Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Commentary on Poetry in English, Third edition [Third edition] 9780773549609

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Editor’s Note
Foreword Collett Tracey
Introduction Being a Personal essai in the Unwritten History of Modern Canadian Poetry
Illustrations
Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
I the beginnings of the modern school
The Precursors (1910–1925)
Introduction
Arthur Stringer: Preface to Open Water
John Murray Gibbon: Rhymes With and Without Reason
Frank Oliver Call: Preface to Acanthus and Wild Grape
The Initiators (1925–1936)
Introduction
A.J.M. Smith: Contemporary Poetry
A.J.M. Smith: Wanted: Canadian Criticism
Leo Kennedy: The Future of Canadian Literature
F.R.Scott: Preface to New Provinces
A.J.M. Smith: A Rejected Preface
II The new poetry: a manifesto
Introduction
John Sutherland: Introduction to Other Canadians
III The early forties
The New Literary Scene
Introduction
John Sutherland: Brief to a Royal Commission
Robert Weaver: John Sutherland and Northern Review
New Critical Currents
Introduction
Northrop Frye: Canada and Its Poetry
F.R. Scott: A Note on Canadian War Poetry
Neufville Shaw: The Maple Leaf is Dying
Louis Dudek: Academic Literature
John Sutherland: Review of Poems by Robert Finch
Editorial board of northern review: Notices of Resignation
P.K. Page: Letter to Northern Review
IV Signs of reaction, new and old
Introduction
John Sutherland: The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry
Lorne Pierce: Foreword to Canadian Poetry in English
V.B. Rhodenizer: Introduction to Canadian Poetry in
V Resurgence
Introduction
Louis Dudek: Où sont les jeunes?
Louis Dudek: Preface to Cerberus
Irving Layton: Preface to Cerberus
Raymond Souster: Preface to Cerberus
Earle Birney: Letter of Resignation
Robert A. Currie: Don’t Blame This on Bliss
VI Points of view
Introduction
Earle Birney: Introduction to Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry
Desmond Pacey: English-Canadian Poetry, 1944–1954
Louis Dudek: The State of Canadian Poetry: 1954
Irving Layton: Foreword to A Red Carpet for the Sun
Northrop Frye: The Keys to Dreamland
Northrop Frye: Verticals of Adam
James Reaney: Editorial
Eli Mandel: Preface to Poetry 62
VII The little magazines
Introduction
Louis Dudek: The Role of Little Magazines in Canada
Michael Gnarowski: The Role of “Little Magazines” in the Development of Poetry in English in Montreal
Frank Davey: Anything But Reluctant: Canada’s Little Magazines
VIII Wider horizons
Poetry Finds a Public
Introduction
William Carlos Williams: A Note on Layton
Joan Finnigan: Canadian Poetry Finds Its Voice in a Golden Age
Anonymous: The Private World of Raymond Souster
Anonymous: The Purdy Pigment
Robert Fulford: On Raymond Souster
Introduction
A.J.M. Smith: From the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse
Jean-Charles Bonenfant: L’influence de la littérature canadienne-anglaise au Canada français
F.R.Scott: The Poet in Quebec Today
Introduction
Louis Dudek: Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry
George Woodcock: Editorial
Milton Acorn: Open Letter to a Demi-Senior Poet
Alan Bevan: Editorial
Milton Acorn: The Montreal Miracle and K.V. Hertz
George Bowering: The Most Remarkable Thing About Tish
Frank Davey: Statement
Frank Davey: Rime, A Scholarly Piece
Raymond Souster: Preface to New Wave Canada
Acknowledgments
Appendices
1 A.J.M. Smith’s “The Rejected Preface”
2 Other Canadians: An Anthology of the New Poetry in Canada 1940–1946 [1947]
3 Wider Horizons: Poetry Finds a Public
Index

Citation preview

THE MAKING OF MODERN POETRY IN CANADA

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THE MAKI NG OF M O D E RN POE T RY I N C A NA DA Essential Commentary on Canadian Poetry in English Third Edition Edited by louis dudek a n d m i c h a e l g na row s k i

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 First published in 1967 by the Ryerson Press as The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Poetry in English Reprinted 1968 First paperback edition 1970 978-0-7735-4958-6 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4959-3 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-4960-9 (epdf ) isbn isbn

Legal deposit first quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication The making of modern poetry in Canada: essential commentary on Canadian poetry in English / edited by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski. – Third edition. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4958-6 (hardcover). – isbn 978-0-7735-4959-3 (softcover).– isbn 978-0-7735-4960-9 (epdf ) 1. Canadian poetry (English) – 20th century – History and criticism.  I. Gnarowski, Michael, 1934–, editor  II. Dudek, Louis, 1918–2001, editor ps 8155.1.M35

2017

c 811'.509

c 2017-900225-2 c 2017-900226-0

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10 /13 Times.

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To the memory of John Sutherland (1919–1956) and Louis Dudek (1918–2001)

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Contents

michael gnarowski :

Editor’s Note  xi Foreword to the Third Edition  xiii michael gnarowski : Introduction: Being a Personal essai in the Unwritten History of Modern Canadian Poetry  xv Illustrations xxxiii collett tracey :

Preface xliii Preface to the Second Edition  xliv i   the beginnings of the modern school

The Precursors (1910–1925) Introduction 3 arthur stringer :

Preface to Open Water 5 Rhymes With and Without Reason  9 call : Preface to Acanthus and Wild Grape 21

john murray gibbon : frank oliver

The Initiators (1925–1936) Introduction 24 a . j . m . smith : Contemporary Poetry  27 a . j . m . smith : Wanted: Canadian Criticism  31 leo kennedy : The Future of Canadian Literature  34 f . r . scott : Preface to New Provinces 38 a . j . m . smith : A Rejected Preface  38 ii   the new poetry : a manifesto

Introduction 45 john sutherland :

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Introduction to Other Canadians 47

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viii iii   the early forties

The New Literary Scene Introduction 65 john sutherland : robert

Brief to a Royal Commission  66 weaver : John Sutherland and Northern Review 80

New Critical Currents Introduction 84 northrop frye :

Canada and Its Poetry  86 A Note on Canadian War Poetry  97 neufville shaw : The Maple Leaf is Dying  101 louis dudek : Academic Literature  104 john sutherland : Review of Poems by Robert Finch  107 editorial board of northern review : Notices of Resignation  109 p . k . page : Letter to Northern Review 110 f . r . scott :

iv   signs of reaction , new and old

Introduction 113 john sutherland :

The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry  116 Foreword to Canadian Poetry in English 122 v . b . rhodenizer : Introduction to Canadian Poetry in English 124 lorne pierce :

v   resurgence

Introduction 141 louis dudek : Où sont les jeunes?  142 louis dudek : Preface to Cerberus 144 irving layton : Preface to Cerberus 145 raymond souster : Preface to Cerberus 146 earle birney : Letter of Resignation  147 robert a . currie : Don’t Blame This on Bliss  149

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ix vi   points of view

Introduction 155 earle birney : Introduction to Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry 157 desmond pacey : English-Canadian Poetry, 1944–1954  160 louis dudek : The State of Canadian Poetry: 1954  169 irving layton : Foreword to A Red Carpet for the Sun 175 northrop frye : The Keys to Dreamland  178 northrop frye : Verticals of Adam  188 james reaney : Editorial  197 eli mandel : Preface to Poetry 62 199 vii   the little magazines

Introduction 203 louis dudek : The Role of Little Magazines in Canada  205 michael gnarowski : The Role of “Little Magazines” in the Development of Poetry in English in Montreal  212 frank davey : Anything But Reluctant: Canada’s Little Magazines 222 viii   wider horizons

Poetry Finds a Public Introduction 231 william carlos williams :

A Note on Layton  233 joan finnigan : Canadian Poetry Finds Its Voice in a Golden Age  235 anonymous : The Private World of Raymond Souster  241 anonymous : The Purdy Pigment  243 robert fulford : On Raymond Souster  245 Relations with French Writing in Canada Introduction 247 a . j . m . smith : From the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse 250 jean - charles bonenfant : L’influence de la littérature ­canadienne-anglaise au Canada français  256 f . r . scott : The Poet in Quebec Today  265

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x

Modern Poetry Across Canada Introduction 270 louis dudek : Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry  271 george woodcock : Editorial  286 milton acorn : Open Letter to a Demi-Senior Poet  287 alan bevan : Editorial  289 milton acorn : The Montreal Miracle and K.V. Hertz  292 george bowering : The Most Remarkable Thing About Tish 293 frank davey : Statement 294 frank davey : Rime, A Scholarly Piece  295 raymond souster : Preface to New Wave Canada 300 Acknowledgments  303 appendices

1  A.J.M. Smith’s “The Rejected Preface”  307 2  Other Canadians: An Anthology of the New Poetry in Canada 1940–1946 [1947] 314 3  Wider Horizons: Poetry Finds a Public  318 Index  321

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Editor’s Note

First and foremost I want to acknowledge the generosity of Dr Gregory Dudek, who consented to the reissue of a book of which a good half must be seen as his father’s work. In the same breath I want to thank Philip Cercone, executive director of McGill-Queen’s University Press, who saw the value of this book and patiently encouraged the idea of bringing it out again. And now, in a different vein, one turns to the book. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada was made by Louis Dudek and myself. As time wore on and it went, gratifyingly, through three printings (two in hardcover and one in paperback) and became a rarity in the used book market, discussions arose from time to time with colleagues who used the book as a teaching resource and between ourselves about the possibility of some kind of updating. Various ideas popped up with everything from a straight reprint to some suggestions that the book be expanded or that it even have a sequel that would carry the discussion into the postmodernist period. All of this remained in the realm of sporadic and random conversations with, looking back at them now, a discernible waning of enthusiasm on our part due, in some small measure, to the fact that several proposals had been floated by other potential editors to develop an expanded version of the book. Nothing seems to have come of those plans. Meanwhile, Dudek became less and less happy with how the high modernism in which he had been such an important participant had evolved into what soon acquired its own label: postmodernism. This was a complex literary phenomenon with which Dudek became increasingly disaffected, and our idea to reissue The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada simply stalled. The present effort, therefore, is a taking up of what had sat in the offing for too long. The original text with its sectional mini-­ introductions that Dudek and I had written those years ago still remains, I believe, to the point, and has been left untouched. The documents of their time remain the documents of their time. Others may choose to see them differently or, perhaps, prefer to assemble their own collection(s), and offer them supported by their own theses. We told Desmond Pacey as much when he grumbled about our

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selections, and I still hold firmly to that ­belief. The prime concern was to stay as close as possible to the original format, with special care being taken not to disturb the integrity of the page order and citations. The new material (the Foreword, Introduction, images, Appendices, and Index) are wrapped around the original text rather than introduced into the body of the book with consequent disruptive effects on pagination. It is to be hoped that the right result has been achieved with the present text. (At the same time I want to take this opportunity to thank Mark Abley and Ryan Van Huijstee of McGill-Queen’s University Press for their advice and their skilful editing, while Mandy Moodie put her considerable IT talent into helping me make word and image behave in this computer age.) As far as the present edition is concerned, I have written my own very personal and familiar version of how The Making was made. This exercise also gave me the opportunity to bring in some “asides,” many of which were a bonus element of the privilege I enjoyed in knowing some extraordinary individuals. I have acknowledged in other places the importance in my life of teachers who became friends and of writer friends who taught me a great deal. Some of these – namely Dudek, F.R. (Frank) Scott, A.J.M. (Arthur) Smith – figure prominently in the narrative that is this book. To others such as Glen Siebrasse, Milton Acorn, John (Buffy) Glassco, and Ron Everson – migliori fabbri, all – I owe an immense debt incurred in many conversations about their poetry and their writing lives. I learned that relationships and the personal touch are invaluable in the making of poetry, and that literature is not just an elegant intellectual exercise but is the stuff of human activity and interaction. I hope that this will be of use and of some interest. All of this effort and endeavour brings me to one paramount recognition. In my case, none of it would have been possible if I had not had the supreme good fortune of Diana, a life partner sans pareil, who has always stood by me.

Michael Gnarowski

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Foreword Collett Tracey

I first came across The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada in the early 1990s, when I was doing my MA in English literature at Carleton University. I had signed up for a course on twentieth-century poetry and publishing in Canada, which was taught by the co-editor of the book, Michael Gnarowski. As my interest in Canadian modernism quickened, leading me to start collecting books of poems and do more research, I became aware of how few academic resources on the subject were available, and that the majority were out of print. It was at that time that the true value of The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada became clear to me. Rather than suggest a critical, scholarly framework, or provide a comprehensive history of modernism, the book offers a fresh and unique approach, which is suggested in its original subtitle: “Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English.” It makes available important documents which, in their original form, were published and distributed in very small runs of eclectic publications. That Dudek and Gnarowski were aware of them is largely because of their personal interactions with writers they were actively promoting through the little magazines and presses they themselves ran. They are the first to identify the little press as a particular and important form of publishing in Canada. Furthermore, the collection of articles they chose to gather, and the strategic way in which they ordered them, is critically important in that it gives face to the rise of modernism in Canada. Created in the 1960s, in a time when Canadian literature was not yet recognized as a legitimate field of study for its own sake, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada advanced a thesis: that poetry needed to recognize its identity – its Canadianness. Through its articles, essays, and letters, I could hear the passion and conviction of the authors – people who were real and alive and committed to making a difference in the movement and direction of literature in Canada. This, in turn, offered me entry into a field of study that was brimming with possibilities for primary research and for new and original approaches. I was swept up by what the book stands for: that literature

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is neither something purely academic nor static; that it is a living, breathing entity; that it is an extension of the human spirit at its most generous and creative best. It was this exciting discovery that made me want to pursue doctoral work, and The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada was at its centre. It was through the book, then, that I came to know and spend time with some of the people who had been involved, at various stages, in crafting the language of modernism for Canadian poetry: Louis Dudek, Aileen Collins, Irving Layton, Glen Siebrasse, Raymond Souster, among others. These were writers who were determined to actively define a trajectory in which Canadian poetry could move. Their vision for developing a purely Canadian literary scene was revolutionary; their commitment to publishing and promoting new and experimental works provides us with evidence of the need to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals who share a common cause, and to be daring and bold. Just as The Making of Modern Poetry was a doorway for me, it has inspired and informed the work of many of my students – both in the classroom, and as part of a little magazine and press I began in 2001. In / Words flourishes under an arrangement of revolving and evolving editorial boards that are committed to finding young and interesting writers, and publishing their work. Many began their love affair with poetry when they first read The Making of Modern Poetry; many have gone on to either launch their own publishing ventures, or to write MA and PhD theses that are traceable back to the lessons learned from this book. The power and impact of the book has remained a constant reminder for me of the need to make it available and accessible. Sadly, Louis Dudek died in 2001, and as I was writing a tribute about him for a volume entitled Eternal Conversations (dc Books, 2003), which was published in his memory, I had occasion to talk to Michael Gnarowski about the need to honour the work he and Dudek had undertaken. We spoke of the project as unfinished. He believed (as did I), that Dudek would have liked to see it reissued – something he had discussed with both of us on different occasions. We also both believed it is an essential resource for anyone interested in Canadian modernism. We rekindled the idea and fortunately were offered support and encouragement by Philip Cercone of McGill-Queen’s University Press. The rest is in the reading of The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada.

