Re:   Reading Klein's "Krieghoff:  Cailligrammes"

by Robin Edwards Davies


"Virtuosity in language," Miriam Waddington declares, is "an obvious fact" in the poetry of A.M. Klein (111).  Perhaps because it is so obvious, Klein's "virtuosity in language" has been a fact that many critics have duly noted and subsequently ignored.  In 1979, Linda Hutcheon and Alain Goldschlager observed that critical appraisals of Klein's work, with the exception of several studies of image patterns in his poetry as a whole, had tended to be "largely thematic in orientation" (52).  Their own analysis of "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens" afforded an example of the rich rewards a formal explication has to offer.  More than ten years later, however, their remark that very little work of this kind has been done remains true.  The poems of The Rocking Chair volume, widely regarded as Klein's finest, have only begun to receive the close attention that their reputation warrants.  D.M.R. Bentley's "Klein, Montreal and Mankind" hints at the formal possibilities of the poems that make up the volume, as does Noreen Golfman's exhaustive 1986 thesis, "The Poetry of A.M. Klein." Golfman aims for "a full explication" (iii) of Klein's poetry and covers the canon admirably, but she is ultimately more interested in meaning than in form.  Bentley's extensive analysis of "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape," published in 1984, remains the model for what can be done.

     Klein's own interest in formal explication is well known.  In his analysis of the "Oxen of the Sun" episode of Joyce's Ulysses, Klein comments:   "It is a rule touching the interpretation of documents that a document ought to be under stood whereby all of its words receive meaning" (313).  Such a rule reflects not only the new critical assumptions of the 1940's, but, as Usher Caplan points out in his "Introduction" to Klein's Literary Essays and Reviews, "the classical Jewish commentaries on the Bible, in which every single word must be explained and accounted for" (xix).  Following a "Yiddish-speaking and Hebrew-thinking" childhood, Klein came to English as a second, even a third, language, acquiring a taste for reading dictionaries as if they were novels.1  Reviewing Solomon Klonitzki-Kline's Milon Dikduki ('Lexicon of Hebrew Homonyms'), he comments on "the protean genius of words to transform themselves from one aspect to another" as a feature common to "all languages" (56).  His own aesthetic emphasizes a "vocabulary which does not live unless it come [sic] alive, unless it reproduces itself, unless it connotes" ("Towards an Aesthetic" 182).

     The living word is not, however, to engender an art that is formless.  The technical form or "shape of things seen" is not to obscure the "significance of the things seen" ("A Conversation" 190).  Klein was deeply suspicious of the divorce between form and significance that free verse seemed to effect.  In "Worse Verse," an early essay published in The McGill Daily in 1927, he characterizes Pound's appeal to "make it new" as an attack on language and literature.  "We can speak of this phase of literary production as modern illiterature," he writes, and "are now awaiting further developments of free verse:"

We have seen it dispense with capitals, punctuation, and part of the human vocabulary; we are anticipating, eagerly and earnestly, the time when free verse will reach the culminating realization of its ideals when, in a last extremity, it will abolish thoroughly and entirely all words, idle words, and will compose its lucubrations with a completeness of dots; and free verse will become a grand hiatus. (153)

While Klein moved away from the romantic concept of poetry as "dream" (within which free verse becomes "nightmare"), he was never receptive to free verse.  In 1943, he wrote to A.J.M. Smith of a reviewers response to his work:  "I defy him to show me any free verse I ever wrote, let alone 'the greatest.'  For a moment I thought P.D.R. was being subtle, and implying that the greatest free verse was the free verse that was never written.  But such reaches of ratiocination are beyond him" (9).   Reading a Klein text initiates a search for significance in poetic forms that are "dynamic, not static; protean, not uniform; self-multiplying, not sterile" ("Towards an Aesthetic" 183).  For a text such as "Krieghoff:   Calligrammes" — one of the most experimental and least discussed poems of The Rocking Chair volume — explication becomes not an act of reading, but of repeated re-reading, of finding in the text multiple entrances produced by multiplying words.

