"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

old forms in a characteristic manner, is that not all that may be reasonably
expected of them? (ibid.)
Colonial English South African poetry reflects a fascinating tension where the
earlier poets, particularly Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), struggled to reconcile their
European roots with the harsher realities of Africa through what can be called African
Romanticism. Sidney Clouts, a poet who is often coupled with Livingstone, calls this “the
violent arcadia” (also the title of his master’s thesis on the nature poetry of Thomas
Pringle, Francis Carey Slater and Roy Campbell). His “violent arcadia” is a paradox
which reflects an attempt to portray the beauty and savagery of Africa through the idyll
of the ancient pastoral tradition (2).
In Grounds of Contest: A Survey of South African English Literature Malvern van
Wyk Smith claims the first notable English South African poet is Thomas Pringle who,
with his fellow 1820 settler-poets, tried to develop “an apt discourse to take imaginative
possession … [of] both people and place” (19). The consensus is that he failed to find this
discourse. Sidney Clouts argues “how inadequate Pringle’s style generally is for the
depiction of scenes which cannot be comprehended within the framework of a gentler
response” (66). In the introduction to A Book of South African Verse (1963), Guy Butler
similarly claims that Pringle used “stock responses” and did not find a fitting vocabulary
(xxiv). White South African poetry only “found its poetic apotheosis” (xxvi) a century
later in the writings of Roy Campbell (1901-57) and William Plomer (1903-73). It was
their treatment of the African landscape which set them apart from the “high-sounding
waffle” (Butler xxiv) of the South African poets who preceded them. Smith argues that
Campbell and Plomer “transformed the debate about domicile and appropriation” (47),
and Butler writes that they
put paid to this old maid’s view of Africa which made the Karoo and the
Bushveld extensions of the Lake District. The landscape is not seen as the face of
a Nature which is magnificent, capricious, impersonal. Plomer offers for our
contemplation not ‘a primrose by a river’s brim’ but ‘a scorpion on a stone’ [The
Scorpion]. (xxvii)
This uneasy view of the African landscape continues into the 20 th Century and is
compounded by the effects of the Second World War and the rise to power of the
National Party in South Africa in1948. Butler argues that the pioneering spirit of the
white settler poets is subsumed by the effects of industry and commerce and resultant
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