Charles Edgar Spear, 1910–1985

Abstract

Charles Spear’s life and work represent something of a contradiction. A poet whose work has been described as ‘owing none of its themes to New Zealand’ continues to be anthologised – and praised – by New Zealand poets to this day. This is all the more remarkable for a poet whose published work runs to little more than a single book (Twopence Coloured) of fifty-two ‘exquisite cameo lyrics’ of no more than seventeen lines in length. But perhaps the most striking contradiction is that between a body of work which ‘travels widely in time and space’ and a poet who said of his own life – not without justification – that ‘practically nothing has ever happened to me’.