     The title of "Krieghoff: Calligrammes" refers to Cornelius Krieghoff, a prolific and popular painter of Colonial Canada, and to the calligramme lyrique, a poetic form developed by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1913 and 1916.  Klein probably encountered Apollinaire's Calligrammes in the mid-nineteen-twenties, as part of the reading encouraged by A.J.M. Smith and McGill's "modernist" circle.  In a number of these poems, Apollinaire attempts to take back the prerogatives of the painter, abandoning the traditional linear layout of the poem in order to allow the typographic or calligraphic phrase to follow the outline of the thing represented.  Hence, individual letters as well as words are inscribed for both their plastic and their poetic effects.  As title, "Krieghoff:  Calligrammes" would seem to announce that a composition in line and colour will here be transformed into words.

     Klein's diction allows for both kinds of composition.  The repeated "make" (305) of the second and eighteenth lines may refer to the activities of either painter or poet, while "circumflex" and "flourish" may be painterly gestures or written symbols.  The transformation from painting to writing is accomplished by postulating a mathematical equivalence in the opening line:  "Let the blank whiteness of this page be snow."  The page as snow is then transformed in the chiasmus to page as "paysage"  — not just a landscape, but a "French Canadian" landscape The "p's" and "g's" alliterate and the word itself opens to include its equivalent — p(ays)age.  Majuscules then become "the make of Cornelius."  Though not explicitly stated — as in the equivalencies between page, snow and paysage — "the make," which can be defined as "the like," implies a similarity between the letters shared by poet and printer and the painter's brushstrokes as mark or signature of the artist.   Hence, the "A's" and "V's" of the poet become the "trees", "arrows," "wigwams," and "gables" of the painter's landscape.  Other majuscules turn this landscape into a human scene:

the ladder H that prongs above the chimney:
prone J's on which the gay sleighs run;
the Q and her papoose;
crucifix Y; or bosomed farmwife B.

The poet's letters, which as part of the alphabet are combined and recombined in language, summarize the genre-subjects and settings that the painter combined and recombined in over two thousand canvasses:  as Krieghoffs recent biographer, J. Russell Harper has noted, Krieghoff was a "pragmatic artist," who, in addition to pioneering "innovative methods" of marketing his work, painted "numerous variations . . . on themes that had proven wide appeal" (xiv).

     Colours, however, are a separate question:

But colours?  Ah, the two colours!
These must be spun, these must be bled
out of the iris of the intent sight:
red rufous roseate crimson russet red
blank candid white.

While letters have been made equivalent to the painter's lines and the white page to his background, print, it seems, cannot add colour, only "shade."  Bentley and Golfman argue that colour is to be supplied by the "intent sight" of what Bentley calls "the earnestly attentive and, indeed, creatively involved reader-spectator" (40).  According to Bentley, the colours that the reader adds are those of Krieghoff's "primary human subjects, the 'white' French Canadians and the 'red' Indian" (40).  But the poetic act in which "Krieghoff:   Calligrammes" invites us to participate is more than the simple re-creation of the painter's treatment of his subject matter.  In his 1948 column on "The Poem as Circular Force," Klein describes the centripetal movement "where the mind of the reader, at the conclusion of the poem is drawn back into the poem's vortex . . . the last line . . . is not . . . a point of departure, but a curve for return" (183).   As Klein's reader-spectator spins shades of Indian red from the many-coloured iris, s/he returns to the erasure with which the poem began:  "Let the blank whiteness of this page be snow."  The final line asks us to bring "intent sight" back to the poem as a whole, to make a reassessment.

