Kendrick Smithyman

William Kendrick Smithyman (9 October 1922 – 28 December 1995) was a New Zealand poet and one of the most prolific of that nation's poets in the 20th century.

Smithyman was born in Te Kōpuru, a milling and logging town on the Wairoa River near Dargaville, in the Northland Region in the far north of New Zealand.

He was the only child of William "Bill" Kendrick Smithyman, an immigrant from England and a former soldier who had fought both in the Boer War and World War I and who had radical political sympathies.

Before World War I, he had worked in sugar plantations in Fiji.

The poet's father had also been a sailor and waterside worker but fell on hard times during the Depression when the poet was growing up.

The father at some points had to work on relief gangs to earn money.

His wife, Annie Lavinia Evans, was born in Christchurch.

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.

His parents managed a home for elderly men in Te Kōpuru before moving to Auckland in the early 1930s.

Smithyman also attended Seddon Memorial Technical College (1935–1939) and Auckland Teachers' Training College (1940–1941), from which he earned a teacher's certificate.

There his first stories and poems were published in the college magazine, Manuka, edited by Robert William Lowry, who later became Smithyman's first publisher.

In World War II, Smithyman served in the New Zealand Army artillery as bombardier (1941–1942), then as a quartermaster in the Royal New Zealand Air Force from 1942 to 1945.

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.

His service in the armed services was spent in New Zealand except for a short period in 1945 when he was stationed on Norfolk Island, resulting in Considerations, a sequence of poems later published in Landfall and after that in the 1951 edition of Allen Curnow's Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1950.

In August 1946, at Auckland, Smithyman married the poet Mary Isobel Stanley (née Neal; 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.

In 1949 the couple moved to Pine Island (now known as Herald Island) in the Waitemata Harbour.

Both poets wrote about this time on the Island where they were living in a remote environment, only accessible by boat.

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.

From 1960 to 1965, Smithyman stopped writing poetry.

Many of the poems from this period were eventually collected in Inheritance (1962) and Flying to Palmerston (1968).

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.

Some of Smithyman's poems, especially in Imperial Vistas Family Fictions (written in 1983-1984 and posthumously published in 2002) are about his father and other relatives from previous generations whom Smithyman had never met, including his grandfather, also named William Kendrick, born in 1829, who became a sailor, fought for the British Royal Navy in the Crimean War, travelled to Australia and India, then became harbourmaster at Ramsgate on the southeast coast of England.

The family moved to several communities in and around Auckland before settling on Boscawen Avenue in Point Chevalier, where the lonely boy read voraciously and attended Point Chevalier Primary School.

There he became a lifelong friend of future poet and historian Keith Sinclair.

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.

"[H]is poetry, above all, was academic in style. Smithyman's verse was notorious for its knotty language and allusive obscurity."