Unlike any other anthology, both in purpose and prestige, The Oxford Book Of Canadian Verse defines itself by its tasteful jacket cover: a 1914 painting by David Milne showing a literate young lady in a red rocker, comfortably reading a book. Though often used as a poetry textbook, the Oxford Book is not really designed for academic use, since it lacks the usual biographical notes, bibliographies, and critical paraphernalia. It is meant for pleasant reading, in the situation shown on the jacket.

But then some painful contradictions emerge. To explain these, one has to look at the history of the Oxford Book, before its present version edited by Margaret Atwood and before poetry became a mass movement of the alternative cultures.

Oxford Book of Canadian Verse

Bliss Carman edited The Oxford Book Of American Verse in 1925, the same year that saw Thomas O’Hagan’s Intimacies Of Canadian Life And Letters and John Garvin’s Master‑Works Of Canadian Authors in 14 hefty volumes. Carman’s American Oxford Book was so Victorian a collection, 17 years after T. S. Eliot had written Prufrock and Cousin Nancy, that it contained nothing of E. E. Cummings, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, or Marianne Moore, though all had published poetry, and much of it, by then. It arrested American poetry at the turn of the century, for those who wanted to be arrested. At the turn of the century, Sir Arthur Quiller‑Couch had edited the Oxford Book Of English Verse, 1250-1900, the first of the lot. There was also an Oxford Book Of French Verse in 1907. Then in 1913, in the days of Burpee’s Canadian Eloquence, we had the first Oxford Book Of Canadian Verse, edited by poet Wilfred Campbell. It contained 100 poets—ah, but there's the rub. Only a dozen or so of these poets survive in memory today; and A. J. M. Smith’s Oxford Book Of Canadian Verse in 1960 eliminated 89 of them at one blow.

The Oxford Book, therefore, does not represent a permanent and growing literature to which new names are slowly being added. We have a new literature every 20 years or so; it doesn’t stand up any longer than that.

In her introduction to the present book, Margaret Atwood acknowledges a great indebtedness to A. J. M. Smith and professes to continue the task he pursued as a highly literate and aesthetic anthologist. (Smith had edited the Gage Book of Canadian Poetry in 1943, as well as the Oxford Book Of Canadian Verse in 1960.) However, her temperament and penchant for causes lead to a poetry of a very different stripe. She tells us that she has “followed Smith’s example” by including “some poets of recent germination.” Well, Smith in 1960 had included two poets of recent germination who have since quite vanished from view. Atwood has included 72 poets (out of a total of 121) who were not in Smith, so that her Oxford Book is 60 per cent new material (10 per cent recycled older poets, 50 per cent brand new).

This, of course, is a result of the so‑called poetry explosion which began in the early sixties. It’s a boom that has not won an audience of adults, unfortunately, but has created, temporarily, an audience of young people. This anthology is a product of the blow-up. It does not contain so much a permanent distillation of Canadian literature as a selection from the current stream.

The French half of the anthology has been wiped out. The older poets have been purged and constricted: 16 poets dropped, among them oddly enough—Susanna Moodie of the Journals, John Hunter Duvar, George Frederick Cameron, and such familiar names as Tom MacInnes, L. A. Mackay, A.G. Bailey (whose Collected Poetry has just appeared), Charles Bruce, and Leo Kennedy. These epic heroes scattered over the field will make some biddies in wicker chairs weep.

Yet Atwood has put together a living anthology, one that will be much discussed and argued about, partly because it is so representative of the youth culture. As she says, it does not include all the current poets by any means—that would be “a different kind of book”—but the older poets (up to E. J. Pratt) are compressed in the first 65 pages, while the rest of the book, about 80 per cent, is mainly devoted to contemporary poetry.

Unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, Atwood cannot really follow in Smith’s footsteps. She is not a modernist, and she is not an aesthetic critic. In defining the modern shift in poetry represented by Smith and Scott, she describes it somewhat pejoratively as “noun‑and‑adjective description, formal elegance and verbal felicity” and so forth, while she adds that an entirely different strain interests her more deeply: “The narrative and the anecdotal, the tall tale, the kitchen‑table yarn . . . vernacular speech . . .” The latter, of course, as Smith would say, is the line represented in British and American poetry by John Masefield and Stephen Vincent Benét, the line of relative mediocrity, of popularity. This is why Smith omitted Robert Service entirely from his book, although Atwood thinks “no Canadian anthology can afford to be without him.”

But worse still, her choices are often based on moral and ideological obsessions, although she is mature enough to be struggling to free herself of these. For example, there is the bleeding‑heart syndrome in the poems about Indians and the wilderness (not that, outside of poetry, one would not support the cause of the native people). We are on the trail of the Indians here, through Pratt, Pauline Johnson, D. C. Scott, Charles Mair, A. M. Klein, Al Purdy, John Newlove, and Doug Fetherling, as though that were the main issue of Canadian life and imagination. We have violated the wilderness. (One forgets that the wilderness—trees, grasses, animals—violated the primal peace of nature, which was mere rock and water and blasting wind; that “methane and ammonia” is where it all started.)

These extra‑poetical considerations lead Atwood to include some dreadful writing in this anthology. Live and let live—such poems might even be fun elsewhere—but this is the New Oxford Book Of Canadian Verse In English. Time may act as “the great anthologizer,” as she says, in England, but here in Canada the editor must do most of the work. That is what Smith did for Wilfred Campbell, and someone else will have to do it for Margaret Atwood eventually.

As an anthologist, Atwood has a thematic rather than an aesthetic interest in poetry, as we know from her book Survival. (It “did a lot for nationalism and the idea of a Canadian literature,” says John Metcalf, “but probably set literary appreciation back by a decade.”) Nationalism is a theme, but so, I think, is feminism. Atwood spends a page of her short introduction arguing that she has not chosen poems on feminist grounds. She ends with the chauvinist snap: “The reader of this anthology, however, may rest assured: no poet has been excluded because he is male.” The more relevant question would be, “Have any been included because they are female?” And the answer would have to be, I dread to say it, yes.

To offer more concrete evidence of minor invidiousness, look at Atwood’s own poems, filling more pages than any other living poet except Earle Birney, and each poem displayed beautifully, starting at the top of the page, with empty space below. The same preferential treatment is given to Jay Macpherson. Compare this with any of the others—D. G. Jones or Birney—whose finest poems are chopped across the middle, with no space to breathe. Is this poetic justice? Fie!

But let’s turn to serious matters. Any of us reading an anthology of poetry is looking for what we might call the Absolute Poem, that particular experience which makes us pause and hold our breath a little, the true poem beyond mere argument and personality. Such a poem is Marjorie Pickthall’s “Quiet” in this anthology, or D. G. Jones’ poem, “For Spring,” or one of Roo Borson’s lyrics that close the book. (Two women holding the top executive positions.) It is a pleasure beyond everything to find such poems in this book. Of course, if an anthology were made of nothing but absolutes, it would be incredibly thin, and most of our poets would be missing from it. But this is the poem we all try to write. The others, many of them fearful struggles to make some earth‑shattering declaration, are only spade‑work in the mining operations of poetry. There is too much of that here —for good historical reasons—but it doesn’t really crush the diamonds that lie in the midst of such plenty. It is for you, dear girl in the red chair on the cover, to find them.