     Krieghoff's Indian scenes are based on the Iroquois people of Caughnawaga, a village on the south shore of the St. Lawrence.  The lack of characterization in these paintings, especially in contrast to Krieghoff's expressive portraits of the French Canadian habitants, is apparent to even the casual observer; the biography of Krieghoff by Marius Barbeau, available while Klein was working on The Rocking Chair poems, describes the faces as "silent and brooding . . . when they let down the barriers of reticence, they seem to utter grievances that might have something to do with the reserve and land question, and with some proposed delegation to see the king" (62).   "The Indians of Caughnawaga," Barbeau concludes, "belonged to a people who were soon to submit to their fate" (67).  Krieghoff, however, did no more than hint at this fate; for him, "the Indian was primarily a symbol of 'the native' "(Harper 52).  Although he occasionally painted the moccasin and basket sellers who roamed the streets of Montreal, none of his canvasses portrays the actual village of Caughnawaga. According to Harper, there is, in fact, "no proof that Krieghoff ever visited Caughnawaga itself:  "his name does not appear in the book kept for visitors" (44). Instead of the European-style stone houses of the reservation, Krieghoff created wigwams and wilderness settings more attuned to popular conceptions of Indians, even borrowing compositions and details from books of prints and engravings (see Harper 44-52).  "Indian-ness" becomes a question of symbolization and generalization, a denial of diversity — and identity.

     The attentive and involved reader of "Krieghoff: Calligrammes" described by Bentley will not have failed to notice that in The Rocking Chair volume the poem follows "Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga."  Like Krieghoff, Klein takes the Caughnawaga Indians as his subjects, but the poet does not ignore the fate of a people whose culture is history and whose reality is the overalls and names of the Québecois (304).  Even the fantasy of the "I" of the poem — of the white speaker who as a child wished himself Indian — is ironically based on pictures of Indians that could very well be Krieghoff's:  pictures found on the "coloured frontispiece" of a book and "on a calendar."  Introduced in the third stanza, with the image of the "bronze" of the native men's skin "expunged," and reinforced in the last, is a picture of a people "bleached" to match the "pious prosperous ghosts" who "watch" them, a process which represents a loss of blood.  In Klein's earlier work, such as The Hitleriad, blood is identified with specific races and loss of blood with the oppression of one race by another:  the Nazi's propound "the worship of the blood in Arians veined, / but in all others preferably uncontained" (193).  As I have argued elsewhere, The Rocking Chair volume depicts the collectivity of race as including some by excluding others, as a reductive unity that, because it precludes diversity, Klein rejects.  In "Indian Reservation:  Caughnawaga," the whites buy beaded shoes and sweet grass baskets, while the Indians "welcome a white mayor to the tribe" — but the result is the same as in The Hitleriad. The Indian may still "scalp" the white man in tourist traps, but he is the real game:  the "scalpings" belong to the "better hunters," who have taken Indian homes and given in return a ghetto in which to raise halfbreed children and a museum in which to keep what remains of Indian culture.  The white men have prevailed, while the "faces like autumn fruit" sought in the opening stanza "pale" in the last.

     "Krieghoff: Calligrammes" parallels "Indian Reservation:   Caughnawaga:"  the two poems would appear to form one of the pairs that give The Rocking Chair volume "structural symmetry" (Bentley, "Klein" 57).  While the transformation of painting to writing establishes the presence of Indian and White in the "wigwams" and "gables," "the Q and her papoose" and "bosomed farmwife B," closer attention to the formal details of the poem reveals a critique of the scene under creation.  The colon between the poem's second and third lines — "and majuscule the make of Cornelius: / then tended A's inverted V's" — promises that what will follow will expand upon "the make of Cornelius."  Klein then lists possible transformations of "A" and "V" and, in the final line of the stanza, summarizes the list as "pat petted verities."  By using a dash to introduce this line, Klein implies a "therefore," a usage he comments upon in his note on "Browning's Blasphemy" (185).  The nine lines of the second stanza are analogous to the second to tenth lines of the first:  both the second and the eleventh lines begin with "And" and end with a colon, suggesting that the lists which follow define "the make of Cornelius" and his "signs."  The formal parallels between these stanzas, however, imply that, though Krieghoff"s work may celebrate "simplicity," it is also repetitive.  In both stanzas, the alternatives promised by colon and list, as well as the repeated use of "or," prove illusory:  expansion turns out to be reduction.  This process is reinforced by the rhyme scheme, which ties each list to its summary and the first stanza to the second:  "V's . . . trees . . . degrees" and "verities" are echoed by "chimney . . . B . . . free" and "simplicity."  The movement from plural to singular forms combined with the reduction of stresses per line emphasizes the limitations of the scene, revealing the simplemindedness behind the "simplicity."  The repeated "of Cornelius," "of Krieghoff' and "of his" alert the reader to the source of these "pat petted verities:"  what Krieghoff delineates and the poem inscribes are, in fact, clichés.

