grown with the years, until in a recent prize-poem competition which brought out 1084 “poems” from the English-speaking world, the quota from New Zealand was seventy-four. Every year, now, one or two fresh volumes come to the birth, and promptly die of neglect on the part of the public; for, in marked contrast with the Australians, the New Zealanders, though they write poetry, do not read their own poets. Some of these volumes deserve the sudden death they suffer; others show an amount of promise which cannot be expected to find more than occasional fulfilment; a few show more than promise. It is the conviction that some of them contain verse which at least comes well up to the level of modern minor poetry that has led to the making of the present collection. It may be admitted at the outset that there is nothing very great to be disclosed herein: the poetical element that a new land contains must always at first be small and of little power. In the generation of the pioneers that is passing away literary effort was inevitably a rare thing: men’s energies were set too sternly to battle with the material facts of life to leave them time for cultivating its graces. The second generation has still before it the task of establishing the nation whose foundations were set by our fathers, and we too have comparatively little time for things not practical—the columns must be
