Canadian Poetry Research Articles

Canadian Poetry in English

Canadian Poetry in English

Canadian Poetry in English, 1965

Canadian Poetry in English, 1965

Review of *Tradition in Exile: A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century* by John Pengwerne Matthews

The publishers correctly describe this work as a pioneer study. It is, indeed, the irst serious attempt at a reasonably comprehensive comparison of the two most important Commonwealth literatures. As such, it poses a challenge to almost ever}r reader, including reviewers, for as yet few are equipped with substantial knowledge of both Australian and Canadian writing. My own qualifications in Australian literature are minimal. Thanks to a fellowship from the Canada Council and a lecture tour arranged by the Australian Humanities Research Council, I was able to live in Australia for some fifteen fruitful and happy months in 1958— 59, listening a lot, lecturing a little, and reading a fair number of Australian books. By contrast, Dr Matthews is a native-born Australian, a graduate of the University of Melbourne, who had spent four years studying in Canada by the time he obtained his Doctor's degree from the University of Toronto in 1957. The present book in its original form was offered as the dissertation. Subsequently, Dr Matthews taught in St. John's College, University of Manitoba, until 1962. Then he joined the Department of English of Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario, where he is now director of the newly established Institute of Comparative Commonwealth Studies. His qualifications are therefore unusual if not unique.

Tradition in Exile: A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry of the Nineteenth Century

Tradition in Exile: A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry of the Nineteenth Century

Towards the Discovery of Canada

"Non-fiction" is an inelegant and unflattering description, invented no doubt by librarians, which is firmly established in Canadian usage. The literary journals of Great Britain and western Europe still attempt to be more discriminating. In their old-fashioned and pedantic way, they go on recognizing the separate categories of history, biography, politics, economics and world affairs; but in Canada these refined European distinctions are cheerfully disregarded. A survey of Canadian literature, by Canadians, normally begins with an article on Canadian poetry, which is followed immediately by an article on the Canadian novel; and then everything that is left over, philosophy, history, economics, as well as literary and art criticism, is swept summarily into a huge residual heap, labelled "remaining material." Poetry and fiction are, of course, "creative." But the claims of "remaining material" to this proud distinction are regarded, in Canada, as decidedly more dubious. A few small items in the vast, amorphous mass of "non-fiction" may be accepted as "creative," but only on the inflexibly enforced condition that they have not been written by members of universities. Works by members of universities are in all cases dismissed as "academic"; and in Canada, as in other parts of the English-speaking world, "academic" is very definitely a pejorative word.[...] It may be worth while to lift Canadian history and Canadian work in the social sciences out of the undifferentiated mass of "remaining material" for a brief inspection.

Symbols of English Canadian Poetry

Symbols of English Canadian Poetry

The Defeated; After Battle; December Spring; Poems; Stars' Roundelay; Murdoch and Other Poems; Poems from Obscurity; Marginal Man; Canadian Poetry Magazine

The Defeated; After Battle; December Spring; Poems; Stars' Roundelay; Murdoch and Other Poems; Poems from Obscurity; Marginal Man; Canadian Poetry Magazine

The Awakening in Canadian Poetry

THAT an emergence of noteworthy poetry has recently occurred in Canada may be inferred from a few bare facts. Within the space of two years1942 and 1943 appeared three excellent anthologies largely or exclusively devoted to contemporary writers.' In April, 1941, Poetry published a number devoted entirely to recent Canadian poets and the criticism of their work. Two other useful anthologies devoted solely to living poets were published in 1936 and 1938.2 And between 1936 and 1943 appeared at least three anthologies not thus far mentioned because of their comparatively unimportant contribution, but illustrating an interest in the general field, if not a particularly enlightened view of the new developments. Meanwhile, in 1936 was published W. E. Collin's The White Savannahs, a sympathetic and informative volume, criticizing the contemporary poets, and in 1943 a too brief but helpful sum-

The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology

The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology

On Canadian Poetry

On Canadian Poetry

The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology

<i>The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology</i>

Canadian Poetry

Canadian Poetry

Colonialism and Nationalism in Canadian Poetry before Confederation

Colonialism and Nationalism in Canadian Poetry before Confederation. Un article de la revue Report of the Annual Meeting / Rapports annuels de la Société historique du Canada (Volume 23, numéro 1, 1944, p. 5-125) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Reviews

E. K. Brown, On Canadian Poetry, reviewed by W. E. Collin Archibald Lampman, At the Long Sault and Other New Poems, reviewed by W. E. Collin A. J. M. Smith, ed., The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology, reviewed by Ralphn Gustafson George E. Duckworth, The Complete Roman Drama: All the Extant Comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the Tragedies of Seneca, in a Variety of Translations, reviewed by Gilbert Norwood Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, reviewed by R. S. Knox Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558–1625, reviewed by Arthur Barker

The Book of Canadian Poetry

The Book of Canadian Poetry

The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology.

