| Chapter : | Introduction |
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authorship, a trajectory at once accidental and overdetermined, the destination anticipated from the formative moments of youthful antipodean exile, as Hazzard explained in an interview in 1984:
Auden said in that beautiful poem about Yeats that poetry altered nothing, that all the savagery of the world would be the same if no poet had ever written. But I know from my own small experience that it can change life radically. Poetry gave me companionship, it opened my mind and my heart—as far as they could be opened. It also changed the facts of my life.
When I was living in New Zealand in 1949–50, I read poems of Leopardi in translation by John Heath-Stubbs and I wanted to learn the originals: they were so beautiful.
I began to read Italian, 12,000 miles away without expectation of going to Italy. Later, it was because I had studied Italian [that] I was sent there by the United Nations and everything changed. It’s not true that poetry doesn’t change things; it does change one’s own nature. You can’t prove such things; thank God you can’t prove them. Truth is too great to be “proved.” (Dutton 51)
The determining tropes of poetry, youth, vitality, and liberation signal the dislocations of Hazzard’s early years as transformative—a form of mobility or, to take up a metaphor from The Ancient Shore, a form of pilgrimage. At the heart of the many accounts Hazzard provides of these experiences is the contrast between the benighted subjectivity accessible to her as a young woman in the thrall, as she saw it, of an unsympathetic family, and the capacity for self-creation opening up to her by independent life in a culture she found infinitely more sympathetic. The sense of agency is inseparable from the compulsion to read literature and, later, from the opportunity to write professionally:
It dawned on me that these things added up to something. One was creating one’s character and one’s personality in an irrevocable way