Eileen Duggan Biography

New Zealand poet, born near Invercargill, educated at Victoria University College. Her verse collections, Poems (1924), A Pioneer (1929), Poems (1937), New Zealand Poems (1940), and More Poems (1951) show her talent for combining the demotic (and local detail) with the charm and regularity of rhymed verse form. Her themes are particularly of the privations and tragedies of ordinary lives. Duggan received a fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature in 1943 and her writing was published and widely read in the USA. In the 1950s, however, her reputation in New Zealand was somewhat eclipsed by the more modernist tendencies of the Caxton School and she was marginalized for what Allen Curnow described as her ‘Georgian decorum’. Duggan's work appears in most of the major anthologies.