In a recent count of book‑publishing poets writing in Canada in English I was able to put down no less than fifty names. In making up this list, simply in the act of writing down names in their geo­graphical, chronological, or various literary orders, a series of pat­terns seemed to emerge, a map of the current literary scene. Looking at these patterns and groups, one could easily see relations between them; our poetry is more self‑contained and unified at present than either English or American poetry can be, partly because we are a small community. (The one real divide is between the French and English language literatures; but we are even now in the midst of setting up closer relations with French‑Canadian poets, e.g. through the translations of Turnbull, Scott, Glassco and others.) So that an outline of this group picture—though it may prove only a superficial method of classification—should prove helpful to the general reader of Canadian poetry, especially for the understanding of any of the new recent developments.

The first group that seems to fall into place on the page is that of what I would like to call, with a niggling motive, our Inactive Older Poets. These include well‑known poets such as Leo Kennedy, Robert Finch, A. M. Klein, our G.O.M. Dr. E. J. Pratt (through illness), A. J. M. Smith and F. R. Scott. There will probably be a roar of objection as I mention some of these names; but the making of anthologies (which is Mr. Smith’s special province) is not equivalent to writing new poetry; and Professor Scott’s Eye of the Needle, valuable though it may be in getting him into heaven, is really a compilation of his best satirical poetry of some time ago. There is no knowing what some of our poets may be doing in secret; there is a difference at any rate between the occasional new poem one sees from these defunct poets and the constant stream of new work that any Canadian editor gets from the next group, which I call our Active Older Poets.

Louis Dudek circa 1950s

This second group consists of some poets who have been on the literary scene for several decades, and others who, despite their age, are newcomers. In the former class, we have W. W. E. Ross, a prolific and active wit, who first appeared in the 1920s, in Marianne Moore’s Dial, published two books in the early thirties, then contributed frequently to John Sutherland's Northern Review and Crawley’s Contemporary Verse, and now sends poetry to the magazines, Yes, Delta, and others. Such creative continuity seems to contradict the Canadian tradition, whereby poets become sclerotic with their thirtieth year. (F. R. Scott, of course, has been praised for a similar record of writing and doing; but his poetic output has been more spotty and sporadic than critics admit, and I have put him in the Inactive group as a disciplinary measure.) At any rate, here is a bit of recent Ross poetry:

Why worry about

the world or the bomb

while the well heeled, the wealthy,

preserve their aplomb?

Let outer storms swirl

let seas toss and pitch

here God’s in his heaven;

all’s well with the rich!

It was almost as if

a saintliness

(preempted by Eliot)

descended to bless

the eager expectant

multitude

condemned, though deserving

to ways that are rude.

Do murky clouds hover?

Are seas black as pitch?

Is it well with the world?

All’s well with the rich!

Among the newcomers to the Active Older Poets, we have Dr. George Walton of Calgary, R. G. Everson of Montreal, and Goodridge MacDonald of the same city. Some of these may be known to a few readers as anything but newcomers: MacDonald has published two Ryerson Chapbooks over the years, and Everson appeared in Poetry (Chicago) way back in 1928. But these poets seem to have taken a prominent place in the Canadian picture only recently, and they appear frequently in our poetry magazines, so that their emergence is a phenomenon worth noting.

The peculiarity of these older boys seems to be a somewhat stiff jointed traditionalism of manner combined with an aggressive awareness of contemporary attitudes and a will to change. They are inclined to be eccentric wits, like Ross; but they can also be serious and tortured behind their mature sophistication of front: Everson and MacDonald write not only of the tragedy of age, but of The Age. All three are also capable of a wise humour and humaneness that sets them apart from their feverish and irritable younger contemporaries. Here is a sample from Everson:

This May I walk with a caracole child

Whose blossoms loiter, driven by gales.

She watches darting slowpoke swallows;

Her chipmunks flourish otiose tails.

Jane tears fulltilt through motionless day.

I pause. I reach—for there goes May.

Over this deft, lighter mood (resembling Ross) these poets may bring to bear the anguished tones of a later generation, as in this fragment from Goodridge MacDonald:

Better to scramble down funnels far from day;

Wander with objective misplaced, directions awry,

This escalator world, then grasp again at sky,

Clouds, houses, people, glimpsed in another day.

