William Golder's the New Zealand Survey (1867): The Relation between Poetry and Photography as Media of Representation

William Golder's The New Zealand Survey includes an epic poem recounting the origin and evolution of New Zealand as a landmass which becomes, with the arrival first of Maori and then British settlers, the scene and basis for the origin of a new nation and the advancing of human civilisation through the application of scientific and moral knowledge. Golder's thinking about the role of poetry in this process is expressed through analogies with other media of representation which precisely define his aim in writing. His repeated and traditional metaphor for the linguistic work of the poet is that of clothing ideas with words; but in The New Zealand Survey, his third volume of poetry, he offers two other analogies, both technological-printing and photography-which extend the other traditional metaphor of picturing into the era of technical process and scientific invention.References to photography occur in the third and fourth volumes of poetry published by Colder: The Neti' Zealand Survey (1867) and The Philosophy of Love (1871). 1 Using the photograph as an analogy for poetic representation is, in one respect, simply consistent with Golder's constant enthusiasm for the new knowledge produced by the discoveries of science and its technological applications, and the new human and social capabilities which developed progressively in association with that knowledge. It can also be seen as an updating of the ut pictura poesis theory of the relation between verbal and visual media, a new example of the sister arts as they have been traditionally theorised in western aesthetics. But recent investigation of the relations between poetry, painting and photography in the first half of the nineteenth century have emphasised that this period marks a profound break with early modern theorising about the visual.2 Lindsay Smith affirms that, after 1839, the camera's 'novel presence transforms acts of looking, most obviously calling into question the concept of a faithful transcription by the artist of the external world [. ] relations between the visible and the invisible, the empirical and the transcendental, are newly conceptualised'. He observes that, as a result of the tendency to consider the still photograph as the forerunner of the movie, 'photography has received surprisingly little attention in interdisciplinary discussions of Victorian culture when in fact nineteenth-century visual and optical discourses, and-most centrally-photographic ones, have ramifications for literature and painting'. 3PreliminariesPhotography, at its inception, like any new cultural technology, was an invention the implications and potentials of which were perceptible more through what Golder calls imagination and the English inventor of photography, William H. Fox Talbot, calls 'floating philosophic visions'4 than in its initial products. Part of the excitement attaching to it was the way in which it unsettled established relationships in the whole field of representation, and how it was demonstrated that the extremely powerful claims for realism and the scientific mode of relating to nature which the products of photography appeared to endorse were not essential to the photographic process. Jennifer Green-Lewis proposes that:Perhaps the best evidence of the pervasiveness of photography in the nineteenth century remains its appropriation by [positivist realism and metaphysical romance]; photography's power lay in its potential to be identified either as validation of empiricism in its surface documentation of the world or, conversely, as proof that any visual account inevitably represents the world inadequately. Realism's triumph over the meaning of photography in general was ironic in that science deemed reliably truthful a process of representation that had achieved notoriety and popularity through its potential to lie.5With respect to Golder's response to photography, it is nonetheless from the imbrication of photography with the culture of science that the values which he places on the term and its significance for our understanding of his poetic and cultural aims are derived. …