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introduction

Being a Personal essai in the Unwritten History of Modern Canadian Poetry The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967) began its life as an idea for a classroom manual for a course in modern Canadian poetry being planned in a two-person English Department at Lakehead College of Arts, Science and Technology (now Lakehead University) in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) and, I might say, in the shadow of the Sleeping Giant. The college library had very modest holdings in the humanities, but its librarian, Dr Roman Grodzicky, encouraged the faculty to make recommendations for the acquisition of books that would support an expanding curriculum. In response to this encouragement, booksellers’ catalogues were studied and purchases recommended with occasional forays into the acquisition of manuscript materials that brought to the collection some of the papers of Raymond Souster, Al Purdy, and other contemporary Canadian and American modernists.1 The initial contents of the class manual were modestly conceived, and the original typescript I found in a fading blue binder contains seven articles and / or essays on Canadian modernism.2 It bears the date 1964 in a faded hand. But 1964 was meant to have more than passing or casual significance in the intellectually pressurized context of the mid-1960s. Not only was Canada’s centennial year just around the corner, but there were general “upheavals” in the offing as the high modernism of the first half of the twentieth century began to give ground to the newly arriving literary ethos of postmodernism.3 What was of greater significance in the early crafting of this book in 1964 was a gathering that May, under the auspices of the Canada Council and hosted by John Glassco and Frank Scott, of writers at the former viceregal lodge called Stanley House on the Baie des Chaleurs in New Brunswick. I drove there from Montreal in my car with Louis Dudek, Glen Siebrasse, and Al Purdy with a running conversation about Canadian poetry and the literary scene, and with occasional pauses to remember, sadly, that E.J. Pratt had died recently on 26 April.4 Siebrasse (1934–2009), who was a friend from our university days at McGill and had helped found Yes: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose

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(1956–70), went on to be a workhorse on the board of the small press Delta Canada, and authored three strong collections of poetry before withdrawing into a philosophical silence and the writing of experimental short stories. He rode as far as Quebec City in bemused silence in the back seat beside the ever-garrulous and happily tipsy Purdy. By this point in my life, Dudek had become a good friend in a relationship that went back to my university days at McGill. In my freshman year at the university I was assigned to an English composition class taught by Louis Dudek, which was part of the mandatory introductory course in English literature and a required credit for all students in Arts. Dudek was newly returned from New York where, in 1944 when he first arrived at Columbia, he must have all but bumped into the early coalescing of the Beats (Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the extramural William S. Burroughs), although it is not likely that a habitually abstemious Dudek would have been attracted to the wild ways of the Beats. Of the American scene, he was inclined to lean towards Cid Corman and Charles Olson and their new poetics, even though he found them not entirely sympathetic. When Dudek arrived at McGill, ostensibly hired to replace the recently absconded Patrick Anderson, he had all but completed his doctoral studies at Columbia University. I was greatly taken with his personality and his teaching method. Having been schooled in the rather doctrinaire setting of St Francis Xavier College in Shanghai, a Roman Catholic boarding school originally founded by the Jesuits in the nineteenth-century but latterly run by Marist Brothers, I found Dudek’s genial openness to the ideas of mere undergraduate students a genuinely intellectually thrilling experience. What struck me in particular was that he ranged far beyond the ­requirements of essay writing and composition in the classroom by talking about literature as universally enlightening with “asides” into Canadian and European literature. Here the influence of Emery Neff, the distinguished Columbia University professor of comparative literature, and of Professors Lionel Trilling, J.B. Brebner, and Jacques Barzun of the same university became evident, and provided an important component of Dudek’s third-year course, which I was to take and, as I recall it, was called “Great Writings of Europe.” It is in that course that Dudek showed us the work of Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, Leopardi, Carlyle, Flaubert, and many other European greats. This was obviously a fortunate carry-over from Dudek having encountered

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Trilling and Barzun and their pioneer work in cultural history of which Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: Five Hundred Years of Western Cultural Life (Harper, 2000) is such a magisterial summing up. I was so totally captivated by this approach that I followed him into my sophomore year, taking a course in Canadian literature that was divided between him and Hugh MacLennan, another great teacher and another stroke of good fortune for me. Thirdand fourth-year courses with Dudek and MacLennan took me farther afield into the significant writers of European and English literature, with, what was to be expected, a plunge into modernism. In the 1950s Dudek was deeply into avant-garde publishing and its methodologies. He joined with Souster and Layton in their venture Contact magazine (1952–54) and Contact Press (1952–66), and he found time to encourage Glen Siebrasse, John Lachs, and myself to launch our little magazine Yes in 1956. He would bring out his own little magazine, Delta, the following year. After that our friendship grew apace until it became a relationship of close and meaningful significance for me, a greater sense of which is expressed in my essay in the posthumous tribute to Dudek, Eternal Conversations (2003). At Stanley House I had occasion to chat with Scott and Smith about their groundbreaking anthology New Provinces (1936), and the effort that it took to bring it out with the Macmillan Company of Canada, which insisted that no matter how modernist or avant-garde the anthology was going to be, E.J. Pratt had to be included.5 On the way back to Montreal (we had lost Purdy who, because of an earlier prise de bec with Dudek, had elected to travel with someone else) we had ample opportunity to discuss a possible collection, a sort of documentary, on modern Canadian poetry – seen as a gleaning of essential articles on Canadian poetry. Clearly the idea was beginning to grow beyond the modest selection I had intended for my class at Lakehead College. What was also convenient was that I had returned to Montreal for the summer to do research at the McGill Library and in private holdings on Canadian little magazines. This was being supported by a grant from the Atkinson Foundation of Toronto, and resulted in indexes to the contents of several little magazines.6 It also meant an ­informative sweep through key little magazines that had nurtured modernism in their pages. It was decided on that trip back to Montreal that we would embark on a much more ambitious project than the very modest originally

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conceived class manual. Both Dudek and I spent the summer browsing through various sources (mostly little magazines) in search of truly significant items that could be offered in a collection of seminal documents on the making of Canadian poetry in what was essentially the first half of the twentieth century. We recognized very quickly that there would be competing elements and competing points of view on what were or had been new directions that had opened up since poetry had begun to move away from traditional influences of late Victorianism. We took our cues from Ezra Pound, enjoining Dudek to “make it new” and John Sutherland pressing for Canadian writing to declare itself free of colonial overtones by acknowledging its essential North American roots and determinants, although we were powerfully aware that the cultural linkages were mainly transAtlantic, and that English poetry was a dominant factor in the AngloCanadian sensibility. I left Montreal at the end of the summer to go back to the Lakehead only to return in December of 1964 to visit family but also to have what proved to be an important dinner at The Troika, a Russian restaurant on Crescent Street, with Louis Dudek, Glen Siebrasse, Ron Everson, and the painter and graphic artist Colin Haworth. There and then we founded a new little press to be called Delta Canada with its first books to be published in the spring of 1965. In March of that year I was writing Dudek with an attached list of articles that I was proposing for inclusion in our “Essential Articles” project and briefing him on progress – such as it was – in my efforts to secure a publisher for the book. I had approached McGill University Press (it had not yet become McGill-Queen’s) where the proposal was, at first, cordially received but where, at the same time, there quickly ­developed a hesitancy that would eventually see the press withdraw from the project. Fortuitously, I was heading back to eastern Canada to take up a C.D. Howe Fellowship and a research position with the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–69), which placed me in Ottawa with frequent and easy access to both Frank Scott and to Dudek in Montreal. I began to cast about seriously for an established commercial publisher to take on our book, although in my letter to Dudek I suggested (rather bravely) that we could always bring it out under our new Delta Canada imprint. That would prove to be unnecessary since Ryerson Press moved into the breach, and we had the reassurance that matters would turn out well.

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But Ryerson taking on the project also brought into play the need of a subsidy in support of publication, and the obvious agency to turn to was the Canada Council even though a book of readings such as we were putting together was not something that the Council normally supported. The obvious thing to do was to present the case in person rather than by means of a written application. I contacted the Council and was given an appointment with an individual described as a senior official. The man in question was someone (totally unknown to me) called Peter Dwyer.7 He proved to be an amiable presence who listened carefully to my description of our “Essential Articles on Modern Canadian Poetry” idea, and after pointing out that it was not the kind of project that fell within the purview of the Council, said that he was still strongly inclined in its favour. Little did I know that my appeal could not have been made to a friendlier sort in the bureaucracy than Peter Dwyer, who was keenly interested in the arts, the theatre, and had himself written poetry. I was happy enough with my interview and felt that now, with the door to the Council slightly ajar, the rest, meaning application forms and financial numbers, would be in the hands of the staff at Ryerson Press. In the spring of 1966 I completed my stint with the culture section of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, where I had been working mainly with Frank Scott and Jean Éthier-Blais.8 At the same time, I was offered a position in the English Department of Sir George Williams University that, in spite of my sadness at having to leave Lakehead, I accepted happily. Sir George was in full bloom. It had just built a splendid new building in the heart of downtown Montreal, and its programs in the fine arts and in literature were vibrant and full of new departures. The university had appointed young and upcoming artists such as Guido Molinari, Yves Gaucher, and Roy Kiyooka, a cohort of the true avant-garde in abstract painting, while the English Department, under the enlightened leadership of Neil Compton, who had been severely handicapped by polio, had the poets George Bowering and Irving Layton, and novelist and script writer Abraham Ram, among its members with other less distinguished creative luminaries orbiting the department. The department, very significantly, was also running an outstanding program of poetry readings that featured some of the most important poets – Canadian and American – of the time. It was, to use the parlance of those days, a hip place,9 with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, John Wieners, Anthony Hecht,

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Margaret Avison, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Victor Coleman, Phyllis Webb, and many others showing up to read usually to an overflowing auditorium of attentive people who had paid fifty cents to get in. For myself the important fact was that my family and I were back in Montreal, and Dudek and I would be in close contact again, and could get to work in putting our project together for submission to Ryerson Press where the project had been well-received and was being god-­ fathered by Earle Toppings and Frank Flemington. On 2 June 1966 we received a letter from Ryerson telling us that the Canada Council had approved a grant10 for the book and, at the same time, raised the question about the title we wanted for it. After some to-ing and fro-ing we settled on The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, a title under which the book would go forward into two hardcover editions and a paperback printing of four thousand copies, and now this third edition with its slightly revised subtitle. Now with Ryerson’s contract in hand and publication of our book assured, we worked out a routine of weekly meetings to consider material for possible inclusion in our collection. With a final list determined, Dudek and I spent the early summer of 1966 under the trees in the back garden of my house in Pierrefonds writing the mini-­introductions that were intended to provide entry into sections of the book. As we went over the various items we had selected for inclusion it became clear to us that what we were putting together was going to transcend the original intention that had prompted me to assemble a readily accessible anthology of the major articles that had helped to define the impulse of modernism in Canadian poetry. What Dudek and I were putting together had the character of a more elaborate documentary history with a certain thesis working as a subtext in it. We had, knowingly, taken our cues from John Sutherland’s idea that poetry in Canada, in order to discover its true identity, would have to understand and embrace its cultural, political, and geographical wellsprings. We also knew that different kinds of poetry had sprung up in the twentieth century, and that the kind of poetry being written by John Masefield in England and raconteur poets in the United States, might have a legitimate counterpart in Canada, and would have to be reckoned with in our own attempts to discover what was the character of true modernism in Canadian poetry. The major issue, of course, was to acknowledge Canadian poetry’s tendency towards latent Victorianism and elements of Georgian poetics

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that had been so firmly rejected by the leading pioneer modernists, Frank Scott and Arthur Smith.11 We realized that while we could afford to be dismissive of those who sentimentalized about the searing effects of the red maple leaf in the fall on sensitive souls, we also had to come to terms with the natural realism of Canada, typified by the stark visual renderings of the Group of Seven, images that had brought a very different kind of awareness of the Canadian landscape. At the same time, we continued to follow a chart of understanding of how the modernist line had worked its way from Smith and Scott’s New Provinces (1936) to the little magazines beginning with Preview (1942–45), First Statement (1942–45), the ideationally wobbly Northern Review (1945–56), to Ray Souster’s Contact (1952–54) as well as his Combustion (1960), while also bearing in mind the CAA’s Canadian Poetry Magazine (guided by E.J. Pratt), and Alan Crawley’s Contemporary Verse12 both had subscribers, associates, and followers. Sorting our way through their pages, some of them genuinely and sympathetically left leaning, became a ruthless exercise in exclusion, while the mythopoeia of Northrop Frye crowded us on the ideological literary right. What became clear to us was that while we had to recognize competing approaches to the making of a contemporary statement in Canadian poetry, we had to advance a thesis (for which we would be attacked later) that favoured the real, the urban, and the succinct, and reflected the new social reality of Canadian life. No longer was Canadian poetry the exclusive domain of the Scotts, the Kennedys, or the Smiths, but equally, it had made room for the Kleins, the Laytons (Lazarovitchs), and the Dudeks. What would be more interesting, however, is that not only were there newly emerged elements of ethnicity, but that social backgrounds and generational elements would also play a role in the tone of the newer poetry. Literature was no longer the preserve of the privileged few, but was also open to those who had come out of lower middle- or working-class neighbourhoods and milieux. The language of their poetry would echo these backgrounds, and their concerns and political tendencies would be more left-wing than, say, the Fabian socialism of Frank Scott, powerful as that was and seriously engagé in social progress and reform as he would be all his life.13 What we wanted to illustrate with our selections was that poetry in Canada was not the product of some kind of literary purity, but that it had taken unto itself the cleansing and sharpening of language, intellectual

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probity, and an awareness of the real world with all its beauty but also with all its warts. Which is not to say that Scott and Smith were somehow unaware of the socio-economic troubles and the political turbulence of the 1930s. How could they have missed the booming echoes of the Spanish Civil War following the emergence of Hitler, which were the central events of that decade, and how could they not have been aware of the criminal profiteering that had brought Wall Street and the world’s economy almost to its knees? Politics, like potassium permanganate, would spread its purple tint through the waters of pure poetry. The answer is that they did not miss a thing, and Scott’s activism in the founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (now the New Democratic Party), the writing of the Regina Manifesto (1933), the bearding of various lions – political, academic, and capitalist – in their dens, was simply second nature for him, while Smith too was no laggard in baring his critical and political fangs at literary and societal conservatism. The parting of the ways with the next generation in Canadian poetry – in the broadest sense the Sutherland et al. crew – would come about because of ethnicity, family histories, and social position that would form the immutable laws of différence. This profoundly lodged sense of difference found expression in various ways. First there was some ongoing skirmishing with Arthur Smith and the choices he made as he tried to introduce the newer poets progressively in the three extremely influential editions of his anthology The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943; 1948; 1957). The riposte to Smith’s point of view came in John Sutherland’s anthology Other Canadians (1947) and its manifesto-like introduction. Then came Canadian Poems 1850–1952 (1952), which had two printings and gave expression to the ideas of Louis Dudek (newly arrived in the English Department of McGill University) and of Irving Layton, who was lecturing at Sir George Williams University. Canadian Poems 1850–1952 was meant to give a new slant on Canadian poetry, opening as it did with a militant working-class poem by Alexander McLachlan (1818– 1896), “We Live in a Rickety House.” The anthology was adopted for use by the English Department at McGill but then dropped because, as Layton believed it, the “authorities” at the university had been startled by the rough and racy language (someone had counted some thirty plus rude and crude words) in some of the poems. The significant point, however, was how the editors viewed poetry and its place in the modern world. In effect, “that poetry is the fullest

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and most adequate expression of our thinking and living.” The unshaking finger was also pointed at the failure of teachers and university professors to see poetry in its socially connected organic reality rather than as an intellectual exercise to be parsed and picked apart for its literary bons mots and its clever and elegant bits and pieces. It can be said, of course, that all this was a continuation (a word much favoured by Dudek for his later poetry) of the tussle between two rival groups on the Montreal scene in the 1940s. Preview, with the hesitancy that this word implied, was not the assertive and self-affirming First Statement that moved out of its origins as a ragged, mimeographed, hand-stapled sheaf into a printed little magazine and, finally, First Statement Press. There was all the difference between the ­middle-class genteel on the one hand and the bare-knuckled proletarianism of the other, and Arthur Smith added fuel to this debate through his more-than-slightlydisparaging comparison of a native tradition with, from his point of view, a much more desirable and enlightened cosmopolitan poetics. There was much discussion about how to present a period in literature – essentially the first half of the twentieth century – without burdening it with heavy-handed theorizing. The notes, papers, and scribblings that have survived do not show a particular concern with the politics or the history of the times, and yet the context was unavoidably something that had to be borne in mind. The simple truths that lurked in the background were readily discernible. Canadian ­poetry had taken at least two important steps in crystalizing its twentieth-century qualities. In the first instance it had moved away from an overriding dependence on the imagery supplied by a very large natural landscape. This was hard enough to do, but the second stepping away had to be a more subtle thing and one that would continue to preoccupy critics and historians on an ongoing basis. This second step was clearly linked to John Sutherland’s idea that Canadian poetry had to become Canadian by first unshackling itself from colonial attachments and, secondly, discovering its “north americaness.”14 It has to be understood that the Dudeks and the Laytons and the Kleins were writing from the perspective of Bercy, De Bullion, and St Urbain streets (essentially east-end neighbourhoods of Montreal) with their strong geography of churches, three-storey tenements with curving wrought-iron external staircases, and convenience and grocery stores that also sold beer by the quart (a feature extolled by Al Purdy) in what was a French Canadian working-class ambience. For young