Better, perhaps, these underworld implications—

Spectre at window of train on the other track.

This is our private nightmare. Let no illusions

modify its repetitive impact . . .

The virtues of these poets lie in the intelligent comment of an older generation on the passing crisis. Their defects are in technique, which creaks and relapses into mechanical outworn rhythms, but their independence is clear; and so is their relation to the younger groups. These are poets who, born in an earlier time, are still alive to the needs and pressures of poetry in the present. They have caught on to the movement of the younger people, and are creating their own expression in the new milieu of time. Books by Dr. Walton and Everson are now in the offing: they will be interesting and, I hope, as widely‑read and reviewed as the first books by the college poets. They are usually far better also—redolent of experi­ence, wit, and wisdom. Their authors are the “faters who play ball.”

Akin to the above, and variously intersecting other groups, there are some poets who may be described as English Traditionalists, either by education in England, or by conservative upbringing or origin. Not all of these poets are old in age by any means, but since they tend to be unconverted in their methods or their ideas from the boundaries of convention in English poetry, they are clearly related to the older poetry and poets. Among this group I would place Dr. Roy Daniells on the West Coast, Philip Child, George Whalley, R. A. D. Ford, Wilfred Watson, Douglas Le Pan, and Anthony Frisch of Toronto. It is a somewhat miscellaneous group; its traditionalism is no longer the “native tradition” of Carman and Roberts, which still plagued Canadian poetry in the twenties and thirties; it is a traditionalism like that of C. Day‑Lewis and Edwin Muir in England, traceable back through Wilfred Owen and Thomas Hardy to the nineteenth century. Here is Wilfred Watson writing about an amateur painter:

I don’t know where he saw them

The trees and flowers he grew

But I am not the naturalist

Of all the things that are

Perhaps he looks into his heart

Or into his colour pot

Perhaps he never sees a thing

Unless that thing is not

Perhaps his observation

Is rooted in his broom

And first he sweeps the world away

To paint it in his room.

A care for traditional metrics is characteristic of such poetry, a high seriousness, and a romantic anguish beneath the surface as the core of meaning. These poets may be inclined to heaviness and dullness. They are also among the most intelligent of the poets, knowledgeable, well‑bred, inner‑directed gentlemen. They are formid­able hostile forces to the troops of the young who want to write with radical new energy, with negative intent. Fundamentally, these traditionalists are our true conservatives.

Canadian critics in the past have been strongly inclined to favour this last group. Criticism is always more conservative than the creative faculty; and in this respect Canadian critics have not been of great help in moving forward with the poetry of the last twenty years. But this point will strike more forcibly when we have looked at the other groups in this survey.

Hardly a separate category, but one illustrating a condition which imposes some uniformity of effect, and which has always had a bearing on the frail growth of a “Canadian literature,” is that group of poets whom we might consider as Migrants. Either coming as visitors, these poets remain in Canada for only a few years; or, born here, they leave early to live abroad. In the past, Heavysege, whose principal work, Saul was probably written entirely in England, belonged to this category; and, with less damage to their Canadianism, Carman and Roberts. Of the living poets, Robert Service and Patrick Anderson are notoriously borderline Canadians. Others now living abroad include A. J. M. Smith, L. A. Mackay, and Kenneth Leslie (of the Inactive Older Group); Ralph Gustafson, P. K. Page, and R. A. D. Ford of the Forties Poets; Phyllis Webb, Gael Turnbull, and Daryl Hine (temporarily), of the Younger Poets. Norman Levine has spent formative years in England; Peter Miller and Ken McRobbie, exciting poets of recent appearance, have also been educated for poetry abroad.

These geographical contacts are of course highly important and useful in a poet’s development. In Peter Miller, the combination of English sensibility with the new acquired attitudes and experiences of Canada makes for a poetry of special gusto. And difficult as it may be to define the “Canadian character” of our literature, it is an unchallenged fact that for those born here living in Canada makes possible a root‑nourished development which transplantation abroad either changes or destroys. The poets who have suffered most in their work by removal would seem to be Smith and Page, among our living poets; those who have advantageously changed the core of their poetry by migration are Gustafson, Mackay, and recently Turnbull (a Scotsman by origin, and an American in any case). Daryl Hine, now on a Canada Foundation Fellowship, may test the theory whether travel grants to poets are good for poetry or decidedly harmful: this gifted young poet does not propose to return to Canada in any immediate future. I think a few years abroad is good for the imagination; protracted living, no matter how high the pay, is fatal for the minor talent.