The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology.

“Our Poets”: A Sketch of Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

Canadian poetry, in the most general terms, is the record of life in Canada as it takes on significance when all the resources of sensibility, intelligence and spirit are employed in experiencing it or in understanding it. Some of our poets have concentrated on what is individual and unique in Canadian life, and others upon what it has in common with life everywhere. The one group has attempted to describe and interpret whatever is essentially and distinctively Canadian and thus come to terms with what is only now ceasing to be a colonial environment. The other, from the very beginning, has made an heroic effort to transcend colonialism by entering into the universal, civilizing culture of ideas.

Canadian Anthologies, New and Old

The publication, in Canada, the United States, and England, of a compact anthology of Canadian poetry in the widely circulated Penguin Books is an event of more than literary importance. For quite apart from its merit the new book seems, as one of the reviewers in the Toronto press put it, “foredoomed” to have a big sale not only in Canada but throughout the whole English-speaking world. People in England and America who want to know whether Canada has an intellectual and spiritual identity are going to seek an answer in the hundred and twenty pages of this book. That they may perhaps be a little disappointed is not Mr Gustafson's fault. His scope was hardly large enough, and he has wisely avoided attempting the impossible. There is refreshingly little in his introduction—as there is much in the prefaces of previous anthologists—about Nationhood, Empire, the Canadian Spirit, and abstractions of that sort. Instead he merely tells us that he has tried to make a small collection of good poems written by Canadians since Confederation. “I have measured and judged my material,” he writes, “not by historical significance nor by 'Canadianism' but in terms of vitality. . . . I am hoping that the poems herein will become synonymous with pleasure.” This is admirable, for it enables us to discuss the book as poetry and to discover why, although it is much slighter than many previous Canadian anthologies, it is one of the best that has ever been made. Such a statement is not in itself, alas, very high praise, and there is much more to be said in favour of the new collection than that, just as there is something to be said also about the weakening effect of the limitations imposed upon the compiler. The book is so good that we are surprised and a little annoyed that it isn't better.

Canadian Poetry—A Minority Report

Professor E. J. Pratt's recent article in the QUARTERLY on the present status of English-Canadian poetry has sent me to a number of other attempts by Canadian poets or critics to evaluate the contemporary native product in terms of the achievement of the past, and I have been struck by the fact that the only thing all the articles have in common is a more or less all-pervading, but usually ill-defined, sense of uneasiness or dissatisfaction. Occasionally this is given direct and even truculent expression; sometimes the reader absorbs it rather furtively, reading between the lines; and sometimes it is rationalized out of existence or sublimated into patriotic boasting. Yet whether the critic denounces, excuses, paints with pride, or merely throws out a smoke screen, he betrays, it has seemed to me, a feeling of insecurity that sometimes amounts almost to bewilderment. Canadian poetry is lost, or it hasn't found itself; new vistas are opening ahead of it, or it has come to a dead end. It is either up a tree or it has slipped from its high estate, and it needs somebody to give it a fresh direction. It should mirror the aspirations of the struggling masses; or it should return to the grand manner and high morals of our fathers. The older poets are too sentimental, and the young are too brainy. The denizens of the Canadian pantheon haven't much to say, but they feel deeply and they love God and Nature; the modern poets are obscure....

Canadian Poetry—Past and Present

This article is essentially a record of the difficulty and embarrassment in selecting a title which would not presuppose too much or too little for the subject. In order to avoid duplication, an index of the specific field was consulted. which was found to contain such ominous captions as “Some Animadversions on Canadian Poetry;” “The Plight of the Poetic Craft in This Country;” “Pegasus in Need of the Spur;” “The Drift of Canadian Verse;” and other titles which prejudged the issue by innuendo in word and phrase. They savoured somewhat of the attitude of a critic who, his mind a blank on the subject, but at least technically complying with the needs of a curriculum, commenced his series of ten lectures with the announcement—“Canadian literature: it doesn't exist.”