Poetry today is not a popular art; Canadian poetry is even less known than English poetry in general; but as art, it is poetry, not prose, which will in the end prove to be the successful literary medium of this century. We should by now begin to realize—what our news­paper reviewers don't even suspect—that the vast majority of books, novels mainly, that reach the public nowadays, have no real pretension and can never have any place as literature, as permanent art. Poetry, though ignored, is at least made to last. For this reason, a close look at the almost secret activity (so far as the public is concerned) of Canadian poets just now might bring the general reader a little closer to what is more real, even more immediate, than the long‑winded entertainments of fiction.

The first thing to observe is that in this country we have in the last decade and a half seen an amazing wave of creative work in poetry breaking into print. The period is analogous to, and superior to, the first outburst of poetry in Canada during the eighties and nineties of the last century. The following is a partial list of our poets who have come out with their first books within the last fifteen years: A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott, Robert Finch, Earle Birney, A. M. Klein, Anne Marriott, P. K. Page, Patrick Anderson, Irving Layton, Ronald Hambleton, Kay Smith, Raymond Souster, James Wreford, Douglas Le Pan, Anne Wilkinson, James Reaney—and an additional half-dozen recognized poets in the younger age group.

To anyone who has even a bare anthology acquaintance with these names and the work they stand for it is hardly necessary to interpret what this means. Canada has just produced a literature of its own in poetry in this century. Taking this with the late‑romantic verse of the eighties and nineties— Carman, Roberts, Lampman, D. C. Scott, Wilfred Campbell, Isabella Crawford—and the work of Drummond, Service and Pratt in between, Canadian poetry can now stand without a blush, though still a junior, beside English and American poetry of the last seventy‑five years. What we need is a critic who will take a survey of our present stature.

Even before the present poetry movement had declared itself, two critics appeared ready to do service to Canadian poetry: W. E. Collin (The White Savannahs, 1936) and E. K. Brown (On Canadian Poetry, 1943). They wrote their intelligent analytic criticism of the modern movement in Canadian poetry before most of the poets listed above had appeared in book form. (Collin, in fact, worked from the manuscript of New Provinces.) Today, when twentieth‑century poetry native to Canada has been put on record through books, anthologies, readings, radio broadcasts, and even TV, we do not have a single critic with the necessary equipment who has been willing to undertake the task of interpreting this poetry seriously, analytically. The chapters on poetry in Desmond Pacey’s Creative Writing in Canada are the best work to date in that direction, but Pacey’s is a very simplified treatment.

Our newspaper and magazine critics are ignorant of the poetry they try to write about when they do try. High school and university teachers, for the most part, are too far behind the spirit of our poetry, too timid and conservative altogether, to dare make an honest statement about literature or its relation to life today. Students in most colleges never get the chance to find out: the libraries don’t even have the necessary books. And do the professors of English in our provincial colleges (both senses) read or understand the poetry of this century? Or are they still “anti‑Eliot,” “anti‑modern”? Is the litera­ture they recognize as the best of our time Rupert Brooke, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Masefield, and now at last—Edwin Muir? Don’t blush, gentlemen!

(Those who don’t believe this may read Professor Rhodenizer’s crackerjack article—against the moderns—in the Dalhousie Review for autumn, 1953.)

Canada needs a few bright young critics who will roll up their sleeves and make criticism in this country their job. Some of those now plugging for academic credits with ambitious essays on John Donne or T. S. Eliot’s concept of “time past” and “time future” might do well to turn their eyes on “time present” and read News of the Phoenix, or The Red Heart, or the two recent books by Layton, Love the Conqueror Worm and In the Midst of My Fever.

There are critical finds to be made: berries where no one has picked before. One of the things about which our critics—the few tired voices one hears—are wrong, is the notion that the activity in recent poetry started suddenly in 1940 and finished suddenly in 1945. A bit of reflection on the probable historical position of the new poetry should make it apparent that the activity of 1940 was only a beginning. Modern rhythm, forms, diction, ideas and imagination, the characteristic attack of contemporary poetry on life, was bound to come to Canada; the thirties were preparing for it in the work of Klein, Scott, and Smith; the forties produced the printed books. This and the next few decades will show the expansion of this poetry in all directions; the process is now going on.

To test the issue, I would offer the reader books recently out, or just coming off the press: Trio, containing the first poems of Gael Turnbull, Phyllis Webb, and F. W. Mandel (Contact Press, 28 Mayfield Ave., Toronto); Reaney's The Red Heart (McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto); Anne Wilkinson’s Counterpoint to Sleep (First Statement Press, 2475 Van Horne Ave., Montreal); my own long poem Europe (recently published by Contact Press); or Layton’s In the Midst of My Fever (Divers Press, Mallorca, Spain). Among other things, the reader will find that Canadian poets at this moment, in the midst of world chaos, do “have something to say.” And in this respect they are unlike recent British and American poets.

E. J. Pratt, for example, has something to say, however unprepossessing and stereotyped the message at the core may seem to some: Towards the Last Spike comes on the heels of a long list of whacking solid books, reminding us of a reputation that will not easily be questioned. Earle Birney’s Trial of a City places modern life on trial before a court which includes William Langland, an old‑time sailor, and an Indian Chief—pretty good “tests to go by” as Robert Frost would say. A. M. Klein published The Second Scroll in 1941, a novel and poetry about world Jewry and the Jewish faith. Books have recently come off the press from the pens of Ronald Hambleton, Patrick Anderson, Douglas Le Pan, and the three heads of Cerberus—Souster, Layton and myself—all of these as angry and concerned about life values and the realities as ever, and no longer to be shelved away easily as “socialistic,” or “imitative” of English trends. Others, moreover, F. R. Scott, P. K. Page and Anne Wilkinson, have new books ready for publication. The generation of poets who started out fifteen years ago are still producing, and most of them have shown some development in ideas and forms. Also, a dozen new poets have appeared on the scene in the magazines: these deserve a brief examination.