Criss‑crossing the chronological and properly literary patterns, the literary magazines have created a certain grouping over the past two decades. Poets often occur in the environment of literary magazines; and although it is likely, as in the case of Contemporary Verse that the existence of a group of poets makes a magazine appear, the reverse also happens. (In modern poetry, the “discovery” of poets by magazines would almost seem to be an act of special creation without which the poet could never have written.) In Contemporary Verse in the 1940s appeared Anne Marriott, Dorothy Livesay, Floris McLaren, and Earle Birney in the west; in First Statement in Montreal, Layton, the Waddingtons, Souster, and myself; in Fiddlehead recently Robert Rogers, Elizabeth Brewster, and Fred Cogswell. All these are regional products of magazine activity. It is rare that a magazine itself establishes a unifying style for such a group of writers, though a common regional quality may be observed. The point to conclude is that at present we need magazines in several regions to cultivate local talents: we need a mid‑western poetry magazine, a west coast magazine, and a Maritimes poetry magazine. (Montreal at present has four mags—Yes, Delta, Prism, and Forge—too many for one region, and none of these seems to be willing to move out.)

We now come to the central design in the Canadian poetry pattern. It consists of three main groups, each of which may be further subdivided into antithetic splinters or individual poets who compose it. These three groups are simply chronological: I will call them the Survivors of the Forties, Les Jeunes of Yesterday, and Les Jeunes of Today. The relations between them constitute the literary activity of the present; and even poets who are uninformed of the recent past are subject to the currents of action and reaction. Eli Mandel, one of Les Jeunes of Yesterday, deliberately fled Montreal and the would-be influence of the Montreal poets; Daryl Hine would seem to have no relation at all to Canadian poetry; but I believe both poets are equally connected fatefully to the activity in Canada since 1940. Our poetry has at least this much organic national integrity: it may not have an obvious Canadian character, but it has a necessary genetic cord attaching it to the native literature and its development.

Of the Survivors of the Forties, one distinguishes those in Montreal from those outside that city. From 1927 (Scott’s and Smith’s beginning) to 1949 (the date of Reaney’s The Red Heart), the modern movement was almost entirely centred in Montreal. Apart from the poets already mentioned around the magazine Contemporary Verse, the key names in our poetry appeared mainly in Montreal; since 1917 this has perhaps been less true, which would mean that the new poetry has spread more widely to other Canadian regions. (Delta today receives good modern poems from Sydney, N.S., from Kirkland Lake, and from the mid‑west; so do Fiddlehead and Yes.) The division, however, between the “Montreal school” and poetry from other quarters before 1947 is necessary to start with.

Outside Montreal, the modernists who began on their own hook possess perforce a great deal of personal vigour, and a certain isolated formidability; they are also more traditional than the Montrealers, nearer to the English Traditionalist Group already discussed. Earle Birney is an individualist of considerable energy; his real father is E. J. Pratt, as one may gather from the method of “Pacific Door” and from the ideas in “Vancouver Lights.” Traditional metrics and moral preoccupations are in the back‑ground of a well‑informed contemporary mind, a poet who knows thoroughly the best English and American contemporary models. Lines such as these are fairly characteristic of Birney:

On this mountain’s brutish forehead, with terror of space

I stir, of the changeless night and the stark ranges

of nothing, pulsing down from beyond and between

the fragile planets. We are a spark beleaguered

by darkness; this twinkle we make in a corner of emptiness . . .