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people raised on those streets, getting accepted by McGill University was a desired but uncertain prospect. On the other side of town were the Scotts and the Smiths, clustering around Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, and with Notre Dame de Grâce and lower levels of Westmount as their middle-class anglophone turf, with McGill as a God-given right, with careers (not just jobs) in the offing, and Oxford and Edinburgh as their intellectual finishing schools. In effect there were truck drivers and petty shopkeepers and fresh-off-the-boat ­immigrants on the one hand and accountants, lawyers and archdeacons on the other. To put it more pointedly, it was literary aestheticism versus a kind of mordant realism. Even the titles of the earliest books of poetry should be seen as indicators. For Scott it’s Overture (1945), for Smith it’s News of the Phoenix (1943), for Kennedy it’s The Shrouding (1933), while for Dudek it’s East of the City (1946), and for Layton it’s Here and Now (1945) with an iconography of trees growing in the middle of concrete sidewalks and the killing of bull calves. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada was released by Ryerson Press in the later part of 1967, and was received into Montreal’s literary community on 21 December. There was a poetry reading at Sir George Williams University after which people gathered in Frank and Marian Scott’s house on Clarke Avenue in Westmount for an informal party. Scott had placed a copy of the book on his mantelpiece, and when the literati had dispersed themselves around the room and Scott had concocted a pitcher of his legendary martini he pointed to the book and said, “What are we going to do about this?” It was a friendly and rhetorical gesture that likely hinted at the fact that Dudek and I, in advancing our thesis, had unseated Scott and Smith as the first and foremost modernists in Canadian poetry. Scott proved to be a good sport about it, but Arthur Smith cooled somewhat in his friendliness, and promptly wrote a letter to Dudek pointing out his own modernist bona fides that occasioned minor revisions in the second edition of the book. Otherwise the book was favourably received by most reviewers. Desmond Pacey, then a kind of grand panjandrum of Canadian literary studies by virtue of his two books on writers and writing in Canada grumbled mildly, while Earle Birney wrote a pained letter to Dudek complaining that we had not acknowledged his contribution properly, while Eli Mandel would sound a true note of appreciation and

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understanding somewhat later in 1971. We tried to make amends with Birney by taking him out to a nice lunch at a French bistro on Crescent Street and suggesting gently that while “David,” among other poems, was a powerful piece of poetry it was, after all, a narrative poem and not, in our opinion, a groundbreaking example of modernism – that elusive notion the making of which we had tried to corral for our book. I was never sure afterwards if his friendship had not cooled somewhat as a result.15 What becomes important at this point of historical review is to note that our exploring of modernist texts and tendencies had carried us to the beginning of the 1960s, that “Age of Aquarius” to mention a near anthem of the times, which saw many aspects of life and society on the brink of dramatic new happenings and new approaches. What was not immediately apparent to us were the radical limits to which experiment in contemporary poetry was going to take us. Raymond Souster’s antennae were better attuned to changes that were in the offing, and his anthology New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (1966) was correctly seen by him as an explosion. That anthology was absolutely pivotal in introducing a new generation of writers whose artistic versatility would go far beyond the printed word on the page and the occasional accompaniment at a poetry reading by a jazz combo.16 What Souster helped to usher in was a major shift in poetry as an all-embracing Art. It was not only largely generational (most of the writers were born in the 1940s) but it would also bring about a strong dose of the counterculture: of the widening of cultural and racial ­horizons; feminism and sexual liberation; music (sound poems), found poems, and graffiti on the page; concrete poetry; poetry as a performance art and, frequently, experiment à l’outrance. The names of bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, bill bissett, Daphne Buckle, Gerry Gilbert, Margaret Atwood, and Victor Coleman, among others, would become part of the literary conversation with their work / works, sometimes outrageously labelled: blew ointment press and blew ointment magazine, Ganglia Press, grONK, and others.17 Thus blew the winds of change – as Ezra Pound had said, “Make it New.”

Michael Gnarowski November 2016

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xxvi notes

1 This was an ambitious initiative for a college library, but it was intended to point to the eventual growth of the institution into a fully fledged university with graduate studies and serious research into Canadian writing. Unfortunately not all the newly minted or “start-up” universities were as imaginatively acquisitive in building their collections. 2 These were A.J.M. Smith’s “Wanted: Canadian Criticism,” the launching editorial in The Canadian Mercury, Louis Dudek’s “Academic Literature” and “The State of Canadian Poetry,” Robert Currie’s “Don’t Blame this on Bliss,” John Sutherland’s introduction in the volume Other Canadians, and Northrop Frye’s “Canada and Its Poetry,” for a grand total of some sixty-nine pages of double-spaced typing. The final published version would be three-hundredplus pages. 3 A great deal of exciting development had begun to take hold of the times. Not only were the great moderns such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound receding into history, but new voices like Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson were laying a strong claim to attention. And events and practices in literature and writing – poetry readings in coffee houses, avant-garde bookshops like City Lights in San Francisco, and venues like the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, and little magazines and little press publishing – all sprang into life with various degrees of intensity and variety. Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) ran a strong contemporary poetry readings series, while a night club above Dunn’s Delicatessen on St Catherine Street tried to alternate poetry readings with the music of a jazz combo and dark-skinned scantily-clad young women who danced in what was euphemistically (but no less poetically) described as a Sepia Review. Dudek read his poems at this venue before yielding this territory to a hip Leonard Cohen. This was a spill-over of the effects of the Beat Movement which had so eloquently sent out its message in Jack Kerouac’s near classic On the Road (1957), and which had so convincingly advocated a union between jazz and the spoken poem. 4 These pauses of sadness resulted in our decision to compose a lament for the passing of the grand old poet. Louis had his guitar and before you knew it the words of a dirge had taken shape. We rehearsed them to an ancient tune and performed our composition upon arrival at Stanley House to the openmouthed amazement of our colleagues. Scraps of the dirge survive on the back of a battered road map, pencilled in Al Purdy’s sprawling hand, as I drove and Louis strummed his guitar. The title of the dirge was “The Bull Winds of Newfoundland,” the tune was based on the Scottish ballad “The

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xxvii Bonnie Earl o’Moray,” and the words, barely decipherable now, go something like this: The grey hills of Newfoundland the ghost of who goes walking through this town the tides come in and out again the grey rocks moan from lips a-broken.

5

6

7

Lone lie the fishing boats with nets along their side and ragged gulls are mewing and moaning with the tide. P.S. An audio recording of the three individuals performing the dirge at Stanley House may have survived. Pratt, of course, was the anomaly in that group of five younger poets whose work Scott was planning to include in what he and Smith hoped would be a showcase of the new modernist style in poetry. Pratt, born in 1882 was almost a generation older than the other poets in the group. His penchant for the longer narrative poem was the very antithesis to the shorter and sometimes near imagist lyric of the new poetry. Moreover, Pratt was a very senior presence in the Canadian Authors’ Association (which Scott had lampooned savagely in his poem “The Canadian Authors Meet”) and was to become the editor of the caa ’s organ, Canadian Poetry Magazine, due to start publication in 1936, the same year in which New Provinces would appear. In another – and non-generational – sense, it could be argued that A.M. Klein and Leo Kennedy were also the odd men out in a group readily identified with educational standing and social position. Klein had come out of the Jewish ghetto of Montreal, and Kennedy, with a Grade Six education and lower-class origins, would have been redeemed by his spiritual links to T.S. Eliot. A couple of these indexes were later published in the Quebec City magazine Culture, which also published my paper on the role of little magazines in the development of modernism in Canadian poetry. Ordinarily, a reference such as this to an individual like Peter Dwyer (1914– 1972) in a literary context would not come up. But Dwyer, by virtue of his career, should have been a culturally and politically fascinating and mysterious later presence behind his desk as an Arts boffin in Ottawa. Dwyer had served in a senior intelligence role with the British Embassy in Washington where he did liaison work with the fbi and had been instrumental in unmasking Klaus Fuchs, the atomic scientist who had fed sensitive information on the development of the atomic bomb to agents of the Soviet nkvd . Dwyer had

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  8

  9

10

11

been, ironically, somewhat of a friend of Kim Philby, the British intelligence operative who had been planted in the heart of British security by the Soviet secret service. Dwyer moved to Canada presumably in 1950, and had worked in the Privy Council Office as a top-level security advisor. This was on the heels of the defection of Igor Gouzenko (1919–1982), which had taken place in September 1945 but was continuing to have ripple effects in Canada’s civil service. Trials took place over several years, notably the trial of Fred Rose, the only member of Parliament to have sat in Canada’s House of Commons as a member of the Labour Progressive (Communist) Party. By way of an aside, one suspects that Patrick Anderson’s sudden departure (some called it flight) from Canada in 1950 had more to do with this spy scare and its attendant trials than with his involvement with his homosexual partner, Orlando Gearing. Patricia Whitney provides much useful information in her essay, “From Oxford to Montreal: Patrick Anderson’s Political Development,” Canadian Poetry 19 (1986). Jean-Guy Éthier-Blais (1925–1995) was a francophone from Ontario who rose to prominence in Quebec’s cultural and literary circles. He was mentored by François Hertel (1905–1985), a Jesuit priest, teacher, and author who had been influenced by the manifesto Refus global that had challenged fundamental Quebec values. Hertel’s influence had a profound effect on ÉthierBlais, whose career included stints in the diplomatic service, a professorship at McGill University, and success as a literary critic and reviewer for the French-language newspaper Le Devoir. He left a body of work that includes essays, memoirs, and reflections. His contribution to the work of the Royal Commission was significant. We prepared memoranda and briefing notes mainly for the use of the cultural sub-committee of the Commission, and some of this input found its way into the Commission’s final report. The reputation of Sir George as a truly “people” university and its location in the heart of one of the liveliest districts of Montreal, with its bistros, bars, and galleries on Sherbrooke, Bishop, and Crescent streets, made for an exciting environment. You could have a large glass of red and a croque monsieur for lunch at Le Moustache for three dollars, and then walk back past Claude Tousignant’s latest “bull’s eye” abstraction on display at the gallery on Sherbrooke Street. The Canada Council placed a set of unusual conditions on its grant. The Council wanted the book’s price not to exceed three dollars, and it wanted any monies gained after the recovery of costs to revert to it. A.J.M. Smith (1902–1980) had the lead role in the charge against fraying remnants of Victorian sentiment in modern Canadian verse. He had attacked

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xxix it in his notoriously combative “Rejected Preface” to New Provinces (a true version of the text appears now in the Appendices section of this book), in which he assigned lingering nineteenth-century sentimentalism to life support. In an infinitely more influential series of introductions to his anthologies of Canadian poetry (1943, 1948, 1957) he had advanced modernist practices and included new and upcoming Canadian poets within the volumes. Smith’s informed efforts went back to the late 1920s. Evidence survives on library cards that reveal that between 1928 and 1932 Leon Edel, Art Smith, Frank Scott, Abe Klein, and others of the McGill group of young poets were reading, among other avant-garde little magazines, This Quarter (1925–32), a Paris and other places “literary mag” with a great variety of big names, experimental and otherwise, on its roster. Smith’s credentials as a published and practising modernist were well established, as he proudly pointed out to Frank Scott in February 1936 by reminding him that his poems had appeared in The Dial (1920–29), The Hound and Horn (1927–34), Nation (1865– ), New Verse (1933–39) and Poetry (1912– ). Both Smith and Scott could claim pride of place as pioneering modernists with their activity as guiding spirits as early as the middle 1920s with the McGill Fortnightly Review (1925–27).   There is an interesting sidelight that may be worth mentioning. Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975), distinguished British mathematician, medical scientist, and prolific author – he developed a widely used pregnancy test and wrote, among many others, two bestselling books, Mathematics for the Million (1936) and Science for the Citizen (1938) – was also a would-be ­modernist poet (Exiles of the Snow and Other Poems, 1918) who was at McGill in the mid-1920s. In his book Scientific Humanist: An Unauthorised Autobiography (Merlin Press, 1998), he wrote, “During my short stay in Canada, there was a very lively group of student literati, mostly left-wing and post-graduate. Their publication, the McGill Fortnightly, was then of a higher intellectual standard than any other student magazine which has come my way.” 12 Contemporary Verse (1941–52), based in Caulfield, Vancouver, and Victoria, BC, was distinguished by a group of strong women writers (e.g., Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Anne Marriott) who, while they did not craft a feminist manifesto (which Dudek and I would have liked to have had for our book), nevertheless set a tone that made their little magazine quite different from male-run publications. 13 Scott came close to left-wing radicalism when Patrick Anderson (1915–1979) swam into his orbit and was instrumental in setting the political tone of their little magazine Preview (1942–45). Anderson arrived in Montreal via New York City. Both he and his wife Peggy Doernbach were Marxists and became

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xxx actively engaged in promoting international communism as members or associates of the Labour Progressive Party. In a conversation with me on 11 October 1971, during the drive from Montreal to a poetry reading at Carleton University, I asked Anderson about a little magazine, En Masse. The magazine was backed by the Labour Progressive (Communist) Party, launched in April 1945 to be published during the federal election of June 1945, and given the task of promoting the candidacy of Fred Rose, who was convicted in 1946 of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Anderson at first denied any knowledge of the magazine of which he and his wife had been active editors (!) but then, when pressed, admitted his involvement. He went on to reveal that when he and his wife were first on their way to Montreal in 1940, they paused short of the Canadian border, went through their luggage, and burnt in the ditch anything political (Marxist?) that they thought would be compromising. Later one of Anderson’s more overt “red” acts was to arrange for a tribute to the Red Army of the Soviet Union in Preview 11 (February 1943). 14 There is an interesting, if amusing, sidelight to a seemingly interminable debate about the idea of identity and continentalism that has hung so heavily over all aspects of Canadian life. Arthur L. Phelps (1887–1970), poet, critic, academic, and broadcast personality who lectured and campaigned for distinct Canadian content in media and the arts, and who taught Canadian literature at McGill University between 1947 and 1953, liked to point out in his lectures that Canada too was an “American” entity, and that the United States had misappropriated the term “American” for its own use when the correct designation or word (his coinage) should have been “Usonian.” 15 Birney had always been a very friendly and welcoming individual, receiving Dudek and me warmly at his home in Vancouver. He had wanted me to come to his Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia and create an index for Prism: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing (later Prism International, still publishing since its start in 1959), the literary periodical that the department was hosting and / or sponsoring. He had also stopped on 19 April 1965 at our house in Port Arthur with Ikuko Atsumi, a Japanese poet with whom he was driving in a sports car from Vancouver to Toronto. Then and there he inscribed my copy of Turvey and signed it Earle Birney and (upside down!) J.L. Turvey (Pte.). Ikuko also signed the book and graciously inscribed a copy of her own poems. 16 The length to which poetry as a performance art could go brings to mind an Allen Ginsberg reading at Sir George Williams University. Ginsberg’s entrance on the “stage” was preceded by what can only be described as acolytes in “sort of” saffron robes who first brought in smoking incense sticks

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xxxi and then walked up and down the aisles of the auditorium offering platters of cookies from which bourgeois types in the audience shrank, fearing that they were being seduced with pot-laced goodies. It was a great reading! 17 The wild and experimental little presses and magazines did not only publish young or hardly known writers. Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood graced the pages of blew ointment magazine which had brashly taken its name from a medication, blue ointment cream, usually prescribed for genital body lice. Voilà pour épater les bourgeois!

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Cover page of the first issue of Preview (March 1942). It was mimeographed on 8” × 14” sheets. This copy belonged to Arthur Smith.

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Cover Cover page of First Statement in its original mimeographed 8” × 11” format. Volume 1, Number 8 bears the signature of Irving Layton.