     Like the process of "bleaching" undergone beneath the watchful eyes of the "pious prosperous ghosts" in "Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga," the bleeding "out of the iris of the intent sight" replaces red (here given the shades of the "autumn fruit" of the previous poem) with white.  The white painter's portrait of the Indian is limited by his vision, which makes an object of his subject:  the Indian as artifact for sale to tourists and for show in a museum.   The poet repeats the objectification of the painter, buying a second hand vision from a book and a calendar in "Indian Reservation:  Caughnawaga" and, here, from Krieghoff.  The parallel construction of the titles would seem to imply that, despite his more romantic settings, Krieghoff's Indians remain well within the realm of white domination, on a reservation which the poet's calligrammes name.  But, if a colon may become "eyes," as "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" suggests (332), the "intent sight" of the reader may expose the "blank candid white" of the final line as an erasure of difference.  There are no real Indians here, only the white man's gaze.

     But the poem will always turn back upon itself, impelling the reader "to retrace his steps, seeking once more the heart of the poem" ("Poem as Circular Force" 183).  If the poet admits complicity in the re-creation of a limited vision, he also acknowledges the nature of this limitation. Krieghoff's clichéd canvasses reduce significance to nothingness, a blank; hence, "any signs will do."  Klein, however, chooses words carefully, implying that the point of view in painting and in poem has been oppressively "French-Canadian" all along.  The white page, like the canvas, is blanc, while the letters which re-create the painter's lines are majuscules — French capitals.  When "A" and "V" are characterized as Indian and French in the third line, the "tented A's" precede the "inverted V's" as the Indians historically preceded the French in Québec.   But by the next line, the inverted V has become "circumflex" and the French accent has wound itself around the landscape, as around the page.  The "A" now follows the "V" as "shade," recalling the less prosperous ghosts of the previous poem. The Indian would seem to be re-introduced in the "arrows" of the sixth line, but the mathematical equation that "equal" and "minus" suggest is reductive:  the "last minus of degrees" which stops the arrows in their flight perhaps refers to the loss of estate the Indian experiences when the "paysage page" is Gallicized.  "The wigwams and the gables" parallel "tented A's and inverted V's," but the final line reveals that the truth in the letters is not only "pat" and "petted" — a reduction and domestication — but specific to the French — verité.

     Gallicized English, however, is not French:  the system of oppression operating in the poem is not restricted to the French colonization of Québec.  The primary audience for Krieghoff's paintings of both Indians and habitants was English as is the audience for Klein's poetry.  For Klein, English was the language that promised to supply the Jewish people "with utterance that is direct and authentic" following the decimation of the Jewries of Europe under Hitler ("Those who should have been ours" 246).  Many critics have noted that Klein saw his own position as a Jew as comparable to that of the Québecois:  his comment in an unfinished letter to Karl Shapiro — "here was a minority, like my own, which led a compact life; continued, unlike my own, an ancient tradition, felt that it belonged" (Caplan 164) — has often been quoted.  As a Jew who chose to write in English, Klein is aware of "amalgamat[ing] factors of two cultures" to which The Rocking Chair volume adds a third (and, in the case of "Indian Reservation:  Caughnawaga" and "Krieghoff: Calligrammes," a fourth) (Caplan, "Intro" xiii).   Rather than address the systemic economic and cultural oppression of the Québecois in Québec, as do many of the later poems in the volume, "Krieghoff:   Calligrammes" enacts systemic linguistic oppression.  As in Joyce, the multilingual play takes place within an entirely English framework: if the Québecois have displaced the Indian, then the English have displaced both.  The denial of even the name by which a culture knows itself — a denial in which this and, with the exception of Linda Luft Ferguson, other critics have participated — allows the reader to expose another erasure.2  On the "blank candid white" that remains where languages other than that of the poem once where, the error of the first Europeans to arrive in North America, thinking it India, is re-inscribed, as is the "French-Canadian."