Anne Marriott was a much frailer talent; she can hardly be said to have survived. Dorothy Livesay has found the going hard: socialist realism lifted her, like her model C. Day‑Lewis, out of the ruck of Georgianism; but having lapsed from political convictions, her poetry has lost power. Ronald Hambleton has shown a similar affiliation and lack of development. Margaret Avison is a more individualistic sport than any of these. She has published very little—one poem, I sometimes think, entitled “The Butterfly”—and her modernism, like Gustafson’s, is eccentric, with roots in some foreign exotic soil. She is very much a product of Toronto’s tense straitjacket culture, in the same ways that Reaney and Anne Wilkinson are. James Wreford, now silent, was a British colonial settled in Canada, a “modern” poet only in the way that the Orkneys poet Edwin Muir, or Roy Campbell, might be. Modernism in Canada, or anywhere, cannot be an individualistic chance occurrence; it is part of a conscious indigenous movement like the growth of “American poetry” in the nineteenth century, or even like “English literature” in the fourteenth and later. I have treated somewhat harshly these poets of the Forties outside Montreal in order to underline their doubtful showing as a coherent body and their eccentricity as individuals. (“Eccentricity” may seem to be an odd criterion for criticism, especially in modern art movements; but I would be willing to defend this critical point in a more theoretical discussion. I think that no great art is eccentric, although it must be original.) By contrast, the Montreal group has much greater consistency of character and sense of common direction. There may be no “school” in Montreal; but the poets of Montreal seem to share a few principles on the social direction and on the experimental direction—toward natural speech—of modern poetry; and in this they must inevitably provide the central drive to the national literature in its movement away from nineteenth century modes.

A. J. M. Smith, being a Migrant (see above), was divorced early in his career from the cosmopolitan-native melting-pot of Montreal. Klein, in his poems of the thirties in the Canadian Forum, and Scott, provided the realistic shape and some of the forthright language that was to be characteristic of Montreal. Klein, of course, spoiled his language with rhetoric; and Scott thinned out his message into brittle wit. Scott and Smith, “meticulous moderns,” began to chip and polish the first new stones; but a heavy hammer‑like stroke is what the Montreal poetry was bound to develop. It was not until Layton appeared, and Souster (from wherever he was stationed with the RAF), and myself, that what was “political” before became truly Canadian and realistic modern poetry; and the language corresponded thereto as Canadian voice and rhythm, not as English metre. (Since Souster appeared in First Statement, and has continued his close association with the Montreal poets, I include him in this grouping, as other critics have done.) I would invite a comparison of Souster’s Selected Poems with Smith’s News of the Phoenix for use of language and for depiction of reality; or Layton’s Cold Green Element with Scott’s Overture; or my book Europe with either the Scott or the Smith book, or with Margaret Avison or James Wreford. Here are a few micro‑slides:

A bitter king in anger to be gone

From fawning courtier and doting queen

Flung hollow sceptre and gilt crown away,

And breaking bound of all his counties green

He made a meadow in the northern stone

And breathed a palace of inviolable air. . . 

(A. J. M. Smith)

It seems that rifles fire blanks or they’re all cock‑eyed

to hell like the kind in shooting‑galleries,

And shells merely nudge you on the shoulder if you’ve over-

slept, or jungle your nerves a bit so you get sick‑leaves

for nothing at all,

And flame‑throwers are just pretty little Roman candles that

give the most wonderful lighting effects after dark,

And the bayonet comes in handy if the roast beef is a trifle rare.

(Raymond Souster)

Strip for this venture forth, my pretty man.

Props and property are caving in.

The roar of masonry and smothered towns,

Ice cap colitudes on money marts

And four winds out of untested skies—

This is the thunder of the still small voice.

(F. R. Scott)

God, when you speak, out of your mouth

drop the great hungry cities

whose firetrucks menace my dreams;

where Love, abandoned woman, hatless and void,

snares me with her thous and pities;

ambulances pick up my limbs.

(Irving Layton)

The sun upon the snow shows up

a superficial beauty that

coldness underneath the foot

here in the heart may well defeat.

His face, too, lights with seeming fire

and in his eyes the sun shines back

his lips are scarlet but the words

come from a blizzard north, are bleak . . .

(James Wreford)

Where the sea smashes

on the rocks at Bordighera;

simply for pleasure,

like the surf at Sete

alone, for miles and miles

of wind and sea‑washed

sand

a strip of land, where there is water on both sides

and a good road running by the sea—

lonely, we stopped and stripped

for the sweet salt surf, the sea

that took us in as though we were nothing . . .

