Saul and Selected Poems by Charles Heavysege

Abstract

502 usually hung on bits of quotation jostle each other from one end of the book to the other. Apart from major texts, there are well over one hundred authors cited, and nearly one hundred and twenty titles - novels, plays, the scriptures, poems, autobiographies, letters, criticism, philosophy, psychology, and social commentary. There is a comparable hospitality to patent irrelevancies, as in a partial justification of the ending of Howard's End, and in the judgement that it is a fine novel, neither of which has even a glancing relevance to the thesis of the book. More obvious is an irrelevant page of defense of Freud against Gide and Sartre. "It would be interesting," the author concludes, "to pursue this comparison further, but to do so would carry us quite beyond the scope of the present inquiry into the realms of comparative psycho-biography." Surely there can be no argument against full documentation. And surely one wishes here to put the best possible construction on extensive referential procedure, even though it seems hardly necessary or useful to the stated objective. But one reference, in calling attention to itself, may create unhappy uncertainties as to others. "Consider again," Professor Mendel writes, "W hit­ man's popular poem, 'Animals.' " The lines quoted are the first eight of Section 32 of a well-known, if not a popular poem, "Song of Myself." They are not very carefully transcribed, as though they might have come from a carelessly edited intermediary source. Too, the title for the 'poem' reminds one of sentimental popular anthologies whose ancestors were the Friendship's Offerings of the nineteenth century. It is not that we have, as Horace says, "dignus vindice nodus," but in the words of some unknown German critic, "die Saiten hoch spannen." To borrow a phrase from Goethe, "entbehren sollst du! Sollst entbehren." It is regrettable to have to record the inescapable conclusion that what might have been a rewarding reconsideration of basic values in human experience had there been care in reading and restraint in writing - turns out to be a cluttered, derivative, inexact, and pretentious book. P.J. ALDUS Charles Heavysege, Saul and Selected Poems, Introduction by Sandra Djwa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976). lxvii, 373. $7.95 For the past several years, whenever a new volume of the University of Toronto "Literature of Canada, Poetry and Prose in Reprint" series has appeared, much negative criticism has arisen. First, the anti-academic critic (and Canada has a large number of parti-pris poet-critics) decries the resurrection of earlier writ­ ers. Then, the academic criticizes the series for not supplying a definitive text with scholarly editing. And finally we hear rumblings from the insides of the University of Toronto Press, when the volumes fail to sell well. At the moment 503 it is rumoured that the series is rapidly coming to an end, and that several of the proposed texts, some of which were almost completed in m s , may never see the light of day. This would be a shame: while the series has definite drawbacks, it also serves a useful purpose, bringing back into print many central texts at a time when the study of Canadian literature has expanded so rapidly that the discipline is being taught by thousands of teachers working, shorthanded and lefthanded, from a few anthologies. Although plans for definitive texts have been set in motion, these take years to complete, and in the interim we need reliable reading texts. The reader of Canadian literature owes a considerable debt to Douglas Lochhead for undertaking a series which proves our literary heritage begins prior to the twentieth century. The latest volume in the series is Charles Heavysege's Saul and Selected Poems, which includes all of Saul, excerpts from Jephthah's Daughter, all of the narrative poem Jezebel, four sonnets, and an introduction by Professor Sandra Djwa of Simon Fraser University. In the past it has sometimes appeared that the scholar introducing the reprint had little actual knowledge of his text's history, because frequently little or no comment was offered on the choice of copy text. In part, this may have been the Press's fault in simply hiring a...