The poetry of death: a thematic study of the verse of James K. Baxter and Chairil Anwar

Abstract

James K. Baxter and Chairil Anwar are two prominent poets from two different national literatures. Baxter is undoubtedly a crucially important figure in modern New Zealand literature; while Chairil is the most influential poet in Indonesian post-war literature. Though culturally different, these two poets show a somewhat similar degree of obsession with death. In the present thesis, I attempt to explore the developmental stages of the two poets' obsessive relation with death as they are reflected in their poetry. In the discussion of Baxter's death poetry, I first suggest that Baxter interprets the issue of death on the basis of the Old Testament myth of the loss of Eden. According to him, death is mythically the consequence of losing Edenic immortality. From here, I proceed to argue that Baxter expands this basic notion of death further to include actual socio-psychological issues in the life of New Zealand society in the sixties. I suggest that he also interprets metaphorically a real-life situation in which love, psychological creativity and sexual chastity are absent as part of the whole experience of postlapsarian death. However, in the discussion of his later poetry, I discover a radical shift from this mythical perspective in Baxter's mode of thinking. I argue that, by reorienting his thinking to the New Testament myth of Christ's death and resurrection, Baxter eventually is capable of interpreting death in a different manner. For him, at the end of the day death becomes the only theological way to regain the lost Eden itself. With Chairil's death poetry, I try to formulate first the ideological base of his thinking about death. I argue that death, according to him, is the cause of what he takes to be the meaninglessness of human life. Afterwards, I explore the poet's two consecutive reactions to that philosophical discovery of death. I suggest that the first reaction constitutes the poet's attempt to transcend death through an intense way of living. However, finding that this is no real solution, Chairil finally accepts death maturely, peacefully as well as vitalistically as a manifestation of a sense of psychological triumph. As this study is not so much a cross-cultural comparison as a sheer exploration of two individual poets, my conclusion, therefore, reflects two distinctive individuals who approach death in their own distinctive ways. After demonstrating that Baxter sees the issue of death consistently within the framework of his faith in the Christian religion, while Chairil deals with it entirely in accordance with his own empiricism, I conclude that the former is a mytho-religious poet for whom death is both the cause and the solution of the meaninglessness of fallen life, while the latter is a poet-experiencer who perceives death merely empirically as the cause of the meaninglessness of life. Thus, while for Baxter, death is only comprehensible if it is viewed from the mythical angle of his religious belief, for Chairil it is perceivable when it is seen in relation to the actual day-to-day experience of living.