(Louis Dudek)

I hope that I am not setting up, for the wrong motives, what is by chance the poetry of my friends (and my own) as deserving of special attention. So little has been written about Canadian poetry of the last twenty years (most of the critical surveys have stopped with Scott, Klein, Smith, and Birney in 1940) that the first outright descrip­tion of what should be quite obvious may appear as a thesis on the Ego. W. E. Collin wrote a volume of criticism about Scott, Klein, and Smith before any one of them had published a single book; and E. K. Brown followed with a second critical study very soon after. Desmond Pacey’s Ten Canadian Poets is the third book‑length study of these poets, Scott and Smith, who have each of them hardly produced enough to fill one thin book of original poetry in a lifetime of fame. The result is that this first generation of our modern poets has loomed very large. There has been an astonishing lag thereafter to deal squarely with the poets who followed, either the Montreal group, or those since 1949: it is as if the Scott‑Smith barrow of criticism were used as a convenient road‑block to the recognition of the true poetic style of Canada’s new poetry, for the thirties poets were surely only forerunners to the score and more poets who have followed, in a more forthright and uninhibited vein, to explore the reality of the twentieth century in poetry. To describe the groups that succeed the forties poets, it is necessary to assert the central position of the later part of the Montreal movement.

The activity of the forties in Montreal consisted of a fundamental opposition between two groups at that time: the poets of the magazine Preview and those of First Statement. Of the Preview group, Patrick Anderson was the leading member; at his feet sat F. R. Scott, P. K. Page, Bruce Ruddick, Neufville Shaw, and—at some distance apart—on his own coussin, Klein. Of this group none have survived but those who were poets before, namely Klein and Scott. (P. K. Page is perhaps a survivor; but her last book, though it received the Governor‑General’s Award, was a painful imitation of her earlier mannerisms, without any sign of breaking new ground. She was really a poet of the English Traditionalist group mentioned above, a group constantly over‑rated by our critics.) Of the First Statement group, the three principal poets—Layton, Dudek, Souster—who were characteristically rooted in Canadian life and speech, have continued to grow and write books, whatever their several defects. Hugh Kenner writing in Poetry (Chicago) has recently named “the Layton‑Dudek‑Souster group” in Canada, with several others in England and America, as constituting “the poetry of the 1950s.” I am sure that Canadian critics will pop their eyes out—and look under their nose again! But years ago, John Sutherland, the aggressive editor of Northern Review, made a similar claim for this poetry in Canada, in his Preface to Other Canadians; Sutherland has earned his place as a critic, but his Preface has more or less gone by the board, as most Canadian literary claims do unless approved by someone abroad.

First Statement, which became Northern Review, was clearly the channel of a native modern poetry of some promise; whereas Preview was the engrafted English stock (of Audenism, Day‑Lewis, Thomas) of which we have a multitude of withered limbs from way back. As Dr. Lorne Pierce put it, and Sutherland repeatedly printed on the back of Northern Review: “No nation can achieve its true destiny that adopts without profound and courageous reasoning and selection the thoughts and styles of another.” First Statement in the forties had naturalized the modern styles to Canada.

Let us move, then, to the next group in the pattern, Les Jeunes of Yesterday. These are the poets James Reaney, Anne Wilkinson (both of Toronto), Phyllis Webb (of Victoria, B.C.), Gael Turnbull (from Scotland, then USA), and Eli Mandel (from Saskatchewan). Three of these stayed for a time in or near Montreal, but it is clear that they converge from a variety of geographical points. Also, they lack a common centre; they appeared on the scene during that interim when Sutherland had turned against the modern poets and when the Montreal “school” had scattered somewhat. They can hardly be considered part of the Montreal impetus: Wilkinson and Reaney are eccentrics of the kind we have already considered; Miss Webb would also be in this pass, but for a background of political (CCF) activity and some influence from the Montreal group in her poetry. Here is a sample of her nervous manner:

Whether pain is simple as razors edging the fleshy cage,

or whether pain raves with sharks inside the ribs,

it throws a bridge of value to belief

where, towards or away from, moves intense traffic.

Or, should the eyes focus to cubes and lights of pain

and the breasts’ exquisite asterisks breed circular grief,

this bird of death is radiant and complex,

speeds fractional life over value to belief . . .

Turnbull has borrowed something from William Carlos Williams and from the latest French manner in his fantasy‑creating. Eli Mandel is important for a new mythologizing style displayed in Trio, a style already suggested by Reaney and Miss Wilkinson. But that aspect belongs properly to the last and most recent group, Les Jeunes of Today.