Cover of First Statement in its much improved printed format (6 × 9 inches).

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Cover of Northern Review, July-August 1948. The issue contains a very rare poem by Audrey Aikman, John Sutherland’s wife, and four pages of art by Betty Sutherland, John Sutherland’s sister and the wife of Irving Layton.

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Cover of Preview magazine, October 1942, in its slightly evolved format (8 × 11 inches).

Extremely plain, and now rarely seen, limegreen dust jacket of New Provinces.

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Note scribbled on the Preface page by Arthur Smith on 26 September 1964, in Michael Gnarowski’s copy of New Provinces. The Preface by Frank Scott (frs ), described as “unduly modest” by Smith, had d­ isplaced (to his chagrin) Smith’s own rather feisty introductory m ­ odernist manifesto.

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Simple design (by Frank Scott?) of the title page of New Provinces, modelled on the modernist British anthologies New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933).

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Title page of an early attempt at a modernist anthology. Featuring twenty poets, it included work by Dorothy Livesay, Robert Finch, and Charles Bruce.

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Group shot at Stanley House, Baie des Chaleurs, New Brunswick, May 1964. Back row (left to right): George Whalley, Al Purdy, Doug Jones. Front row: Earle Birney, Michael Gnarowski, John Glassco, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, Fred Cogswell, and Frank Scott. Sitting: Arthur Smith.

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Rare photo of a very young John Sutherland, published with his ­poems in  A New Canadian Anthology (1938).

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Six of the “North Hatley Nine” outside Betty and Ralph Gustafson’s home, a stone’s throw from Lac Massawippi, Quebec, August 19, 1966. This informal gathering would later prove to be the founding meeting of the League of Canadian Poets. Left to right: Lorna Everson, Ron Everson, Ralph Gustafson, Lia Souster, Ray Souster, and Louis Dudek. Not shown: Betty Gustafson, Michael Gnarowski (who took the picture), and Frank Scott (who arrived later).

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APPENDICES

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appendix one

A.J.M. Smith’s “The Rejected Preface”

In reviewing the contents of The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada with the firm intention of preserving the integrity of the original selections and their arrangement, and to adhere to the socio-cultural approach that underpinned this book, it became clear that there had been three events in the unfolding of the modernist period in Canada that warranted contextualizing commentary. These were the publication of A.J.M. Smith’s “Rejected Preface” to New Provinces (1936), John Sutherland’s Introduction to Other Canadians [1947], and the emergence, some would say the eruption, of poetry into the public’s domain with readings in coffee houses and universities, vinyl disc recordings of readings, and much publicity in the media. Several poets emerged onto the public stage at this time with Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Al Purdy enjoying the greatest popularity – and with Layton very much the enfant terrible of stage and auditorium. “The Rejected Preface” below is of special interest because it contains a political flavour (greatly mitigated in Smith’s revision of it in 1965) that takes us back to the 1930s and the engagement by intellectuals and artists of strong left-wing positions. The importance of the effect of the cultural climate prevalent at Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s, which would have carried over to linger in the minds of the likes of Frank Scott, has to be kept in mind. Scott was only one of several Canadians of accomplishment whose political and social outlook would have undergone shaping at that great academic institution. Charles Ritchie, Hugh MacLennan, and Douglas LePan, all winners of the Governor General’s Award for their writing, come readily to mind, and with that the trends to international values and the idea of the cosmopolitan in the arts becomes an attractive option. The conventional wisdom has been that E.J. Pratt and Robert Finch (to some slight extent) had been behind the rejection of Smith’s Preface on the grounds that it would tweak the noses of fellow poets. That may well have been one reason, but one suspects that Smith’s uncompromising position on the death of capitalism and the need for re-ordering society to make it more just, humane, and conscious of the needs of the

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greater majority of people, must have seriously startled a traditionalist like Pratt. In terms of cultural affinities, this was a marvellous echo from a similar process that had taken place two years earlier with the publication in England of New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands (1932) and New Country: Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures (1933). Both anthologies contained strong left-wing views and were edited by a scientist schoolmaster, Michael Roberts, who was also a poet, reviewer, and someone who had been expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain for Trotskyist leanings. New Signatures featured among others, the poems of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Day Lewis. Frank Scott had a copy and he modelled New Provinces on it even up to the cover design and the subtitle, which became for Scott “Poems of Several Authors.” It is worth noting that the criticism levelled at the editors of New Provinces for the absence of women poets can also be made of the two British anthologies. What should also be noted is that Smith and Scott were keenly aware that they had missed Dorothy Livesay and were, consequently, hoping to include her poems in the second instalment of New Provinces they were planning. Interestingly enough New Provinces was bracketed by two anthologies of that particularly troubled decade. The first is Modern Canadian Poetry (1930), edited by Nathaniel Benson, a stalwart of the Canadian Authors Association, who presented the work of twenty contemporary Canadian poets and included six women poets. At the other end of the decade is A New Canadian Anthology (1938), edited by Alan Creighton and Hilda Ridley. It showcased the work of ninety-nine poets of whom seventy-four were women. It is also interesting that the words “new” and “modern” appeared in the titles, suggesting that modernité was not seen as the exclusive preserve of New Provinces. New Provinces (1936) [Text reconstituted from the manuscript. Square brackets are meant to indicate a textual ambiguity in the manuscript.] The bulk of Canadian verse is romantic in conception and conventional in form. Its two great themes are nature and love – nature humanised, endowed with feeling, and made sentimental; love idealised,

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sanctified, and inflated. Its characteristic type is the lyric. Its rhythms are definite, mechanically correct, and obvious; its rhymes are commonplace. The exigencies of rhyme and rhythm are allowed to determine the choice of a word so often that a sensible reader is compelled to conclude that the plain sense of the matter is of only minor importance. It is the arbitrarily chosen verse pattern that counts. One has the uncomfortable feeling in reading such an anthology as The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse or J.W. Garvin’s Canadian Poets that the writers included are not interested in saying anything in particular; they merely wish to show that they are capable of turning out a number of regular stanzas in which statements are made about [the] emotions the writer possibly feels, say “in winter,” “at Montmorenci Falls,” or “in a birch bark canoe.” Other exercises are concerned with pine trees, the open road, God, snow shoes, or Pan. The most popular experience is to be pained, hurt, stabbed or seared by Beauty – preferably by the yellow flame of a crocus in the Spring or the red flame of a maple leaf in the Fall. Now there would be no objection if in these poems the observation were accurate and its expression vivid, or if we could feel that the emotion were a genuine and an intense one. We could then go on to ask if it were a valuable one. But with a negligible number of exceptions in these poems the observation is general and the descriptions are vague. The poet’s emotions are unbounded, and are consequently lacking in the intensity which results from discipline and compression: his thinking is of a transcendental or theosophical sort that must be taken on faith. [The fundamental criticism] against Canadian poetry as a whole is that it ignores the intelligence. And, as a result, is dead. Our grievance, however, against the great dead body of poetry laid out in the mortuary of the Oxford Book or interred under Garvin’s florid epitaphs, is not so much that it is dead, but that its sponsors in Canada pretend that it is alive. Yet it ought to be obvious to any person with even the most elementary taste that this poetry cannot now, and in most cases never could, give the impression of being vitally concerned with real experience. The Canadian poet, if this kind of thing represents his feelings and his thoughts is a half-baked, hyper-­ sensitive, poorly adjusted, and frequently neurotic individual that no one would trust to drive a car or light a furnace. He is the victim of his feelings and fancies or of what he fancies his feelings [are or] ought

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to be, and his emotional aberrations are out of all proportion to the experience that brings them into being. He has a soft heart and a soft soul, and a soft head. No wonder nobody respects him, and [only mugs evince even] the most casual interest in his poetry. A few patriotic professors, one or two hack journalist critics – these have tried to put the idea across that there exists a healthy national Canadian poetry which expresses the vigorous hope of this young Dominion in a characteristically Canadian style, etc., etc. but the idea is so demonstrably false that no one but the interested parties has been taken in. We do not pretend that this volume contains any verse that might not have been [legitimately] written in the United States or in Great Britain. There is certainly nothing specially Canadian about [any but] one or two poems. Why should there be? Poetry today is written for the most part by people whose emotional and intellectual heritage is not a national one: it is either cosmopolitan or provincial, and, for good or evil, the forces of civilisation, are rapidly making the latter scarce. A large number of the verses in the book were written at a time when the contributors to this volume were inclined to dwell too exclusively on the fact that the chief thing wrong with Canadian poetry was its conventional and insensitive technique, [and] consequently we sometimes thought we had produced a good poem when all we had done in reality was not produce a [bad] one. In Canada this is a deed of some merit. In attempting to get rid of the facile word, the stereotyped phrase and the mechanical rhythm, and in seeking, as the poet today must, to combine colloquialism and rhetoric, we were, of course, only following in the path of the more significant poets in England and the United States. And it led, for a time, to the creation of what, for the sake of brevity, I will call “pure poetry”. A theory of pure poetry might be constructed on the assumption that a poem exists as a thing in itself. It is not a copy of anything or an expression of anything, but is an individuality as unique as a flower, an elephant or a man on a flying trapeze. Archibald MacLeish expressed the idea when in Ars Poetica he wrote, “a poem should not mean but be” Such a poetry is objective, impersonal, and in a sense timeless and absolute. [The danger is, of course, that the poem may just as well be a freak or a monster or a shapeless mass as anything else.]

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Not recommended with the disinterested motives that produce “pure poetry” are those which give rise to imagist [verse]. The imagist seeks with perfect objectivity and impersonality to recreate a thing or arrest an experience as precisely and vividly and simply as possible. Mr. Kennedy’s “Shore”, Mr. Scott’s, “trees in ice”, my own “Creek” are examples of the simpler kind of imagist verse; Mr. Finch’s “Teacher”, tiny as it is, of the more complete. In “Shore” and “Creek” the reader may notice that the development of the poem depends upon metrical devices as much as on images, the music is harsh and the rhythm difficult. Most of the verses in this book are not, however, so unconcerned with thought as those mentioned. In such poems as “Epithalamium”, “The Five Kine”, “Out of the Pulver”, “Like an Old Proud King” and [something by Pratt] an attempt has been made to fuse thought and feeling. Such a fusion is characteristic of the kind of poetry usually called metaphysical. Good metaphysical verse is not, it must be understood, concerned with the communication of ideas. It is far removed from didactic poetry. What it is concerned with is the emotional effect of ideas that have entered so deeply into the blood as never to be questioned. Such poetry is primarily lyrical; it should seem spontaneous. [For myself, I can testify that the very pronounced vowel sounds in the opening lines of “Like an Old Proud King” came as a surprise to me on subsequent examination, as I am sure did such a triumph as the line,] “The wall was there, oh perilous blade of glass” to Mr. Finch, or “The Man of April walks again” to Mr. Kennedy. In [these] poems thought is the root, but it flowers in the feeling. They are essentially poems of the sensibility, [sensitive and] a bit melancholy, a little bit too musical. A [more obvious] robustness is found in satirical verse, such as Mr. Scott’s much needed counterblast against the Canadian Authors Association, or in the anti-romanticism of Mr. Klein’s “And my true love, She combs and combs The lice from off My children’s domes.”

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The appearance of satire and also of didactic poetry that does not depend upon wit, would be a healthy sign in Canadian poetry. For it would indicate that our poets are realizing, even if in an elementary way, that poetry is more concerned with expressing exact ideas than wishy-washy “dreams”. It would indicate, too, that the poet’s lofty isolation from events that are of vital significance to everybody was coming to an end. Detachment, indeed, or self-absorption is, for a time only, I hope, becoming impossible. The era of individual liberty is [abrogated]. Capitalism can hardly be expected to survive the cataclysm its most interested adherents are blindly steering towards, and the artist who is concerned with the most intense of experiences must be concerned with the world situation in which, whether he likes it or not he finds himself; and for a time at least he has something more important to do than to record his private emotions [experiences]. He must try to perfect a technique that will combine power with simplicity and sympathy with intelligence so that he may play his part in (creating a popular mentality hostile to war and patriotism) developing mental and emotional attitudes that will facilitate the creation of a more practical social system. (To do this is perhaps to abandon the “pure” function of the artist; but it cannot be helped. The band had better stop playing “Nearer my God to Thee” when there are places at the pumps.) Of poetry such as this, there is here only the faintest foreshadowing, – a fact that is not unconnected with the backwardness politically and economically of Canada – but that a Canadian poetry in the future must become increasingly aware of its duty to take cognizance of what is going on in the world of affairs we are sure. That the poet is not a dreamer, but a man of sense, that poetry is a discipline because it is an art, and that it is further a useful art: these are propositions which it is intended this volume shall suggest. We are not deceiving ourselves that it has proved them.

A.J.M. Smith

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313 note

1 The text of “The Rejected Preface” originally published in this volume was the one that Arthur Smith had published in Canadian Literature 24 (Spring 1965). In September of 1964, Michael Gnarowski had gone to East Lansing, Michigan to visit Arthur Smith who was a well-­established member of faculty at Michigan State University (not the University of Michigan as has been implied) which he had joined in the 1930s when it was still Michigan State College. During a casual conversation in Smith’s study Smith was asked if the “Rejected Preface” had survived, and if it had, would he consider having it appear in Yes: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. Smith produced the preface and said that he would think about it. A year later he sent a revised version to Canadian Literature. The present text, in Arthur Smith’s handwriting, is drawn from Frank Scott’s personal archives and would appear to date from 1935. It was photocopied by Scott and given to Gnarowski with other correspondence in 1973 to assist in the preparation of the new edition of New Provinces which came out in 1976 in the Literature of Canada Series published by the University of Toronto Press.

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appendix two

Other Canadians: An Anthology of the New Poetry in Canada 1940–1946 [1947] The significance and importance of John Sutherland’s anthology lies in the fact that in its totality it was an intended riposte to the 1943 first edition of Arthur Smith’s influential anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry. What Sutherland wanted to do was to push back against Smith’s categorizations of Canadian poems, in particular the classification of native and cosmopolitan traditions in Canadian poetry. Sutherland was very deliberate taking on Smith’s idea of “Tradition” and turning it inside out. The argument that Sutherland was happy to reduce to its simpler values was whether intellectualization (with its suspect academicism), which was the mainstay of the cosmopolitan ideal, was the best way to define modernism. If the new poetry was to take its cues from what is relevant, real, and of the here-and-now it would be a reflection of the many “isms” that were in the air, with politics as the watchword. Smith’s insistence on the cosmopolitan was a reflection of a strong sense of the anti-national that was lodged in his sensibility. He appeared to be on the right track in his remarks at the very end of his anthology’s Section VI and the beginning of Section VII of his Introduction, yet it is the idea of aesthetic detachment that conspired against his total commitment to the unfolding modern idiom, and it is Sutherland who in his counterstatement flirted with a poetry of the people for the people. It should be noted here that the avant garde ideas that crystallized for Smith and, sometime later, for Sutherland had their antecedents in the thinking of Raymond Knister (1899–1932),1 who was insufficiently recognized in the earlier editions of this book. His modernist efforts found their way into the Paris avant-garde magazine This Quarter as early as 1925, and shortly thereafter (most likely in 1927) was in contact with Smith about the possibility of launching a little magazine. There was a clear difference in the two positions that had been building within the circumstances of Canadian poetry. Overshadowing the cultural ethos of those times, and while it may have been more overt and readily perceivable in its international content (mainly British for

