The Virgin Land: Some Images from 19th-century New Zealand Poetry

Abstract

Poets sing and write about questions such as where is home, where do we belong and what stories does our land tell? Reflecting as well as shaping the environment they inhabit, whether writing well or badly, poets inscribe cultural space. Collectively they present generalised images of a period, just as individually they portray particular and specific aspects. My thesis is that our nineteenth-century settler-poets saw the land as virgin waiting for the imperial advance.