearby house, aged 46. She set up the James K. Baxter Charitable Trust, which supported causes he had supported, for example prison reform and drug addiction rehabilitation programmes, and ensured that all proceeds of his work went to the trust.

Evidence and allegations of sexual assault In January 2019, the Victoria University Press published a collection of Baxter's personal letters as James K Baxter: Letters of a Poet. The collection was edited by his friend, John Weir. One letter in the collection revealed that in 1960, Baxter confided to another woman that he raped his wife, Jacquie Sturm, after she expressed low interest in sex. New Zealanders reacted with dismay to the revelations, describing them as "awful", "terrible" and "shocking". Marital rape in NZ was first criminalised in 1985. In The Spinoff John Newton wrote that it is no longer possible to talk about Baxter without addressing how Baxter thinks and writes about women.

Paul Millar, a Baxter scholar and personal friend of Sturm, who had been appointed as her literary executor after her death, cautioned against reading the letter as turning Sturm into a victim: "Leaving apart how appalling this letter is – a betrayal on so many levels from the brutal act described, the lack of shame in the description, and the profound betrayal of trust – its publicity is once again putting Jacquie in a subordinate position to Baxter, a bit player in his narrative. ... Jacquie deserves much more than to be remembered as Baxter's victim ... despite everything she endured, she emerged victorious. If people really want to know Jacquie they should seek our her writing, not Baxter's."

Critical reception and legacy Criticism of Baxter's poetry has generally focused on his incorporation of European myths into his New Zealand poems, his interest in Māori culture and language, and the significance of his religious experiences and conversion to Roman Catholicism. New Zealand poet laureate Vincent O'Sullivan wrote in 1976 that Baxter is an inherently New Zealand poet: "that is the proportion of Baxter's achievement – the most complete delineation yet of a New Zealand mind. The poetic record of its shaping is as original an act as anything we have." A common theme in Baxter's extensive body of writing was strong criticism of New Zealand society. His biographer Paul Millar said: "If, at times, Baxter appears to evaluate New Zealand society harshly, his judgements are always from the perspective of one intimately involved in the social process." By contrast, John Newton noted that at least some Māori welcomed Baxter's engagement with their language and culture, In Schmidt's view, Baxter's writing was affected by his alcoholism. Schmidt also commented on Baxter's influences, noting that his work drew upon Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats; then on Louis MacNeice and Robert Lowell. Michael Schmidt identified "an amalgam of Hopkins, Thomas and native atavisms" in Baxter's Prelude N.Z..

A number of Baxter's poems were written in the ballad form, and Baxter has been described by critics as "New Zealand's principal lyricist". It was devised by New Zealand singer-songwriter Charlotte Yates.

Selected works

Beyond the Palisade, 1944 Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, 1948 Hart Crane; a poem, 1948 Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry, 1951 Poems Unpleasant, 1952 (with Louis Johnson and Anton Vogt) Rapunzel: a Fantasia for Six Voices, 1953 The Fallen House, 1953 The Fire and the Anvil, 1955 Traveller's Litany, 1956 The Iron Breadboard: Studies in New Zealand Writing, 1950 The Night Shift: Poems on Aspects of Love, 1957 (with Charles Doyle, Louis Johnson and Kendrick Smithyman) In Fires of No Return, 1958 Chosen Poems, 1958 Two Plays: The Wide Open Cage and Jack Winter's Dream, 1959 The Ballad of Calvary Street, 1960 Howrah Bridge and Other Poems, 1961 Three Women and the Sea, 1961 The Spots of the Leopard, 1962 The Ballad of the Soap Powder Lock-Out, 1963 A Selection of Poetry, 1964 Pig Island Letters, 1966 Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand, 1967 The Lion Skin, 1967 The Man on the Horse, 1967 The Bureaucrat, 1968 (prod.) The Rock Woman: Selected Poems, 1969 Jerusalem Sonnets: Poems for Colin Durning, 1970 The Flowering Cross, 1970 The Devil and Mr Mulcahy, and The Band Rotunda, 1971 (plays) Jerusalem Daybook, 1971 The Sore-Footed Man, and The Temptations of Oedipus, 1971 (plays) Ode to Auckland and Other Poems, 1972 Autumn Testament, 1972 (reissued in 1998, edited by Paul Millar) Four God Songs, 1972 Letter to Peter Olds, 1972

Posthumously published Runes, 1973 Two Obscene Poems, 1974 Barney Flanagan and Other Poems, read by James K. Baxter (record), 1973 The Labyrinth: Some Uncollected Poems 1944–72, 1974 The Tree House and Other Poems for Children, 1974 The Bone Chanter, edited and introduced by John Weir, 1976 The Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady, edited and introduced by John Weir, 1976 Baxter Basics, 1979 Collected Poems, edited by John Weir, 1979 (reissued in 1995 and 2004) Collected Plays, edited by Howard McNaughton, 1982 Selected Poems, edited by John Weir, 1982 Horse: a Novel, 1985 The Essential Baxter, selected and introduced by John Weir, 1993 Cold Spring: Baxter's Unpublished Early Collection, edited and introduced by Paul Millar, 1996 James K. Baxter: Poems, selected and introduced by Sam Hunt, 2009 Poems to a Glass Woman, with introductory essay by John Weir, 2012 James K. Baxter: Complete Prose, four volume set edited by John Weir, 2015 (Victoria University Press) James K Baxter: Letters of a Poet, edited by John Weir, 2015 (Victoria University Press)