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Canada), the tussle was very real between the literary, intellectual, and academic on the one hand, with symbolists, surrealists, and aesthetes brandishing their poems, and on the other hand the realists’ cultural proletarianism of which one cites an example from the pen of ­Raymond Souster. A convert and a First Statement Press author, Souster started in 1947 (?) a publishing initiative with a little magazine or, more accurately, a hand-typed flyer called Enterprise: A Monthly Review. In issue No. 2, dated February 1948, of this now incredibly rare piece of literary ephemera (he seems to have produced a mere twenty-five copies per issue), Souster crafted an announcement cum advertisement for John Sutherland’s recently published anthology. He wrote tellingly, saying Other Canadians “is indispensable for all students of modern Canadian poetry, especially the very influential ‘Montreal School’, which has been derided and praised in the same breath by our leading second-rate critics.” Smith’s great anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry in its three incarnations (1943, 1948, 1957) and its fifteen- to twenty-year dominance of the scene (classroom and otherwise) led its readers strongly in Smith’s favoured direction for the cosmopolitan. Sutherland’s Other Canadians, it can be argued, inspired a series of “positional” anthologies such as Dudek and Layton’s Canadian Poems 1850–1952 (1952, 1953) and, perhaps more importantly, gave rise to Contact Press (1952–66), with the whole eventually supporting the Sutherland Doctrine with Ray Souster’s anthology New Wave Canada (1966). So, who then was this man John Sutherland and wherefrom did he derive his authority? Sutherland was a native of New Brunswick, born in 1919, who briefly attended Queen’s University (1936–37) and then settled in Montreal where he even more briefly attended McGill University, becoming disillusioned with attitudes there. In 1942 he launched a modestly mimeographed poetry publication called First Statement, and for which he had the support of several acquaintances including Audrey Aikman, who became his wife, and Betty Sutherland, his sister and a developing graphic artist. Bravely, Sutherland called his undated publication a magazine and subtitled it “A Magazine for Young Canadian Writers,” but before too long became “A National Literary Magazine.” Northrop Frye did not think much of this publication and, in his review of it in November 1942, complained vaguely about the lack of capital letters and punctuation. But this would be corrected quickly, and Sutherland somehow

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managed to raise enough money to buy a proper letterpress and put his group to work setting type and printing. The publication could now move from a few mimeographed, stapled 8” × 11” sheets with a semblance of a printed cover, to a proper 6” × 9” printed format that, in turn, grew into First Statement Press, which published collections of poetry by the best of the newly emerging young writers such as Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Patrick Anderson, Raymond Souster, Anne Wilkinson, and Kay Smith, as well as Other Canadians. Betty Sutherland designed the covers. Sutherland was one of several women artists who were closely connected with modernist poets and their activities in editing and publishing little magazines and little presses. Their role has not been adequately considered by critics and literary historians of the period, with the result that the effect and influence of Marian Scott, wife of Frank Scott, Margaret Day-Surrey, wife of Philip Surrey the painter, P.K. Page, poet and painter, and Peggy Doernbach, wife of Patrick Anderson – all involved or connected with Preview – remain in the shadows. Similarly the links between the graphic arts and modernist poetry have not been fully explored. See, for example, the highly urbanized and modern images and poems of Lawren Harris, key member of the Group of Seven, in his significantly early publication, Contrasts: A Book of Verse (1922). The ambition here was clearly to address a national audience, and to bring modern Canadian poetry out of the rarefied atmosphere of a cultural elite that appeared to have appropriated it.

note

1 Raymond Knister, perhaps because of his tragic early death, was something of an anomaly in the story of Canadian modernism. Born and raised on a farm in southern Ontario, and lacking significant exposure to the currents of contemporary literary debate as well as the touch of urbanism that tended to define modernité, he was able, nevertheless, to discern correctly the direction in which twentieth-century writing was moving. Still in his early twenties he attached himself to The Midland (1915–33), an American literary magazine of regional concerns but with an instinct for outreach and the experimental, and he then went on to develop a series of ideas aimed at “de-colonializing” the Canadian literary sensibility. His espousal of some of his contemporaries such as Wilson MacDonald and Mazo de la Roche may have worked, in the

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317 eyes of later critics, against his reputation as a true modernist. Dorothy Livesay helped his cause by lending herself as editor of his Collected Poems (1949), but then there was a long pause before interest in Knister revived. A graduate seminar on Knister at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) may have resulted in what was very probably the first thesis on his work, “Tragic Dimensions in Selected Short Stories of Raymond Knister” by Doris Everard, which coincided with the publication of Selected Stories of Raymond Knister (1972), edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski. This was the second volume in a series launched by the English Department of the University of Ottawa that was dedicated to the Canadian short story. It was produced at the atelier of Editions d’Orphée, an avant-garde Quebec publisher owned by André Goulet (1933–2001), a near-legendary master printer. The layout was devised by Goulet which would make the interior appearance of the book different from other titles in the series. The text was set in hot lead and printed on a small Heidelberg letterpress. A second printing came out in 1974. Interest in Knister’s work followed with a “Special Knister Edition” of the Journal of Canadian Fiction 14 (1975) and The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose, selected and introduced by Peter Stevens (1976). An important personal essay by Imogen Givens, Knister’s daughter, coupled with a useful checklist of Knister’s work, compiled by Anne Burke, appeared in Essays on Canadian Writing 16 (1979–80).

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appendix three

Wider Horizons: Poetry Finds a Public

The gradual progress of what the French like to call modernité, especially in the art of poetry, was marked by identifiable moments or events. Hallmark anthologies that made a powerful case for the new poetry, and the breaking out of poetry into public view, so to speak, would be the significant advances of those key first fifty years of the twentieth century in Canada. The 1960s, in all their component parts – social, cultural and political – ushered in what was not too extravagantly described as a new age. A new age the hallmark of which, generally speaking, was a liberalization in all areas of life that expressed itself by reacting against conformity, spectacularly identifying itself with the musical production Hair (1967), and bringing into the open the tribal counterculture of “hippiedom” with its free-for-all ways. The poets grew beards and long hair, acquired guitars, and wore “ban-the-bomb” or similar pendants as necklaces (see Irving Layton on the dust jacket of Lovers and Lesser Men). The culminating collective ecstasy was the near revolutionary event of Woodstock (1969). In literature, the move towards a kind of literary l’apertura a sinistra had begun with a left-wing bias and the throwing over of conservative styles and tired conventions, symbolized by the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) in the United States and, in Canadian poetry, by the publication of Layton’s The Improved Binoculars (1956). The importance and impact of Binoculars can be attributed to the fact that it was published by Jonathan Williams, an American publisher who was identified with the new avant garde that had established itself at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, under the tutelage of Charles Olson. (For an extended discussion see my Afterword, “The Improved Binoculars: History as the Long View; What the Departing Crowds Might Have seen,” Porcupine’s Quill, 1991, 123–33.) Moreover the book had a powerful endorsement in a prefatory note by no less an eminence than William Carlos Williams. This made Canadian literati sit up and take notice. Suddenly there was pugnacity and self-advertisement in the air – and acceptably so!

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This early foray into a new kind of field of open poetry would very soon dovetail neatly into the public’s seeming appetite for, and approval of, the poet as a bohemian free spirit with ground-breaking attitudes and somewhat unusual habits. Jack McClelland, canny publisher that he was, sensed the potential of poetry delivered to a curious and happily accepting public. Well-publicized reading tours would feed neatly into this new climate of art as entertainment, and the likeliest poets to respond to this situation were Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy, and Earle Birney. All were good readers: Layton a presence exuding powerful masculinity at the lectern, self-dramatizing, vituperative, and sexually allusive; Cohen seductively in love with his own lyrical persona; Purdy drawling, appealingly folksy and full of a kind of common sense today-ness; and Birney cleverly working and reworking the magic of his words with all their promise of the beginning of a postmodernist style. All of which was wonderfully in tune with the Age of Aquarius and a neat antithesis to the dry-as-dust academicism of the traditional poetry reading. In general the advent of electronics from simple television to tape recorders, vinyl discs, and film helped to make culture an infinitely more accessible experience. What happened was that “poetry in public” became part of the emergence of folk elements in the arts. Music, especially with the rise of groups such as the Kingston Trio and the Mamas and the Papas with their frequently anti-establishment messages in their poems/songs, validated the idea of poet as bard and singer. The emergence and great influence of someone like Bob Dylan, for example, paved the way for the performance lyrics of Leonard Cohen. The ten years between 1959 when Layton’s Red Carpet for the Sun came out and 1969 when he left Montreal for Toronto was a bonanza decade for McClelland and Stewart, the publisher that had really seized the day of poetry, having found its public. Layton, ever the populist, hoped for the day when his Collected Poems (1965) would be on every taxi driver’s dashboard. But, in spite of the popularity and widespread use of this poetry in the classroom and the university, serious scholarship failed to engage this writing in a meaningful way. The academic foxes knew many things but did they know the big thing, which was the binding relationship between the artist and his/her audience. Other than slim booklets parsing poems, solid and respectable critical assessment with intellectual scope did not materialize. To be sure there were

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ambitious and immensely useful biographical studies of Layton and Birney by Elspeth Cameron and of Frank Scott (he of an earlier generation) by Sandra Djwa, but the hedgehog critics had gone into hiding. If, as we have been led to believe, criticism is the handmaiden of literary endeavour why, one asks, has so little serious socio-critical attention been visited upon a cultural phenomenon like Irving Layton? More importantly, where is the thoughtful discussion of the significance of a cohort of major Jewish writers (Abraham Klein, Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen) who challenged the excluding gentile sensibility in its definition of the literary identity of Canada? These examples may appear to be too Montreal-centred, but the nexus of modernism in Canadian poetry was Montreal, and if we are to recognize our best access to the Third Solitude, it is still through the extravagances of Layton’s Waiting for a Messiah (1985), the outsider’s viewpoint in Howard Roiter’s Here Comes Hymie! (1990), and William Weintraub’s celebration of what was and may still be Canada’s most vibrant city in City Unique (1996). All of this was a later thing, and, of course, the learned foxes, which knew many things, would come out of the magic woods of academe and leave us theories and texts to ponder. But the one big thing that the hedgehog knew was not addressed, and that was what to make of, and how to understand, the literary identity of a many-­ faceted society that had not quite defined i­ tself, and which, it could be said, had found a bit of a battleground in the modernist debate. Perhaps the debate was carried on with Butterfly on Rock (1970) by D.G. Jones, and then worked its way through the relatively safe territory of biographical studies of Leo Kennedy by Patricia Morley and of Milton Acorn by Richard Leman, eventually arriving at the new thinking of Brian Trehearne. Or was that just a glimpse of the brush we caught as the clever fox made off again into the dark and sensuous woods of aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake? A debt to Northrop Frye lingered in some of this, jostled at the same time by the new-fangled notions of Marshall McLuhan. Had the hedgehog seen the truth in the rear-view mirror? The unassailable truth of experience and the powerful flavour of prosaic fact.

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Index

Acorn, Milton, 84, 156, 225, 232, 239, 283, 285, 287–9, 292–3, 320; on K.V. Hertz, 292–3 Aeschylus, 10 Aiken, Conrad, 17; “Disenchantment,” 17 Aikman, Audrey, xxxv, 70, 71, 80, 110, 209, 315, 316 Aldington, Richard, 4, 10, 22, 104, 224; “Choricos,” 10 Alline, Henry, 124; Hymns, 124 Allison, W.T., 131 Alphabet, 197–8, 239, 270, 296 Amethyst (Acadia University), 224 Anderson, Margaret, 208 Anderson, Patrick, xvi, 48, 56, 57, 72, 74–5, 94, 96, 101, 103, 104, 109, 118, 120, 130, 162, 166–7, 169, 170, 172, 173, 208–9, 210, 220, 221, 275, 280, 282, 316; The Colour as Naked, 167; “Poem on Canada,” 57; Search Me, 208; A Tent for April, 48, 74, 162, 167; The White Centre, 167 Anderson, Sherwood, 36 anthologies: absence of women in, 308; importance of, xvii, xxii, xxv, xliii, 74–5, 81, 86–97, 98– 100, 115–6, 119–20, 122–3, 149– 50, 157–9, 168, 173, 199–200, 219–20, 247, 250, 272, 308, 309, 314–17 Anti-Rot, 198

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Arensberg, Walter Conrad, 15; “Axiom,” 15 Arnold, Matthew, 12 Arsenault, Jean, 285 Asselin, Olivar, 87 Aster, Sydney, 225 Atlantic, 206 Atwood, Margaret, xxv Auden, W.H., 54, 81, 117, 118, 164, 167, 172, 206, 209, 280, 308 Avison, Margaret, xx, 52, 96, 104, 236, 277, 278; “The Butterfly,” 277; “Butterfly Bones, or Sonnet Against Sonnets,” 236; “Maria Minor,” 96; Winter Sun, 236 Ayre, Robert, 72 Bailey, Alfred G., 104, 163, 165; Border River, 165 Ballon, Ellen, 72 Barbusse, Henri, 36 Barker, George, 54, 118 Barnard, Sylvia, 238 Barzun, Jacques, xvi, xvii Beattie, Jeanne, 262; Blaze of Noon, 262 Beauchemin, Nérée, 253 Benson, Nathaniel, 308 Bevan, Alan, 224–5, 289–91 Bibaud, Michel, 266 Binyon, Lawrence, 10 Birney, Earle, xxiv–xxv, xl, 54, 90, 93, 94, 104, 109, 114, 117, 118,

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322 121, 126, 129, 141, 147–8, 156, 157–9, 164, 168, 170, 171, 173, 210, 235, 236, 239, 258, 262, 276, 277, 279, 319, 320; “Anglo-Saxon Street,” 90; The Creative Writer, 156; “David,” xxv, 94; David and Other Poems, 141, 164; Now Is Time, 164; “Pacific Door,” 277; Preface to 20th Century Canadian Poetry, 156, 157–9, 173; The Strait of Anian, 114, 164; Trial of a City and Other Verse, 129, 164, 171, 236; Turvey, 262; “Vancouver Lights,” 277 bissett, bill, xxv Black Mountain Review, 224 Blake, William, 52, 156, 197, 234; Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 197 blank verse. See free verse Blast, 207 blew ointment, xv blew ointment press, xxv Bonenfant, Jean-Charles, 250, 256–64 Book of Canadian Poetry, The, xxii, 45, 47, 50, 51, 84, 86–97, 101–4, 120, 129, 155 book publication, Canadian, 68, 74, 77, 114, 271 Bourinot, Arthur S., 126, 160, 165; Nine Poems, 160 Bowering, George, xix, 204, 223, 271, 293–4, 301 Boxer, Avi, 225, 292 Bradstreet, Anne, 92, 93 Brebner, J.B., xvi Brewster, Elizabeth, 163, 168, 210, 276; East Coast, 168; Lillooet, 168

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Brochu, André, 268; Printemps ’63, 268 Brooke, Rupert, 29, 171; “Dining Room Tea,” 29 Brown, Audrey Alexandra, 126, 165 Brown, E.K., 53, 65–6, 70, 83, 105, 128–9, 165, 170, 231, 279; On Canadian Poetry, 53, 83, 105, 165, 170 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 12 Browning, Robert, 12, 52 Bruce, Charles, xxxix, 46, 47, 93, 126, 131, 168; The Flowing Summer, 168; “Immediates,” 93; The Mulgrave Road, 168; “Words Are Never Enough,” 46 Bruchési, Jean, 256–64; Canada, Réalités d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, 256 Buckle, Daphne, xxv, 301 Burns, Robert, 124 Burroughs, William S., xvi Bush, Douglas, 25–6; “Making Literature Hum,” 25–6 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 12, 177, 180 Cabell, James Branch, 36 Call, Frank Oliver, 4, 21–3; Acanthus and Wild Grape, 4 Callaghan, Morley, 32, 83, 258, 261, 262; The Loved and the Lost, 262 Cameron, Elspeth, 320 Campbell, Grace, 257 Campbell, Marjorie Freeman, 150; “Only the Heart,” 150 Campbell, Roy, 115, 162, 172, 210, 277

