R. A. K. Mason, 1905–1971
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26686/knznq.v7i3.713Abstract
The story of how R. A. K. Mason threw two hundred copies of his first book, The Beggar, into Auckland harbour in the late 1920s, in disgust or despair because no one would buy it, is a legend in New Zealand literary history. It may be apocryphal, but it is compelling as myth, symbolising a time – the 1920s and 1930s – when a true, vital, native literature struggled to be read or heard in a provincial and puritanical country. The publication in 1924 of The Beggar, the poet and critic Allen Curnow was later to write, marked the emergence of New Zealand’s ‘first wholly original, unmistakably gifted poet’.
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References
Doyle, Charles. R. A. K. Mason. New York: Twayne, 1970.
Curnow, Allen. A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-45. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1945.
Curnow, Allen. The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. London: Penguin, 1960.
Curnow, Allen. ‘The Poetry of R. A. K. Mason’. Book, 2 (May 1941).
Murray, Stuart. Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998.
‘R. A. K. Mason 1905-1971: some tributes’. Landfall, 99: 25: 3 (September 1971): 222-42.
R. A. K. Mason at Twenty-five. Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1986.
Stead, C. K. ‘R. A. K. Mason’s poetry: some random observations’. Comment, 16: 4: 4 (July 1963): 34-39.
Weir, J. E. R. A. K. Mason. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1977.
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