     But it is white inscribed on white:  "Krieghoff: Calligrammes" "speak[s] white," speaks the language of Québec under the economic, cultural and linguistic domination of the Anglophone/Anglophile that contemporary Québecois poets such as Michèle Lalonde indict.  "Speak white," writes Lalonde,

il est si beau de vous entendre
parler de Paradise Lost
ou du profil gracieux et anonyme qui tremble
       dans les sonnets de Shakespeare (452)

Klein notes that he learned his own English from these very sources in a letter to Yiddish critic Schmuel Niger, and that their "linguistic echoes" fill his mind as much as "the thought-forms of the prophets" (Caplan, "Intro" xiii).  Klein embraces what Lalonde resists, but in so doing convinces us that the Québecois "are not alone," as Lalonde concludes, "ne sommes pas seuls" (455).  There are no Québecois in Klein's poem, nor Iroquois, but their absence testifies that

dans la langue douce de Shakespeare
avec l'accent de Longfellow
parlez un français pur et atrocement blanc
speak white
c'est une langue universelle . . .
speak white
tell us again about Freedom and Democracy (454)

     While Klein admits "that one of the functions of art . . . is to rouse the reader to a realization of existing injustice and current oppression," he is anxious that this function be achieved without "the perversion of letters into a series of political phrases and economic clichés" ("Proletarian Poetry 161).  As Apollinaire's calligrammes lyrique suggest, Klein uses the alpha bet in "Krieghoff:   Calligrammes" for its plastic effects; the multiple readings that the poem invites may even relate, in part, to Apollinaire's attempts to "describe a circle that leads from recognition of the object to the exploration of the poet's reflections on it, and back again to the picture overlaid with a new significance" (Lockerbie in Apollinaire 11).  Certainly, the reader returns to Krieghoff, through Klein, with greater insight.  But "Krieghoff:  Calligrammes" is not itself a calligramme.   It does not fragment and recombine the linear sequence of poetry, nor replace a traditional layout with a pictorial shape.  S.J. Lockerbie notes that "the calligrams encapsulate much of Apollinaire's most incantatory writing" (11); Tom Marshall's interpretation of "Krieghoff:  Calligrammes" as "magic language" implies that Klein's achievement is much the same (161). However, in his comment on "Browning's Blasphemy," Klein makes clear that, for him, "words are meanings, and not mere incantations" (185):  it is the "trinity of dots" that free verse substitutes for words that has "oracular connotations," a "whole abracadabra of abstruseness" ("Worse Verse" 153).

     Klein's commitment to language is such that Apollinaire's desire to emulate the painters could be no less reductive that a Krieghoff canvas:  the colon of his title may be an equal sign.  In any essay on "Hebrew Calligraphy," Klein notes that, due to the prohibition against the making of images in the Decalogue, "the ancestral letter itself" — calligraphy rather than painting — becomes "a most singular art-form" (85).  Hence, a poem such as "Heirloom" suggests that the "printed track" is more expressive, more beautiful than any illustration (158). The Second Scroll turns on such a distinction between the written and the pictorial image:  when a photograph of Uncle Melech is finally obtained, it — like the narrative Klein builds around "reports of [Melech's] exploits" (18) and the poems, letter, play and prayers that provide glosses — is "a double, a multiple exposure" (61).  Hence, while "Krieghoff:  Calligrammes" re-creates the reductive qualities of a painting, it also offers an alternative.   "Free" in the seventeenth line stands out as the only word within the rhyme scheme linking stanzas one and two which does not signify an object.  Instead, "free" may either qualify or denote an action:  the alphabet is capable of freeing objects from "the painter's flourish" (with all its negative connotations), revealing the poetic complexity behind painterly simplicity.   "Klein," as Golfman notes in her analysis of "Krieghoff:   Calligrammes," "privileges verbal language over concrete imagery because he values the poet's challenge of inventing a symbolic discourse to recreate reality over the painter's task of merely imitating reality" (508).  A free verse that abolishes words and replaces the alphabet with dots could thus effect no freedom at all.