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 Campbell, William Wilfred, 34, 36, 38, 86, 94, 125, 170; The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, 38, 39 Canada Council, xv, xix, xx, 66, 240, 249; grants, 236, 237, 238, 239, 243 Canadian Authors’ Association (caa ), xxi, 3, 25, 32, 34–5, 41, 48, 49, 53, 60, 68, 80, 81, 85, 99, 141, 147–8, 207, 239, 308, 311; Canadian Poetry Magazine, 141 Canadian Bookman, 3, 25, 34, 207; Canadian Author and Bookman, 53 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc ), 73, 156, 213, 232, 235–6, 237; “Anthology,” 236; “Critically Speaking,” 73; Radio-Canada, 263; “Wednesday Night,” 236 Canadian Conference of the Arts, poetry readings at, 235 Canadian Forum, 4, 25, 205, 207, 211, 239–40, 278 Canadian Life, 69 Canadian Literature, 26, 239, 249, 271, 286–7, 313n1 Canadian Mercury, 26, 203, 204, 207, 217–19 Canadian Poems 1850–1952, xxii, 166, 173 Canadian Poetry, 160 Canadian Poetry in English, 122–3, 149–51, 173 Canadian Poetry Magazine, xxi, 141, 147–8, 207, 223, 239, 296 Canadian Poets, 309 Carman, Bliss, 10, 18, 25, 46, 51, 54, 55, 66, 67, 86, 90, 92, 101, 116, 122–3, 125, 141, 155, 157,

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323 164, 170, 173, 215, 236, 248, 250, 252, 256, 274, 275; Canadian Poetry in English, 173; The Friendship of Art, 155; The Kinship of Nature, 155; The Poetry of Life, 155; Sappho, 18; Talks on Poetry and Life, 155 Carroll, Lewis, 57; Alice in Wonderland, 194 Casgrain, Abbé, 251 Cassirer, Ernest, 197 Cataract, 156, 224, 225, 227 Cather, Willa, 36 Cerberus, 129, 142, 145, 146, 166, 172 Chamberland, Paul, 268; “Ode au guerrier de la joie,” 268; “Poème de l’anté-révolution,” 268 Chapman, William, 149, 253 Charbonneau, Jean, 253 Chatterton, Thomas, 254 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11, 179 Chesterton, G.K., 115, 172, 258 Chiaroscuro (University of Waterloo), 224 Child, Philip, 147, 163, 168, 240, 274; The Victorian House, 168 Chopin, René, 254 civ /n, 141, 168, 172, 173, 210–11, 221, 239 Clark, Donald, 71 Cogswell, Fred, xl, 168, 210, 276 Cohen, Leonard, 173, 211, 231, 232, 235, 240, 241, 283, 284, 292, 307, 319, 320 Coleman, Victor, xx, xxv, 204, 301 Collin, W.E., 127, 128, 170, 231, 279; The White Savannahs, 127, 170

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324 Collins, Aileen, xiv, 172, 210 Collins, William, 15; “Ode to Evening,” 15 Colombo, John Robert, 226, 240, 244 Combustion, xxi, 204, 210, 224, 239, 241, 245 Connor, Ralph, 32, 34 Contact, xvii, xxi, 141–2, 146, 162, 166, 168, 172, 173, 204, 210, 222, 224, 239, 241, 245, 270 Contact Press, xvii, 129, 142, 171, 173, 238, 245, 315 Contemporary Verse, xxi, 45, 69, 73, 81, 113, 116–17, 118, 161, 172, 204, 208, 210, 239, 272, 276 Corman, Cid, xvi, 142, 172 Cornish, John, 263; The Provincials, 263 Corso, Gregory, 287, 288 Crane, Stephen, 85 Crashaw, Richard, 52 Crawford, Isabella, 67, 87, 90, 102, 157, 170; “Bite Deep and Wide, O Axe, the Tree,” 90 Crawley, Alan, xxi, 73, 81, 161, 204, 208, 272 Creative Writing in Canada, 170 Creeley, Robert, xix, 142, 172, 223, 236–7, 288, 292, 293, 299; and theory of organic form, 299 Creighton, Alan, 308 Crémazie, Octave, 91, 248, 251–2; “Le Drapeau de Carillon,” 251; “Les Morts,” 252 Criterion, 208, 211 Critic, The (McGill University), 24 Cull, David, 301 Culture, 250

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Cummings, E.E., 29–30, 59, 85, 172 Currie, Robert A., 141, 149–51; “Don’t Blame This on Bliss,” 149–51; and the “sentimental syndrome,” 141 Dahlberg, Edward, 115 Dakin, Laurence, 126 Dalhousie Review, 171 Dalton, Anne, 95 Daniells, Roy, 114, 165, 210, 274; Deeper Into the Forest, 114, 165 Dante, 51, 52 Dantin, Louis, 253, 254; “Noël intime,” 254 Davey, Frank, 204, 205, 222–7, 271, 294–300, 301; on rhyme, 295–300 Davies, W.H., 107 Davis, Scott, 301 Dawson, David, 294, 295, 301 Day-Lewis, C., 127, 164, 274, 277, 280, 308; A Hope for Poetry, 127 Deacon, William Arthur, 232 de Gaspé, Philippe Aubert, 248; Les Anciens Canadiens, 248 De Grandmont, Eloi, 240 de la Roche, Mazo, 32, 249, 257, 260, 263, 316n1 Delta, xvii, 156, 204, 205, 211, 220, 221, 239, 240, 270, 276 de Martigny, Paul, 253 Désaulniers, Gonzalve, 253 Dial, 36, 219, 272 Dickens, Charles, 180–1 Dickinson, Emily, 168, 181 Diespecker, Dick, 160; Between Two Furious Oceans, 160 Di Prima, Diane, 224

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 Direction, 45, 69, 210, 221–2 Divers Press, 171 Djwa, Sandra, 320 Donne, John, 29, 52, 129, 171; “The Ecstasy,” 29 Drummond, 94, 170, 257; “The Wreck of the Julie Plante,” 94 Dryden, John, 11–12; “Defence of Poetry,” 11 Dudek, Louis, xiv, xv, xvi–xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xl, xli, 47, 56, 60, 70, 71, 72, 74–5, 104–6, 109, 113, 118, 129, 141, 142–5, 151, 155, 160, 162, 166, 168, 169–74, 200, 204, 205–12, 220, 237, 238, 240, 245, 246, 271–85, 289, 292, 315; and academic literature, 85, 104– 6; East of the City, xxiv; “Europe,” 240; Europe, 171, 174, 278; on “little magazines,” 205–12; “Où sont les jeunes?” 142–4, 146 Duhamel, Roger, 36, 259 Duncan, Robert, 223, 293, 296–9; and theory of rhyme, 296–9 Duvar, 101; “The Emigration of the Fairies,” 101 Dwyer, Peter, xix Edel, Leon, 214, 217, 219 Edgar, Pelham, 193 Éditions Erta, 285 Éditions Hexagone, 285 Eigner, Larry, 288 Elan, 210 Elie, Robert, 257 Eliot, T.S., 4, 17, 24, 29–30, 36, 46, 51, 53, 85, 115, 117, 121, 127, 129, 130, 161, 164, 165, 170, 171, 172, 180, 206, 207, 208,

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325 211–12, 231, 232, 270; “Portrait of a Lady,” 17; The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 127; “The Waste Land,” 24, 127, 129, 232 Ellenbogen, George, 232, 238, 283, 284, 285 Elson, John Melbourne, 34; “The Canadian Literary Scene,” 34 England, poetry of: Angry Young Men movement in, 231, 282, 283; and “little magazines,” 203, 208; and modernism, 231, 270, 277, 282; tradition and influence of, xx, 22, 34, 38, 39, 40, 57, 81, 82, 88, 92, 98, 101, 104–5, 117, 118, 121, 124, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 205 English Illustrated magazine, 211 Enterprise: A Monthly Review, 315 Éthier-Blais, Jean, xix, 268–9 Evergreen Review, 224, 225–6 Everson, Lorna, xli Everson, Ron, xviii, xli, 4, 238, 273–4 Everybody’s magazine, 211 Evidence, 224–5, 227, 271, 289–90, 291 ExeJesus, 198 Exile, 207 Farebrother, A.E., 71 Faulkner, William, 183, 289–90 Fearing, Kenneth, 59, 288 Ferland, Albert, 254; “La Patrie au poète,” 254 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 288 Fiamengo, Marya, 239; The Quality of Halves, 239

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326 Fiddlehead, 168, 172, 174, 210, 223–4, 239, 270, 276 Files, H.G., 73 Finch, Robert, xxxix, 26, 68, 81, 86, 93, 103, 104, 107–9, 110, 114, 121, 126, 128, 170, 200, 256, 272, 307, 311; “Alone,” 107; “Ask No Promise,” 107; “The Five,” 107; “The Five Kine,” 40, 311; “The Formula,” 107; Poems, 107–9, 110; “Poet on Poet,” 109; “The Sisters,” 104; “The Smile,” 108; The Strength of the Hills, 114; “Teacher,” 40, 311 Finnigan, Joan, 235–40 First Statement, xxi, xxiii, xxxiv, 45, 56, 71, 74, 75, 77, 81, 86, 116, 141, 161, 166, 172, 204, 209, 210, 219, 220, 221, 222, 276, 278, 280–1, 315–16; group of ­poets, 70, 220, 231, 285 First Statement Press, xxiii, 45, 66, 69–71, 73, 74–5, 76, 77–8, 79, 119, 171, 315; New Writers Series, 74, 75, 76, 77, 221 Flemington, Frank, xx Flint, F.S., 3 Floating Bear, The, 224 Ford, Ford Madox. See Hueffer, Ford Madox Ford, R.A.D., 237, 274, 275 Forge, 276 Forman, Buxton, 15 Fortnightly magazine (England), 206–7, 214 Forum, The, 36 Fournier, Jules, 87; Anthologie des Poètes Canadiens, 87

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France, poetry of, 22, 97, 125, 252, 253, 260, 296; and Symbolism, 127, 129, 253 Frazer, 27, 127, 128; The Golden Bough, 27, 127–8, 130 Fréchette, Louis, 248, 252, 253; Légende d’un Peuple, 252; Mes Loisirs, 252; Le Noël au Canada, 248; Voix d’un Exilé, 252 free verse (blank verse), 3–4, 6, 10– 11, 12, 13–15, 16–17, 18, 19–20, 21–2, 28, 125, 126, 133, 169, 295–6 French-Canadian literature, 73, 77, 82, 87, 149, 200, 210, 247–69, 270, 271, 285; and anthologies, 247, 249, 250; and the École Littéraire de Montréal, 253, 254; in “little magazines,” 249–50, 268; and the terroir, 248, 253, 255, 266; and translation, 248–9, 261, 263, 271 Freneau, Philip, 92, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 56, 118, 162, 186 Frieman, Lawrence, 72 Frisch, Anthony, 274 Frost, Robert, 29, 37, 104, 165, 168, 171, 270 Frye, Northrop, xxi, 84, 86–97, 114, 156, 178–87, 188–97, 241, 315, 320; and censorship, 182; and conventions in literature, 179–82; “The Educated Imagination,” 156; Fearful Symmetry, 197; and imagination in literature, 182–6, 187, 191; literature and dream, 186–7; and literature as imagi­ native key to history, 194–5; ­mythology and literature,

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 188–90, 193; and nature in Canadian poetry, 84–5, 93–6; and “original” vs “aboriginal” in ­poetry, 84, 91–2; and religion and literature, 89, 90, 94, 188–9, 195; and the teaching of literature, 188–97, 193–4 Fulford, Robert, 232, 245–6; on Raymond Souster, 245–6 Fyfe, F., 173 Gamble, Howard, 71 Gants du ciel, 250 Garneau, François-Xavier, 248, 251; Histoire de Canada, 248 Garneau, René, 264 Garneau, Saint–Denys, 249, 255, 266; Regards et jeux dans l’espace, 255 Garvin, J.W., 18, 38, 39, 309; Canadian Poets, 38, 309 Gautier, Théophile, 231 Gélinas, Gratien, 249; Bousille et les Justes, 249 Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine, 252; “Le Canadien errant,” 252 Gibbon, John Murray, 3–4, 9–20; and rhyme and meter, 10–20 Gibbs, Robert, 168 Gide, André, 36 Giguère, Roland, 256, 266, 267; “Saisons polaires,” 267 Gilbert, Gerry, xxv, 301 Gill, Charles, 253 Gill, E. Lakshmi, 301 Ginsberg, Allen, xvi, xix, 231, 288; “Howl,” 231 Giroux, André, 257 Glassco, John, xv, xl, 249, 271

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327 Glover, Guy, 72, 73; The World Today, 73 Gnarowski, Michael, xiv, xxxvii, xl, xli, 26, 205, 211, 212–22, 285, 313n1, 316n1; and “little magazines” in Montreal, 212–22 Goldberg, William, 210, 221 Golden Dog, The, 248 Goldsmith, Oliver, 6, 93 Gottlieb, Phyllis, 287 Governor-General’s Award, 81, 86, 107, 128, 129, 131, 236, 239, 280, 307 Graham, Gwethalyn, 72, 240, 257; Earth and High Heaven, 249 Grandbois, Alain, 240, 249, 255; “Fermons l’armoire,” 255 Graves, Robert, 180 grONK, xxv Grove, Frederick Philip, 72 Grove Press, 224 Gulliver’s Travels, 180 Gustafson, Betty, xli Gustafson, Ralph, xl, xli, 54, 72, 109, 160, 165, 173, 235, 238–9, 240, 275, 277; Canadian Poetry, 160; Flight into Darkness, 160, 165; Rivers Among Rocks, 238–9 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 248 Hall, Douglas, 71 Hambleton, Ronald, 52, 54, 56, 57, 72, 93, 118, 129, 160–1, 165, 170, 172, 277, 282; Object and Event, 165; Unit of Five, 129, 161 Hardy, Thomas, 254, 274 Hardy, W.S., 258, 263; The Unfulfilled, 263

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328 Harney, John, 240 Harper’s, 206 Harris, Sydney J., 133 Harrison, John, 71, 110 Harte, Bret, 104 Hartford Wits, 92 Hawkins, William, 301 Haworth, Colin, xviii Hayakawa, S.I., 36 Hearst, W.R., 206 Heavysege, Charles, 47, 52–3, 87, 95, 96, 275; “Count Filippo,” 52; “Jephtha’s Daughter,” 52; “Saul,” 52–3; Saul, 275 Hébert, Anne, 82, 235, 249, 255, 266, 267; Les Songes en équilibre, 255; Le Tombeau des rois, 255; “Vie de Château,” 255, 267 Hecht, Anthony, xix Hemingway, Ernest, 36, 180, 224 Hémon, Louis, 266; Maria Chapdelaine, 90, 266 Hénault, Gilles, 235, 256 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 9 Herbert, George, 52 Here and Now, 69, 114, 141, 161, 198, 210, 211, 239 Hergesheimer, Joseph, 36 Herrick, Robert, 12; “To Daffodils,” 12 Hertel, François, 72, 255–6 Hertz, K.V., 225, 292–3 Hine, Daryl, 210, 232, 238, 275, 276, 283, 284, 285 Hitchcock, George, 293 Hogg, Robert, 301 Homer, 92, 190, 193, 195 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 164, 296; and theory of inscape, 299

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Housman, A.E., 178 Hovey, Richard, 92 Howe, Joseph, 95 Howells, William Dean, 6 Huckleberry Finn, 194 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 17–18; “Antwerp,” 17 Hugessen, A.K., 72 Humanities Association of Canada, 85; “The Poet and the University” (symposium), 85 Huxley, Aldous, 36 Imago, 204 Impression, 210 Impromptu, 216 In/Words, xiv Irwin, Grace, 263; Least of All Saints, 263 Irwin, W.A., 237 Isaacs, Avrom, 239; Isaacs Gallery, readings at, 236–7 Island, 204 James, Henry, 115, 192 Jeffers, Robinson, 93, 178 John Bull, 211 Johnson, Pauline, 125 Johnston, George, 237 Jolas, Eugene, 4 Jonas, George, 301 Jones, D.G., xl, 172–3, 237, 238, 240, 283, 285, 320; Butterfly on Rock, 320; The Sun is Axeman, 237 Jones, LeRoi, 224 Jonson, Ben, 180 Joyce, James, 29, 36, 115, 172, 183, 186–7, 197, 219, 231, 290; Finnegans Wake, 186–7, 197

