Eileen Duggan

Eileen May Duggan

She had continued ill health from a childhood sickness,[2] so decided to give up teaching. Partly for the same reason she decided not to marry in 1918 and in 1940. She supported herself by journalism, with a weekly article in The New Zealand Tablet, writing the women’s page under the pen name of Pippa. The first article appeared in the issue of 7 September 1927, and the last posthumously on 17 January 1973. She also wrote items for newspapers like The Dominion of Wellington. She lived in early 1950s in inner-city Wellington in Glencoe Terrace off The Terrace, in a weird canyon in the heart of the city up flights of precipitous stairs and, later, in the 1950s, in Imperial Terrace, Kilbirnie.^[3]

Poet

Her first poems were published in The New Zealand Tablet in 1917. Soon after her arrival in Wellington she published her first volume, probably in 1921 (although other dates have been proposed: 1920, 1922 or 1924). Through her career she published individual poems in various newspapers and journals in New Zealand (including the New Zealand School Journal), Australia (The Bulletin), England (The New English Weekly) and America (America and The Commonweal, both Catholic journals).^[4] In the 1930s she was New Zealand's best-known poet, with an Eileen Duggan Society in America. Her 1937 volume of poems had an introduction by Walter de la Mare. However, in spite of this, as Dr Peter Whiteford argues, "changes in literary fashion were reaching New Zealand that would ultimately see her marginalized within the literary community."^[5] She stopped writing poems (to "have done with words") about 1951 but continued to earn income from her prose for another twenty years.^[6] She wrote some poems on events for the Catholic Church, which treated her at times as an unofficial poet laureate, and a poem when Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage died.

Some of her poems were anthologised in books of New Zealand poems by Chapman, Bennett and Vincent O’Sullivan, but none of her poems were included in

In the

• Poems (1921)
• New Zealand Bird Songs (1929) described by her as rhymes for children
• Poems (1937, American edition 1938 & enlarged edition 1939)
• New Zealand Poems (1940)
• More Poems (1951)
• Eileen Duggan: Selected Poems edited by Peter Whiteford (1994, Victoria University Press, Wellington)
  ISBN 0-86473-265-1

• A Gentle Poet: A portrait of Eileen Duggan O.B.E. by Grace Burgess (1981)
• A New Zealand Poet for the World in Great Days in New Zealand Writing by Alan Mulgan Chapter 10, pages 90–94 (1962, Reed)

References