The implication here is that the young of yesterday—Reaney to Webb—were really a digression, or even a regression of a kind; interesting, but not very promising. Reaney was the most sensational talent of the group. His recent book, A Suit of Nettles, following the all‑edition consuming Red Heart, is a crashing disappointment, a pedantic study of metres and an exercise in unnatural comic‑allegorical postures. Miss Wilkinson has written some of the most tense and beautiful short poems of the past decade, but she has an undisciplined, hit‑or‑miss imagination, with little mastery of her emotions or method; her effects are haphazard, and she is not likely to discover a smoothness all her own. She is too nervous and afraid of losing her lucky strokes in a sustained and simplified poetry: she lacks sufficient knowledge of her own process and its direction to make it of general usefulness. These two poets, Reaney and Wilkinson, are, however, the most exciting of the Group of Yesterday; and they are still here. One never knows until a poet is dead.

Les Jeunes of Today are very much alive. They are, some of them, poets of immense talent and individual interest; and they have a consistent relation to the forties poets—sometimes a relation of opposition and reaction—which gives them unity and purpose as a body. To define what this unity is, one would first have to recall some aspects of the forties group which bear on the younger people’s predicament, for it is by the absence of the moral and intellectual assurances of the earlier poetry that the recent poetry has to be explained.

The forties poetry, as we know, was utopian in its political idealism (as the poets of England in the thirties were); it was angry poetry, from a sense of frustration in this idealism (unlike the Angry Young Men and the San Francisco poets today); it was a poetry of pity, for the oppressed and the unemployed (as may be seen in Spender’s early poetry). These attitudes of social idealism, of anger, and of pity, were sometimes damaging, when they led to ideological theses and dogmatizing in poetry; but more important, they channeled the ideal striving which is natural to poets, and they provided a moral and emotional coherence to their poetical expression. They created a spirit of confidence and a drive for discovery and for knowledge. They provided motive for the perfection of technique (the true technique that consists in skill in achieving a real end, not just in making a poem); and established the test of poetry as its total effect, even its pragmatic effect, a criterion that, like “popular appeal,” can never be a bad test to go by. These characteristics may be found in all the poets of the forties, not only in the Montreal groups but in varying extent in Anderson, Wreford, Hambleton, Layton, Souster, Dorothy Livesay. The loss of these assurances (and that is a familiar story) prepared the predicament of the 1950s. Les Jeunes of Today are the inheritors of a period of political and moral disillusionment; their effort to solve that predicament is the clue to the varieties of imagination they display.

For the young poets beginning to write today, the political ideals of the forties poets have been destroyed in the holocaust of World War II, and what was left of that politics was finally discredited in the emergence of an Organization society based on militarism and efficiency, a society which is accelerating its regulatory and standardizing techniques everywhere around us. “Socialism”—or the Welfare State—has vanished as an ideal before the reality of mass communications systems serving the New State and the centralized corporations, while an abundance‑consumption culture tries to absorb the goods poured out by accelerated and overexpanded industry. (The growth of indus­trialism is driven by the expanding principle of “faster” and “more”; it cannot at present arrest itself. How far can it go?) Military budgets of astronomical proportions are now a regulatory means (controlled waste) of keeping the machines whirling at maximum speed, while the threat of a devastating war guarantees an unquestioning credulity in the populace, a passivity in the well‑informed. Advertising has brainwashed the public intelligence and drained the entertainments almost entirely of the genuine arts. Education is a “preparation” for this life. The future looks even more ominous: societies—soviet or capitalist—will be more “cybernetic” than ever, more mechanically efficient, dehumanized, and unreal, than anything we have dreamed; the free individual, the artist, if he exists, will be a secret misfit, a demented servant, working against the speedy senseless drive and fury of machines.

Perhaps I overstate the case somewhat, perhaps I understate it. It cannot be described convincingly in any moderate, reasonable language: the language of hysteria, as practised by the San Francisco poets, or by the Montreal poets (who anticipated San Francisco and the Angry Young Men) is the only speech we know.