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 Kafka, Franz, 255 Katz, Gertrude, 292 Kearns, Lionel, 294, 298–9, 301; “Subversion,” 298–9 Keats, John, 12, 15, 16, 176, 186; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 16 Kelly, Robert, 224 Kennedy, Howard Angus, 34 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 235 Kennedy, Leo, xxi, 26, 34–7, 40, 68, 85, 95, 117, 128, 165, 217, 218, 219, 220, 271, 311, 320; “Calling Eagles,” 117; “Epithalamium,” 40, 95, 311; “The Future of Canadian Literature,” 34–7, 218; “Shore,” 40, 311; The Shrouding, xxiv; and Victorianism in Canadian literature, 36; “Words for a Resurrection,” 40 Kenner, Hugh, 280 Kenyon Review, 224 Kerouac, Jack, xvi, 318; On the Road, 318 Kirby, William, 260 Kleiman, Ed, 198 Klein, A.M., xxi, xxiii, 24, 26, 41, 54, 68, 72, 92, 103, 106, 109, 114, 117, 118, 128, 160, 163, 164, 165, 170, 171, 172, 206, 207, 208, 216, 219, 220, 231, 256, 270, 272, 278, 279, 280, 292, 311, 320; “Autobiographical,” 103; The Hitleriad, 163; “Out of the Pulver,” 311; Poems, 163; “Portrait of the Poet as a Nobody,” 207; The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, 114, 163; The Second Scroll, 172; Seven Poems, 114

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329 Knister, Raymond, 4, 32, 46, 105, 114, 117, 314, 316n1; Collected Poems, 114, 316n1; Selected Stories of Raymond Knister, 316n1 Krohn, Peter, 283 Krushchev, Nikita, 195 Lachs, John, xvii, 211, 285 Lalonde, Michele, 240 Lampman, Archibald, 25, 36, 46, 51, 54, 66, 87, 91, 95, 96, 128, 155, 157, 164, 168, 170, 236, 248, 252; “The City of Dreadful Night,” 96; “City of the End of Things,” 96; “In November,” 95; “Midnight,” 95; “Two Canadian Poets,” 155 Lampman Review, 198 Langevin, André, 257, 261 Lanier, Sidney, 15; Science of English Verse, 15 Lapointe, Joseph-Arthur, 254; “Les Pauvres,” 254 Lareau, Edmond, 247; Histoire de la littérature Canadienne, 247 Laurence, Elsie Fry, 53; “To Human Flesh,” 53 Laurier, Wilfrid, 257 Lawrence, D.H., 36, 104, 115, 182; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 182 Layton, Irving, xiv, xvii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxxiv, 47, 56, 60, 70, 72, 74, 84, 110, 114, 129, 130, 141, 142, 145–6, 151, 155, 162, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175–8, 209, 210, 221, 225, 231, 232, 233–4, 235, 238, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, 276, 278,

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330 279, 280, 282, 284, 289, 291, 292, 307, 315, 318, 319, 320; “A Bonnet for Bessie,” 175; “The Bull Calf,” 235; Cold Green Element, 278; “De Bullion Street,” 60; “Divinity,” 175; “For Mao Tse-Tung: A Meditation of Flies and Kings,” 175; Here and Now, xxiv, 74, 162; The Improved Binoculars, 231, 318; In the Midst of My Fever, 171; A Laughter in the Mind, 175; “Love Is an Irrefutable Fire,” 175; Lovers and Lesser Men, 318; Love the Conqueror Worm, 171, 174; “My Flesh Comfortless,” 175; “Newsboy,” 60; Now Is the Place, 74, 114; “Open Letter to Louis Dudek,” 225; and philistinism, 176, 177; A Red Carpet For the Sun, 175–8, 238; “To a Lily,” 225; Waiting for a Messiah, 320; “The Warm Afterdark,” 175; “Why I don’t make love to the First Lady,” 235; “Words Without Music,” 60; “Young Girls Dancing at Camp Lajoie,” 175 Leacock, 216, 218, 240, 257; Literary Lapses, 249; “The Problem of Canadian Literature,” 218 League of Canadian Poets, xli Lee, Hope, 198 le Gallienne, Richard, 10 Leman, Richard, 320 Le May, Pamphile, 248, 253 Lemelin, Roger, 257, 261 Le Pan, Douglas, 84, 114, 165, 170, 172, 237, 274, 307; The Net and

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the Sword, 165; The Wounded Prince and Other Poems, 114, 165 Leprohon, J.L., 248; The Manor House of the Villerai, 248 Leslie, Kenneth, 96, 99, 126, 275 Lespérance, John Talon, 248; The Bastonnais, 248 Letters in Canada, 259 Levertov, Denise, 288 Levine, Norman, 160, 275; The Tight-Rope Walker, 160 Lewes, G.H., 206 Lewis, C.S., 115, 172 Lewis, Wyndham, 36 Liberté, 268 Life, 211 Lightall, W.D., 250; Songs of the Great Dominion, 250 Lincoln, Abraham, 195; Gettysburg address, 195 Lindsay, Vachel, 93 Lismer, Arthur, 72 literary criticism and theory, Canadian, 24–7, 31, 32–3, 45–61, 65, 66–7, 68–9, 73, 77, 78–9, 82–3, 84–110, 114, 126–7, 128– 9, 141, 147, 155–200, 217, 271, 274–5, 279–80; leftist, 130–1, 151, 307, 308 literary magazines, 81, 82, 211–12, 222, 275–6; university, 204, 214– 16, 239. See also “little magazines” “little magazines,” xiv, xvii, xviii, xxi, 65, 66, 68–9, 73, 77, 81, 82, 85, 130, 161, 172, 198, 203–27, 239–40, 249–50, 294–5, 314; aim and role of, 211–12; editors and

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 editorial boards of, xiv, 203, 209, 222–3, 225, 226, 294, 295; in England, 203, 208; in Montreal, 212–22, 268; and modernist poetry, 203, 204, 205–10, 220; readership of, 69; types of, 203– 4; in the United States, 203, 208, 212, 213, 288 “Littlewit and Loftus,” 90 Livesay, Dorothy, xxxix, 4, 46, 52, 54, 72, 95, 96, 109, 114, 117, 118, 121, 160, 163–4, 174, 208, 210, 219, 237, 239, 276, 277, 282, 308, 316n1; Day and Night, 160, 163– 4; Poems for People, 114, 164; and socialist realism, 277 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 13, 93 Look, 211 Lord, Barry, 301 Lorna Doone, 190 Lowell, Amy, 9, 11, 208 Lozeau, Albert, 253–4 Lucky Jim, 231 Lyman, John, 72 MacDonald, Goodridge, 273 Macdonald, Wilson, 32, 316n1 MacEwen, Gwendolyn, xx, 225, 237, 241 Machen, Arthur, 36 MacInnes, Tom, 95, 125; “Zalinka,” 95 MacKay, Isabel Ecclestone, 20; Between the Lights, 20; “Indian Summer,” 20 MacKay, L.A., 73, 93, 104, 275; “I Wish My Tongue Were a Quiver,” 93

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331 Maclean’s, 82, 232 MacLeish, Archibald, 40, 93, 310; Ars Poetica, 40, 310 MacLennan, Hugh, xvii, 53, 72, 240, 257, 262, 307; The Precipice, 262; Two Solitudes, 249, 257, 262 MacMechan, A.M., 131 Macpherson, Jay, 84, 198, 200, 210, 235, 271, 284, 285 MacSkimming, Roy, 301 Maiakovsky, Vladimir, 268 Mair, Charles, 51–2, 67, 94; “Tecumseh,” 94 Malus, Michael, 232 Mandel, Eli, xxiv–xxv, 84, 156, 163, 168, 171, 173, 199–200, 210, 211, 237, 238, 276, 281, 284, 285, 287; Trio, 171, 281 Mann, Thomas, 36 Marquis, Don, 9, 10; and definitions of poetry, 9 Marriott, Anne, 46, 72, 90, 95, 109, 117, 118, 121, 126, 166, 167, 170, 208, 210, 239, 276, 277; Sandstone, 167; The Wind Our Enemy, 46, 90, 118, 167 Martin, Peter, 238 Martlet (McGill University), 24 Marx, Karl, 45, 56, 57, 118, 162, 167, 177 Masefield, John, xx, 29, 171 Massey, Vincent, 262 Masters, Edgar Lee, 11, 21, 104, 168; Spoon River Anthology, 11, 21 Mauriac, François, 183 McClelland, Jack, 319 McClelland and Stewart, 66, 171, 238, 243, 319

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332 McConnell, J.W., 72, 75 McCourt, Edward A., 258, 262; Home Is the Stranger, 262 McFadden, David, 225, 226, 301 McGill Daily, 24; McGill Daily Literary Supplement, 24 McGill Fortnightly Review, 3, 24, 68, 117, 203, 206, 214–16, 219 McGill Outlook (originally McGill Fortnightly), 24 McGill University, xv, xvi–xvii, xxii, xxiv, 24, 73, 106, 129, 214, 237, 240, 315 McLachlan, Alexander, xxii; “We Live in a Rickety House,” xxii McLaren, Floris, 208, 276 McLuhan, Marshall, 320 McMaster, Rowland, 200 McRobbie, Kenneth, 210, 239, 275; Eyes Without a Face, 239 Measure, 224 Meredith, George, 12; “Love in the Valley,” 12 meter (rhythm), 6, 7–8, 12–13, 18– 19, 21, 28, 38–9, 132–3, 169, 193–4, 274, 277, 281, 296, 309 Midland, The, 4 Migrant, 224, 288 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 171 Miller, G.C., 226 Miller, Henry, 222, 290; Tropic of Cancer, 222 Miller, Mary Margaret, 100 Miller, Peter, 210, 237, 238, 249, 275 Milton, John, 6, 52, 179, 189, 194, 290; Paradise Lost, 189 Miron, Gaston, 240 Moby Dick, 194

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Modern Canadian Poetry, xxxix, 308 Moment, 224, 225, 227, 239, 271, 292 Monroe, Harold, 208 Monroe, Harriet, 9, 29, 208 Monthly Criterion, The, 36 Montreal, xxiii–xxiv; “little magazines: in, 212–22; Montreal group of poets, xxiii, 67, 68, 81, 82, 86, 113, 114, 116, 117, 128, 141, 165, 210, 220, 232, 270, 276–8, 280, 281, 282, 283, 292, 315 Moore, Marianne, 59, 172, 272 Moore, Tom, 124 Morin, Paul, 254–5; Le Paon d’émail,” 254; Poèmes de Cendre et d’Or, 254 Morley, John, 206–7 Morley, Patricia, 320 Morris, William, 12 Moscovitch, Henry, 225, 283, 285, 292 Motion, 224, 226, 227 Mountain, 224, 225–6, 227 Muhlstock, Louis, 72 Muir, Edwin, 171, 274, 277 Mullen, David, 221 Nativity, 216 Neff, Emery, xvi Nelligan, Emile, 249, 253, 254; “Romance du vin,” 254 Nester, Stanley, 292 A New Canadian Anthology, xli, 308 New Country: Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures, xxxviii, 308

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 “new poetry,” 28–30, 38, 45–61, 66, 67, 81, 119, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 204, 209–10, 270, 314, 318; in the United States, 46 New Poetry, The, 9, 18 New Provinces, xvii, xxi, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, 26, 38, 68, 128, 129, 130, 170, 207, 219–20, 307– 13, 313n1 New Republic, 88 New Signatures: Poems By Several Hands, xxxviii, 308 New Talent, The, 215 New Wave Canada, xxv, 271, 300–1, 315 New Yorker, 88 Nichol, bp, xxv Nicol, Eric, 258 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 177, 293 Northern Review, xxi, xxxv, 45, 65, 71–3, 76, 77–8, 79, 80–2, 85–6, 109–10, 113–14, 115, 117, 130, 141, 161, 162, 172, 198, 204, 209, 210, 220, 221, 222, 239, 270, 272, 280, 281; editorial board of, 109–10; production and distribution of, 72, 78 Nowlan, Alden, 84, 156, 232, 238; Under the Ice, 238 O Broin, Padraig, 226–7 O’Grady, Standish, 49, 94, 238 O’Hara, Frank, 237 Olson, Charles, xvi, 142, 172, 223, 237, 287, 288, 293, 300, 318; and “Composition by Field,” 147 On Canadian Poetry, 105, 128, 165, 170 Ondaatje, Michael, xxv, 301

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333 Open Letter, 204 Origin, 172, 224 Orwell, George, 199; 1984, 199 Other Canadians: An Anthology of the New Poetry in Canada 1940– 46, xxii, 65, 74, 75, 81, 84, 114, 119–20, 121, 130, 161, 162, 221, 280, 307, 314–17 Others, 15 Our Canadian Literature, 116, 149– 50, 250 Outline of Canadian Literature, An, 247 Outsider, The, 224 Owen, Wilfred, 274 Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, 250, 270, 309 Oxford University Press, 66, 238 Pacey, Desmond, xxiv, 156, 160–9, 170, 210, 235, 260, 279–80; Ten Canadian Poets, 280 Packard, Frank L., 34 Page, P.K., 56, 57, 72, 75, 93, 103, 104, 109, 110, 118, 120–1, 129, 151, 160, 166, 167, 170, 172, 208, 210, 220, 237, 275, 280; As Ten, As Twenty, 167; “The Stenographers,” 93, 167 Parker, Gilbert, 248 Parkhurst (later Purdy), Eurithe, 244 Parti Pris, 268 Partisan Review, 85, 105 Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, 240 Penner, Roland, 71 Phelps, Arthur Lyon, 20, 58, 173 Pickthall, Marjorie L.C., 20, 128; “Improvisation on a Flute,” 20; The Lamp of Poor Souls, 20

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334 Pierce, Lorne, 66, 113–14, 122–3, 141, 149–50, 173, 250, 280–1; “A Canadian People,” 113; and Canadian Poetry in English, 141, 149–51, 173; and Our Canadian Literature, 116, 149–50, 250 Pilon, Jean-Guy, 200, 256, 266, 267; “L’étranger d’ici,” 267–8 Plato, 186 P.M., 210 Poe, Edgar Allan, 95 poetry: definitions of, 9, 21; descriptive, 133, 134; dramatic, 133, 136–7; experimentation in, 290– 1; formal emancipation of, 5–9, 10, 12, 13–16, 21–2, 28–30, 38, 97, 147; and imagism, 3, 10, 40, 59, 104, 117, 311; lyric, 133, 134–5, 309; metaphysical tradition in, 29, 40–1, 45–6, 47, 51, 52, 127, 129, 130, 164, 165, 166, 311; modern, 28, 86, 102, 155, 170, 171, 189, 193, 231–46; narrative, 126, 133, 135–6, 163, 236; neometaphysical, 126, 130; sonnet form, 12, 13, 16, 135, 296, 299; and Symbolism, 129, 155, 253, 270, 315. See also free verse, meter, rhyme poetry, Canadian: academic influence on, 85, 104–6, 109, 207, 237, 241; colonialism in, xxiii, 55, 57–9, 60, 85, 89–91, 93, 99, 100, 316n1; compared with that of other nations, 34–6, 126–7, 270, 271, 278; the Confederation Poets, 125, 126; cosmopolitanism in, 45–6, 50, 314, 315; future of, 50, 51, 119–20; influence

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of migrants on, 124; and Jewish ­authors, 320; left-wing, socialist tradition in, 58, 61, 81, 90, 104, 118, 119–21, 146, 161–2, 163, 166, 219, 282–3, 285; modernism in, 113, 114, 270–301; nature in, xxiii, 55–6, 60, 66, 84–5, 93–6, 102, 164, 308; in the 1940s, xxiii, 65–83, 84–107, 114, 116–22, 146, 156, 164, 171, 275, 276–7, 282, 285; in the 1960s, 318–19; the post-­ Confederation poets, 54, 67; the pre-Confederation poets, 55, 87; realist tradition in, xxi–xxii, 56, 67, 142, 155, 156, 164, 241, 277, 285, 315; regionalism in, 51, 69, 89, 114, 168, 214, 276; religious element in, 47, 52, 53, 55, 81, 90, 94, 115, 120–1; satirical verse in, 24, 41, 141, 163, 237, 266, 269, 270, 272, 311–12; Victorianism in, xviii, xx, 26, 36, 46, 86, 157, 159, 204, 270. See also French-Canadian literature; poetry, modern, in Canada poetry, modern, in Canada, 3–4, 18–20, 24–5, 26–7, 38, 45, 46–7, 220; audience for, 231–46, 307, 318–20; beginnings of, 24–41; and literary criticism, theory, 155–200; and “little magazines,” 203, 204, 205–10, 212; and poets of the 1940s, 65–83; precursors to, 3–23; reaction to, 113–37, 141; and rise of “new poetry,” 45–61; and role of the “little magazines,” 203–27. See also French-Canadian literature