     Colour may still be supplied by the "intent sight" of the reader, but Golfman's assertion that "colour cannot be embodied in language" (508) perhaps underestimates Klein's poem.  Since, in typography, the eye is the space a letter encloses, while a blank or white is the space between, colour would appear to be implicit in the letters themselves.  Hence, "iris" may derive meaning from its position in both the human and the typographical eye / I as well as its prismatic qualities. Klein regarded French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud's attribution of "colours to the vowels" in 'Voyelles' as a "locus classicus in modern criticism," important precisely because the auditory is "spoken of in terms of the pictorial" ("Untitled" 191).  "Krieghoff: Calligrammes' " "blank candid white" may be in the spirit of the French poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the use of candide is associated with the "exploitation of synaesthesia" Klein describes in Rimbaud (Robert 313).   Klein, however, perhaps remembering his Talmudic training in "the hues and uses of the chatoyant word" (Klein in Caplan 43), would go farther than Rimbaud:

The vowels are given their rainbow.  But are the consonants really colourless?  Do not the sounds, too, evoke, in the mind of one susceptible to such experience, their own tints and colours?   Is there not a hue after the cry of the consonants?  Surely S is blue, as it is the sky and its constellations, B the boldness of brown, and F something soft and shaded?

The two colours of "Krieghoff:  Calligrammes" are easily bled from the iris eye of language, for the poem suggests that language itself is a rainbow, spinning a coat of many colours.  Not surprisingly, Klein's "archetypical poet" is Joseph, whose mind "is truly of the thousand peacock hues . . . it flashes similtude, image, colour" (144).

     Nor is colour the only pictorial quality available to the poet.  Sounds also speak "shapes and forms:"  "R," Klein writes, "is the very essence of waviness, and T pointillist's precision itself' ("Untitled" 191).  Klein sees the moon as "an interjection crying / O!" in "Anguish" (33); Y appears in both "Krieghoff:  Calligrammes" and "Political Meeting" as crucifix (306).  Other letters acquire pictorial associations in other poems: A, V, H, J, Q, and B, together with Y, all figure in "Krieghoff: Calligrammes." Like the Hebrew scribe, Klein "turns mere geometry, the squares and blocks of his alphabet" into "a virtuosity" in which human or animal shapes "are an intrusion" ("Of Hebrew Calligraphy" 85).   "Square" is specifically associ ated with letters as more than pictures in "Heirloom," while "curlecues" is used by Klein to describe the narrative complexities of Joyce (297).  What seemed to be a language of geometry and penmanship designed to imitate the painter, can also be seen as a language of poetic one-upmanship.

     In his essay on Joseph, Klein bids "the moving spirit of each reader" to "fill in the gaps with commentary and ornamentation best suited to each particular temperament and to the constant theme" (148).  The constant theme of "Krieghoff:  Calligrammes" would seem to be the multiplicity of language and, as in the Joseph story, of the poet's imagination.  This theme emerges as much from the language that gives the poem its form as from the celebration of language that becomes part of its content, for the poem is indeed protean, inviting multiple readings.   We enter art history through a re-creation and critique of the work of Cornelius Krieghoff; read a social documentary paralleling "Indian Reservation:   Caughnawaga;" expose the limitations of both painter and poet; join the celebration of the superiority of language over mere line and colour.  And still the poem erases itself and begins again, asking the reader to return, to once more "Let the blank whiteness of this page be snow."  But here this "particular temperament," together with Klein in his reading of Joyce, "call[s] a truce" (313).