But the newest generation of Canadian poets is not even capable of social anger, or of pity. Social protest has gone beyond these emotions and presents a blank face on all such real issues. The frame of the new poetry is tragedy: the tragedy of life itself, of humanity, suffering an incurable condition. This is the premise I read in the obscure cosmological imagery and the total negation of Leonard Cohen’s and Daryl Hine’s poetry at its best. The same echoes resound in Al Purdy’s poems, in Ellenbogen’s, in D. G. Jones, and in the newer poets like Peter Krohn, Moscovitch, and Acorn. Even a few fragments will help to establish the tone and theme:

In this time of not yet famine

when children are going mad

with blood and bone

and murder on the parlour rug

when adults are playing chess

with guns drums and the young

and death fails to discriminate

between colours and flags

the harvests of the young

turn grey . . .

(George Ellenbogen)

And we are now the only wonders here

where home’s that place years and years behind us,

and a thousand miles from home is where we are.

Past glories cannot pardon present hunger

and a miraculous constellation does not change

passion, sorrow and the threat of war;

only we are different, having lost

the comfort and isolation of our conduct,

those vices which made us proud, indifferent.

In us has died the world when we were children,

the implacable conscience and the swift decision,

so we can wonder which way to go . . .

(Daryl Hine)

A painful rededication, this Spring,

like the building of cathedrals between wars,

and masons at decayed walls;

and we are almost too tired to begin again

with miracles and leaves

and lingering on steps in sudden sun . . .

(Leonard Cohen)

Bloody and stained, and with mothers’ cries,

These silly babes were born;

And again bloody, again stained, again with cries,

Sharp from this life were torn.

A waste of milk, a waste of seed;

Though white the forest stands

Where Herod bleeds his rage away

And wrings his bloodless hands.

(Jay Macpherson)

The tragic sense in these poets—paralleled by Layton’s recent well‑nigh demented poetry—is accompanied in Canada by actual comforts and complacencies that result from a high standard of living and an economy of accelerated efficiency. Hence we have the paradox of an apocalyptic mythological poetry combined with a certain complacent detachment and non‑engagement of manner—sometimes even of dilettantism. Yet in these poets, an intellectual disorder (not only in politics, but in morality and in religion) leads to a primitive mythological effort to organize chaos. This, when it is not only a game, proceeds from a state of mind fundamentally disturbed, and bordering on the deeply neurotic, or worse. Poets like Hine, Ellenbogen, Mandel, Cohen, and Purdy, grasp at a confusion of symbolic images, often a rag‑bag of classical mythology, in the effort to organize a chaos too large for them to deal with in the light of reason. At the same time, an irresponsibility encouraged by actual comforts and surrounding abundance introduces an element of aimless enervation, sometimes of perverse exhibitionism, which is the psychological compensation for a sense of guilt and inadequacy. (I suspect that this view of the young English‑Canadian poets may apply in part also to the young French Canadians published in the Editions Hexagone and Erta, providing a first connecting link with our French-speaking compatriots. What I have read of them reveals a parallel symbolism.)

Within this range of youthful poetry, where it is hardly possible to say what is permanent, what is ephemeral, there is a division between the poets more entirely committed to the mythologizing method—Hine, Macpherson, Mandel—and those still attached to the method of social realism. The former, who are related to James Reaney and Anne Wilkinson, may be called the surrealist branch; the latter, the political, or sociological. To this latter branch, which is more closely derived from the First Statement group of the forties, belong the majority of the recent poets: Jean Arsenault, Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, George Ellenbogen, Moscovitch, Gnarowski, Lachs, D. G. Jones. Some of them may be considered still unregenerate Leftists: but then Acorn, in that class, is in his thirties and is really a remnant, in age, from the older generation. Properly, these new realistic poets express a sardonic bitterness in their social criticism, a realism without any utopian idealism to support it. Their harshness and their rage are more disturbing, and more menacing, than the social criticism of the earlier generation. They are social critics without a cause: one expects at any moment that they will discover their real purpose—is to destroy.

And these social poets are not essentially different from the archetype‑seeking mythologists. Both branches of the new poetry suffer from the same deep sense of emptiness, of lies and of aimlessness; of impending ruin, of impending dehumanization; in short, a sense of political and moral demoralization. They express these things either by way of myth, or by concrete illustration and allusion. Their greatest need is a sign of hope, a positive sign. But that sign may have to come, not from any individual, but from without, from the world stage where the tragic drama of despair is being re‑enacted—and then, of course, at the right time, from within themselves.