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 Poetry magazine, 3, 4, 10, 69, 105, 115, 206, 273, 280 Pound, Ezra, xviii, xxv, 3, 4, 10–11, 13–14, 36, 46, 85, 104, 115, 147, 164, 172, 206, 207, 208, 223, 224, 231, 234, 240, 270, 301; Cantos, 147; “The Garden,” 11; “My City,” 11; “The Return,” 10 Powell, S. Morgan, 232 Pratt, E.J., xv, xvii, xxi, 26, 32, 50, 54, 66, 67, 68, 72, 80, 83, 85, 87, 91, 92, 95, 103, 104, 117, 126, 128, 131, 155, 157, 160, 163, 164, 170, 171, 220, 236, 256, 272, 277, 307, 308; Behind The Log, 163; Brébeuf and His Brethren, 91, 96–7, 163, 256; The Cachalot, 163; Collected Poems, 160, 163; “Dunkirk,” 103; “The Fable of the Goats,” 95; narrative poetry of, 50, 91, 94, 126, 157, 163, 236; “Pliocene Armageddon,” 95; “Silences,” 95; They Are Returning, 163; The Titanic, 94, 236; “Tom the Cat from Zanzibar,” 95; Towards the Last Spike, 163, 171; The Witches’ Brew, 92, 95 Preview, xxi, xxiii, xxxiii, xxxvi, 45, 56, 69, 73, 81, 85, 86, 113, 116, 161, 167, 172, 204, 208–9, 210, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 280; leftish leanings of, 208–9 Pride and Prejudice, 181 Prism, 204, 223, 224, 239, 270, 276 Protocol, 210 Proust, Marcel, 102, 195, 286 Purdy, Al, xv, xvii, xxiii, xl, 84, 156, 210, 225, 232, 240, 243–4, 283,

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335 284, 285, 292, 307, 319; Cariboo Horses, 243; “The Country North of Belleville,” 243–4; “Transient,” 243 Queen’s Quarterly, 85, 239 Raddall, Thomas, 258 Ram, Abraham, xix Raven (University of British Columbia), 211, 224 Readers’ Club of Canada, 238 Reading, 69, 210 Reaney, James, 72, 83, 84, 114, 156, 160, 168, 170, 171, 173, 197–8, 210, 236, 237, 239, 270, 271, 277, 281, 282, 285; Message to Stratford, 236; A Message to Winnipeg, 236; The Red Heart, 83, 114, 160, 168, 171, 173, 270, 276, 281; A Suit of Nettles, 281 Recall, 224 Redpath, Beatrice, 150; “The Star,” 150 Reeves, John, 236; A Beach of Strangers, 236 Reid, James, 294, 301 Revue de l’Université Laval, 259–60 Rhodenizer, V.B., 116, 123, 124–37, 141, 149, 150–1, 171; and the “authentic Canadian poetic tradition,” 125–6, 129, 131, 135, 149; and Canadian Poetry in English, 124–37, 141, 149–51; and leftists, 130–1, 151; and patriotism, 124–5 rhyme, 6, 10, 12, 13–14, 15–16, 17, 18–19, 20, 21, 28, 38–9,

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336 295–300, 309; end-rhyme, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 19, 296; history of, 6–7, 11–13; Robert Duncan’s theory of, 296–9 Richards, I.A., 46 Richardson, John, 248 Richler, Mordecai, 249, 320; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 249 Ridley, Hilda, 308 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 183, 185, 255 Rimbaud, Arthur, 254, 255, 294 Ritchie, Charles, 307 Roberts, Charles G.D., 34, 36, 46, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 66, 67, 95, 99, 125, 128, 141, 157, 164, 168, 170, 248, 252, 256, 274, 275; “Canada Speaks to Britain,” 99 Roberts, Dorothy, 238; Twice to Flame, 238 Roberts, Goodridge, 72 Roberts, Michael, 308 Robertson, Jean, 71 Robinson, E.A., 29, 168 Robinson Crusoe, 194 Rogers, Robert, 210, 276 Roiter, Howard, 320; Here Comes Hymie!, 320 Ross, W.W.E., 4, 46, 52, 54, 95, 117, 210, 237, 272, 273; “The Death,” 95 Rossetti, Christina, 12 Rossetti, Dante, 12 Roy, Gabrielle, 249, 257; Bonheur d’Occasion (The Tin Flute), 249 Roy, G.R., 249; Twelve Modern French-Canadian Poets, 249 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, xviii, xix, 250

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Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences (Massey Commission), 65, 76, 77–8, 264 Royal Commission on Publications (O’Leary Commission), 239 Ruddick, Bruce, 56, 103, 208, 220, 280 Russell, Bertrand, 191 Ryerson Press, xviii–xix, xx, xxiv, 66, 70, 116, 173, 207–8, 238, 239, 241, 273, 301; Gallery Editions, 239 Sandburg, Carl, 4, 9, 14, 29, 37, 59, 93, 98, 104, 288; “Ice Handler,” 14; “Lost,” 14; “Under the Harvest Moon,” 14 Sandwell, B.K., 129 San Francisco, poets of, 282, 283 Sangster, 101; “The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay,” 101 Sapir, Edward, 32 Saturday Evening Post, 31 Saturday Night, 4 Saunders, Thomas, 168; Horizontal World, 168; Scrub Oak, 168 Scarlet Letter, The, 194 Schnitzler, Arthur, 36 Schull, Joseph, 160; I, Jones, Soldier, 160 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 19–20, 66, 94, 125, 164, 170, 236, 252, 256; Lundy’s Lane, 20; “New Year’s Eve, 1916,” 19; “Piper of Arll,” 94 Scott, F.G., 95 Scott, F.R., xv, xvii, xviii, xix, xxi– xxii, xxiv, xxxvii, xxxviii, xl, xli,

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 3, 24, 26, 38, 40, 41, 48, 51, 54, 68, 72, 80, 82, 85, 88, 97–100, 104, 105, 106, 109, 117, 118, 121, 125, 128, 155, 165, 170, 171, 172, 173, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 214, 216, 217, 219, 200, 232, 237–8, 249, 250, 265–9, 270, 271, 272, 276, 278, 279, 280, 292, 307, 308, 311, 313n1, 320; “Canadian Authors Meet,” 48, 80; Eye of the Needle, 272; “John Brown’s Body,” 219; Lest We Forget, 237; Message, 238; Overture, xxiv, 278; “The Poet in Quebec Today,” 250, 265–9; satirical verse of, 41, 237, 266, 270, 272, 311; “Trees in Ice,” 40, 311 Scott, James, 73 Scott, Marian, xxiv Scott, Walter, 22 Scratch, The (McGill University), 24 Seeger, Alan, 10 Service, Robert W., 36, 125, 170, 275 Shakespeare, William, 6, 15, 16, 158, 177, 179, 180, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 194, 258, 295; King Lear, 184; Measure for Measure, 15; and sonnet form, 16 Shapiro, Karl, 59 Shaw, George Bernard, 36, 180 Shaw, Neufville, 56, 73, 85, 101–4, 109, 208, 220, 280; “The Maple Leaf is Dying,” 101–4 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 12, 256 Siebrasse, Glen, xiv, xv–xvi, xvii, xviii, 211

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337 Simpson, R.G., 71, 110, 209, 210 Sitwell, Edith, 30, 121; Bucolic Comedies, 30 Sketch, 211 Skinner, Constance Lindsay, 18; “The Song of the Search,” 18 Smith, A.J.M., xvii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxxiii, xxxvii, xl, 3, 24–5, 26, 27–33, 38–41, 45–53, 68, 72, 81, 84, 85, 86–97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 117–18, 120, 121, 128, 129, 130, 155, 162, 165, 170, 171, 173, 203, 204, 206, 207, 214, 216, 217, 219, 220, 231, 238, 250–6, 270, 272, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 292, 307–13, 314, 315; and The Book of Canadian Poetry, 45, 47, 50, 51, 84, 86–97, 101–4, 120, 155, 160, 173, 314, 315; “Contemporary Poetry,” 24–5, 27–30, 155; “Creek,” 40, 311; and formal emancipation of poetry, 28–30; on French–Canadian poetry, 250–6; “Like An Old, Proud King,” 40, 311; as literary critic, 24–5, 31–3, 38–41; “Nationalism and the Canadian Poets,” 50, 51; native and cosmopolitan schools of Canadian poetry, 45, 47–51, 53; News of the Phoenix, xxiv, 118, 171, 278; “Ode to Yeats,” 97; “A Rejected Preface,” 38–41, 307– 13; “Shadows There Are,” 104; “Wanted—Canadian Criticism,” 25, 31–3, 155 Smith, Kay, 72, 120, 130, 162, 170, 316; “Footnote to the Lord’s

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338 Prayer,” 120; Footnote to the Lord’s Prayer, 162 Solway, Dave, 232 Songs of the Great Dominion, 250 Sophocles, 10 Souster, Lia, xli Souster, Raymond, xiv, xv, xvii, xxi, xxv, xli, 47, 56, 60, 72, 74–5, 84, 113, 114, 118, 126, 129, 141, 142, 145, 146–7, 151, 155, 160, 162, 166, 167, 170, 172, 173, 200, 209, 210, 221, 232, 241–2, 245–6, 270, 271, 276, 278, 280, 282, 289, 300–1, 315, 316; The Colour of the Times: The Collected Poems of Raymond Souster, 241, 245; “Easter Sunday,” 242; “Flight of the Roller Coaster,” 242; Go To Sleep, World, 114; “Rainbow over Lake Simcoe,” 242; Selected Poems, 278; When We Are Young, 74 Spasm, 224 Spender, Stephen, 54, 81, 117, 118, 164, 282, 308 Stein, Gertrude, 219 Stephens, James, 28; Collected Poems, 28 Stevens, Wallace, 29–30 Stratford Festival, 236, 237 Stringer, Arthur, 3, 4, 5–9, 19, 20; “Autumn,” 19; “The Nocturne,” 19; “One Night in the North West,” 19; Open Water, 3, 19 Sutherland, Betty, xxxv, 315, 316 Sutherland, John, xviii, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxxv, xli, 45–6, 47–61, 65, 66–76, 80–3, 85–6, 107–9, 110,

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113–14, 115, 116–22, 141, 155, 161–2, 166, 209, 210, 220, 221, 239, 270, 280, 281, 314, 315–16; brief to Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 77–9; and colonialism in Canadian poetry, 55, 56, 57–9, 60; and conversion to Catholicism, 45, 82, 113, 162, 210; and criticism of A.J.M. Smith, 45–53, 81, 84, 162; Introduction to Other Canadians, 45, 47–61, 84, 120, 307; and Marxism/socialism, 45, 47, 56, 57–8, 61, 81, 119, 120–1, 161–2; and nature poets, 55–6, 60; and Other Canadians, 45, 114, 119–20, 121, 130, 161, 162; “The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry,” 81, 115, 116–22; The Poetry of E.J. Pratt: A New Interpretation, 80; and poets of the 1940s, 55, 56–7, 58, 59–60; and rejection of modernism, 115; and religious element in Canadian poetry, 47, 52, 53, 55, 81, 115, 120–1; and review of Robert Finch’s Poems, 107–9, 209; and two traditional schools in Canadian poetry, 45, 47–51, 55 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 12, 103 Sylvestre, Guy, 259 Tagore, Rabindranath, 13 Tallman, Warren, 295 Tamarack Review, 65, 114, 204, 211, 222, 223, 225, 239, 243, 249

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 Tate, Allen, 211 Taylor, Frances Beatrice, 150 Téangadoir, 226–7 Teasdale, Sara, 17; “But Not to Me,” 17; Love Songs, 17; “Summer Night, Riverside,” 17 Ten Canadian Poets, 280 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 12, 34, 52, 103 Thibaudeau, Colleen, 71, 168 This Quarter, 4, 314 Thomas, Dylan, 54, 118, 164, 165, 167, 189, 197, 280; “Altarwise by owl-light,” 189, 197 Thompson, Francis, 10 Time, 211, 232 Times Literary Supplement, 211 Tish, 84, 204, 205, 223, 224, 226, 227, 271, 292, 293–5, 301; Tish group of poets, 84, 156, 205, 232, 292, 293–4 Toronto, 114, 245–6; Toronto poets, 270, 277 Tracey, Neil, 95 transition, 36, 207 Trehearne, Brian, 320 Trilling, Lionel, xvi, xvii Trobar, 224 Trottier, Pierre, 255; “Femme aux couleurs de mon pays,” 255 True Feelers, 198 Tupper, Kathryn Munro, 150 Turnbull, Gael, 168, 171, 173, 237, 238, 271, 275, 281 20th Century Canadian Poetry, 156, 157–9, 173 Tynan, Katherine, 10 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 194

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339 United States, poetry of, xv, xvi, xviii, xx, 12, 22, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 46, 57, 69, 81, 82, 84, 88, 92– 3, 96, 97–8, 101, 104, 205, 210, 223; and the Beat poets, xvi, 231, 287, 288, 289, 292; and the Black Mountain poets, 294, 318; “little magazines” in, 208, 212, 213, 224; and modernism, 231, 234, 270, 277, 287–9, 301; tradition and influence of, 47, 59, 60, 84, 142, 164–5, 168, 170, 271 Unit of Five, 129, 130, 160, 161, 167 University Gazette (McGill), 24 University of Toronto Press, 66, 237, 313n1; Literature of Canada series, 313n1 University of Toronto Quarterly, 70, 114, 126; “Letters in Canada,” 70, 114, 128 Valéry, Paul, 36, 183 Values, 198 Verhaeren, Émile, 36 Viereck, Peter, 162 Virgil, 51 Voices, 4 Voices of Victory, 98–100; “Canadian Crusade,” 99; “Recompense,” 99 Wace, Robert, 6; “Le Brut d’Angleterre,” 6 Waddington, Miriam, 74, 118, 120, 162, 166, 167–8, 209, 210, 221, 237, 276, 316; Green World, 74, 162, 167 Waddington, Patrick, 209, 210, 276

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340 Wah, Fred, 294, 301 Walden, 194 Walker, David, 258, 261 Walton, George, 238, 239, 273–4 Waterloo Review, 270 Watson, Albert Durrant, 116; Our Canadian Literature (series), 116, 123 Watson, Wilfred, 84, 274 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 9 Weaver, Robert, 65, 80–3, 211, 232, 236, 243 Webb, Phyllis, xx, 85, 168, 171, 172, 210, 238, 243, 275, 281 Webber, Gordon, 72 Weintraub, William, 320; City Unique, 320 Wells, Henry, 54 Wells, H.G., 180–1; Kipps, 180–1 Werfel, Franz, 36 Weston, Jessie Laidlay, 127; From Ritual to Romance, 127 Whalley, George, xl, 114, 237, 274; No Man Is an Island, 114 Whitman, Walt, 12–13, 14, 37, 59, 93, 104, 146, 296; Leaves of Grass, 12

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Whittier, John Greenleaf, 93 Widdows, P.F., 249 Wieners, John, xix Wilkinson, Anne, 162, 170, 171, 172, 174, 210, 237, 277, 281–2, 285, 316; Counterpoint to Sleep, 162, 171 Williams, William Carlos, 156, 172, 223, 224, 231, 233–4, 242, 281, 301, 318; on Irving Layton, 233–4 Wilson, Colin, 231; The Outsider, 231 Woodcock, George, 271, 286–7 Wordsworth, William, 12, 34, 168, 290 Wreford, James, 56, 57, 72, 104, 118, 120, 126, 129, 160, 165, 170, 277, 278, 279, 282; Of Time and the Lover, 120, 160, 165 Wylie, Elinor, 219 Yeats, William Butler, 29, 46, 85, 129, 164, 180, 206, 270 Yes: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, xv, xvii, 156, 205, 211, 221, 239, 272, 276, 313n1 Yugen, 224

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