    Notes

  1. Klein refers to his childhood in this way in a letter to Schmuel Niger quoted at length in Caplan's "Introduction" to the Literary Essays and Reviews (xiii).   An anecdote about Klein's highschool taste for reading dictionaries appears in Caplan's Portrait (35).[back]

  2. Luft Ferguson uses "Québec" and "Québecois" throughout in arguing that "Klein's sympathy with Québec did not extend to an exploration of the fervent determination to survive as a nation" (64).  My own use of "French Canadian" in "'A Game's Stances'" reflects an ethnocentricity I have come to regret deeply.[back]

         I would like to thank faculty and students at the University of Western Ontario — especially D.M.R. Bentley, Pat Gibbings and Kathleen Kells — for many fine discussions of Klein and Quebec during the writing of this essay.


Works Cited

Apollinaire, Guillaime. Calligrammes:  Poems of Peace and
          War (1913-1916).
Anne Hyde Greet, trans. S.J. Lockerbie,
          intro. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.

Barbeau, Marius. Cornelius Krieghoff Pioneer Painter of North
           America.
Toronto: MacMillan Co., 1934.

Bentley, D.M.R.   "A Nightmare Ordered: A.M. Klein's 'Portrait
          of the Poet as Landscape,'" Essays on Canadian Writing 28
          (Spring, 1984) 1-45.

_____.   "Klein, Montreal and Mankind," Journal of Canadian
          Studies
19:2 (Summer, 1984) 34-57.

Caplan, Usher.   Like One That Dreamed:  A Portrait of A.M.
          Klein.
Toronto:   McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1982.

Edwards Davies, Robin.  "'A Game's Stances:' Questions of
          Language and Unity in Klein's 'The Provinces,'" Canadian
          Poetry
19 (Fall/Winter, 1986), 49-56.

Golfman, Noreen.   "The Poetry of A.M. Klein."  2 vols.  Diss:
          University of Western Ontario, 1986.

Harper, J. Russell.  Krieghoif.  Toronto:  University of Toronto
           Press, 1979.

Hutcheon, Linda and Alain Goldschlager.  "'Out of the Pulver and
          the Polished Lens:'  A.M. Klein as Wordsmith," Canadian
          Poetry
4 (Spring/Summer, 1979) 52-58.

Klein, AM. Literary Essays and Reviews. Usher Caplan and
           M.W. Steinberg, eds.   Usher Caplan, intro.  Toronto:
           University of Toronto Press, 1987.

_____.  The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein. Miriam Waddington,
          ed., intro.  Toronto:   McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1974.
          Where necessary, quotations have been silently emended
          in accordance with Zailig Pollock, "Errors in The Collected
          Poems of A.M. Klein," Canadian Poetry
10 (Spring/Summer,
          1982) 9 1-99.

_____. The Second Scroll. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart
          Ltd., 1951.

Lalonde, Michèle.  "Speak White," La Poésie québecoise:  de
          origines a nos jours:   anthologie.
Laurent Mailhot and
          Pierre Nepveu, eds.   Montréal:  Les Editions de l'Hexagone,
          1980, 452-5.

Luft Ferguson, Linda.  "The Rocking Chair:  Portrait of the Poet
          as Province," Journal of Canadian Studies 19:2 (1984)
          58-65.

"Some Letters of A.M. Klein to A.J.M. Smith, 1941-1951," in
          Seymour Mayne, ed. The A.M. Klein Symposium. Ottawa:
          University of Ottawa Press, 1975, 1-13.

Marshall, Tom.   "Theorems Made Flesh:  Klein's Poetic Universe,"
          in A.M. Klein.  Toronto:   The Ryerson Press, 1970, 151-162.

Robert, Paul.   Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française.  Deuxieme
          ed.  Revue et enrichie par Alain Rey.  Tome 11.  Paris-XI: Le
          Robert, 1986.

Waddington, Miriam.  A.M. Klein. Toronto:  Copp Clarke Publishing
           Co., 1970.