The new poets are little known because they have mainly appeared in obscure places. In the last few years Northern Review has provided less and less outlet to enterprising work of the kind I would call modern, i.e. continuing the lines opened up by poets as varied as Cummings, Williams, Pound, Marianne Moore, Eliot, Auden, et cetera. (The editor of that magazine has recently declared in print that he favors such writers as C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and Roy Campbell, rather than Joyce, Eliot or Pound!) The new Canadian poets have therefore looked elsewhere, and have gone unobserved even by the small audience which exists for poetry in Canada. Contemporary Verse has ceased publication. To make up for the losses in magazines, however, The Fiddlehead (Fredericton, N.B.) appeared in print last year: CIV/n, edited by Aileen Collins, was started in Montreal; and Contact was started by Souster in Toronto, a mimeographed magazine with a printed cover—as Preview and First Statement were in their day. Souster’s Contact has brought to a handful of young poets in Canada the work of Origin magazine in the United States, and the poetry of Charles Olson, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley and other poets of an interesting group now working in the States. Our underlying position in Contact (as well as in CIV/n, the Montreal magazine) is one of sharp social criticism, but not a criticism based on political or economic grounds alone: it is a cultural attack, a criticism of contemporary life in the name of the whole range of liberal values; and the poetry that we make on this basis is as varied as the personalities of poets can be.

The poets who have appeared in these little magazines have, some of them, true talent and serious artistic purpose. Phyllis Webb (from Victoria, B.C.) is a young writer with a nervous, original style all her own; D. G. Jones (now to Kingston) is developing a skill in a formal style which is just the example we need; F. Fyfe (now in Hamilton) is a young poet with abundant energy and freedom, somewhat like James Reaney in this respect; Gael Turnbull (in Iroquois Falls, Ont.) writes whimsically and almost too wisely, but with an underlying moral earnestness and social concern which produce a unique combination; E. W. Mandel (St. John, Que.) handles Greek myths and legends as if they were contemporary facts, and uses them to interpret modern life realistically, almost violently, in their light; Leonard N. Cohen (Montreal), the most recent arrival, has a sensitive and imaginative mind, and a ballad‑maker’s imagination and voice. All this new poetry may be described as highly individualistic and imaginative, ranging into high fantasy rather than stooping to prosaic fact. It is a kind of poetry that began in Canada with James Reaney’s The Red Heart. It is extravagant at times; but it is no less objective in its implied antagonisms to existing culture than was the poetry of F. R. Scott or Earle Birney.

Of the older poets in Contact and CIV/n Patrick Anderson has contributed some prose; Ralph Gustafson has given examples of his usual skill; Souster has matured in emotional tone, but retained all the vivid intensity of his first books. Irving Layton, most important, has in the last few years shown a grasp of poetic complexity and a sense of human tragedy which puts him in the very first rank of Canadian poets. This must be seen in his recent books.

But in addition to all the recent and current books and the new poetry in magazines, anthologies can be taken as a barometer of activity. A. J. M. Smith’s anthology is to be reprinted in a new edition; and a re‑editing of the Ryerson anthology of Bliss Carman and Lorne Pierce as Canadian Poetry in English (Ryerson) has recently been published. Contact Press has put on record a new reading, or cross‑section, of the literature in Canadian Poems: 1850-1952; and Earle Birney, through Ryerson, has edited Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry, which for all its lack of balance in selection is a vital exhibition of our contemporary poetry. These books are creating a new audience for poetry in the universities and schools: at McGill alone, some 700 entering students every year are introduced to the principal Canadian writers through lectures and textbooks—a work started by Professor Arthur L. Phelps. If colleges across Canada undertook to introduce Canadian novels and poetry in combination with the regular English survey, we might be getting somewhere.

Finally, as one hates to leave an article on poetry without a few lines of quotation, I offer each of the following as picked stones for the reader to dwell on for some time; they may begin to glow and reveal to him something of what I have been saying.

First, from Layton’s Love the Conqueror Worm.

“Imagination

Makes nothing happen, being

The shadow of a beggar's plate

On snow.”

This from Anne Wilkinson:

“I am so tired I do not think

Sleep in death can rest me.

So line my two eternal yards

With softest moss,

Then lengths of bone won't splinter

As they toss,

Or pierce their wooden box

To winter . . .”

From Dorothy Livesay, in Fiddlehead, Nov. 1953.

“What moved me, was the way your hand

Lay cool in mine, not withering;

As bird still breathes, and stream runs clear­—

So your hand; your dead hand, my dear.”

And from my poem Europe, because it seems to fit here:

“The past speaks in the remaining monuments

and a few pages

of the dead poets,

judging the Esso empire

and the new Milanese

without mercy.

What should we say, we few,

who know what we know,

but for these records?

Where would we get words

for our recriminations?”

So this is the scene in 1954, or one view of it. I don’t suppose that the present list of names and these comments are sufficient informa­tion about the whole range of our poetry now. Each must see it from his own position. The poetry must be read to be valued properly. The presentation given here may sound too optimistic but, who knows, if the reader will go through the books and magazines for himself, he may decide I have not boasted enough for the poets. They rise in power in proportion as you have the power to see them—being spiritual genii.