Notes from a Preview Meeting

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Dean Irvine

 

Among his papers at the National Archives of Canada, F. R. Scott deposited a scribbler with the notes from a meeting of the Preview group.1 Dated March 13, 1944, these notes consist of a group discussion among the Montreal-based little magazine’s editors: Patrick Anderson, P. K. Page, Bruce Ruddick, Neufville Shaw, A. M. Klein, and Scott himself. According to another Preview-related document called "Rules of the Game," the editors were to "meet regularly during the second and fourth week of every month"; these notes would have been taken at "the first or open meeting . . . for general discussion, post-mortem on the last issue, reading of mss if desired, and sweet intercourse." The "second or closed meeting" was reserved for "final choice of mss for [the] next issue, details of publication, etc."2 Meetings were held in Montreal at either Scott’s home in Westmount or at the Andersons’ apartment behind Dorchester Street (present-day René-Lévesque Boulevard) (Anderson, "Conversation" 53). Founding members of the group had started to cross paths in Montreal between the fall of 1940 and the fall of 1941, with Scott, Anderson, Ruddick, Shaw, and Margaret Day first gathering at Scott’s place in early 1942 to organize Preview’s inaugural, March 1942 issue. After Anderson invited Page to a Preview meeting, she joined the group in advance of the second, April 1942 issue.3 Day left the group after the third issue,4 and other changes in membership would follow. The presence of both Shaw and Klein at the March 1944 meeting is itself significant and indicative of transformations taking place in the group at the time: Shaw’s name disappeared from the cover of the magazine as of the October 1943 issue (no. 16) and Klein’s first appeared on the cover as of the March 1944 issue (no. 19). The March 1944 meeting may, therefore, have been Klein’s first as an official member of the Preview group, though he had already submitted some poems and met with the group on occasion prior to accepting the invitation to become an editor of Preview (Caplan 95). Shaw’s return to the group after a several-month absence may be attributed to the agenda of the meeting itself: a retrospective discussion of the manifesto "Statement" of the Preview group that was published in the March 1942 issue (no. 1).5Among the members unaccounted for in these notes are two women and wives of editors who, as Patrick Anderson put it, "were extremely important behind the scenes"—Kit Shaw and Peggy Anderson (Introduction iii). Kit Shaw handled subscriptions and submissions through the first fifteen issues,6 while Peggy Anderson managed production work for Preview from the first to the last issue.7 Kit Shaw’s and Peggy Anderson’s absences from this document are emblematic of their invisibility in the literary-historical record of Preview. Whatever its lacunae may signify, this brief document is the only extant set of notes from any Preview meeting.

At the March 1944 meeting, the discussion was not a post-mortem of the previous issue—as was apparently customary at open meetings—but a retrospective on Preview during its first two years of publication. Patrick Anderson’s reading of the "Statement" that opens the meeting is appropriate, since he is generally acknowledged to be the author of the unsigned Preview editorials (Trehearne 357). Rather than initiate a revision of the original manifesto, however, Anderson launches a debate among the members of the group concerning issues of cultural nationalism and internationalism. Opposed to the cultural nationalism promoted by former supporters of international socialism, among them Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald MacLeish, Anderson first reiterates the group’s disavowal of such isolationist ideologies and later, in defence of his position, advocates the integration of internationalism and nationalism in Canadian literary culture. Klein’s response to Anderson’s critique of Brooks and MacLeish questions whether the original Preview group was, despite its own claims to the contrary, similarly caught up in a cultural-nationalist ideology. Scott, however, emerges as a defender of Preview and of cultural nationalism; his perspective is nationalist in that he denies any American influence on the Preview poets, claims some essential distinction between American and Canadian poetry, and points to the group’s intention to meet in order to discuss the problems of poetry’s production, circulation, and audience (or lack thereof) in Canada. Scott’s responses to both Shaw and Ruddick also serve to advance a nationalist agenda. Page is somewhat reticent on the issue, suggesting only that the poet’s environment necessarily plays a role in the composition of a poem. Closing the discussion of cultural nationalism, Scott playfully alludes to an "essential national quality" of Canadian poetry, namely the "moosiness" of the moose (Djwa 214). Scott’s ludic phrase is, if only in jest, a Canadian variant of the typically modernist tendency toward defamiliarization in language: instead of making the stone "stony," the Canadian modernist poet should make the moose "moosey." The implications of Scott’s comment are that either an essential nationalist mode of expression in Canadian poetry never had emerged or that such symbolic expression of "Canadianness" had ossified into cliché.

From questions of Canadian content the conversation shifts to questions of Canadian audiences. Rather than reassert its internationalism, Anderson is the first to concede that the Preview group had not yet secured a wide audience, even in Canada. According to Anderson, this is the reader’s problem, which he would later call "the problem of communication and of the reader’s critical attitude" and attempt to rectify by publishing "An Explanatory Issue" (no. 18) in September 1944 with prose commentaries as headnotes to poems by the Preview group (Anderson, "Explanatory" 1). Page more cautiously observes that it is not poetry in general but poetry written by the Preview group in particular that troubles the "average" reader. Such modern poetry, Scott contends, alienates the unaccustomed reader; there is, as yet, no communication between the modern poet and the public. As modern poets, he believes, the members of the Preview group are progressive; their modernism necessitates a break with an older order of values (and an older poetics) still observed by a conservative Canadian public. Indeed, the group had not yet devised a successful means to communicate its poetry to the general public. Scott and Anderson ascribe this communication gap between poet and public to the obscurity of their poetry, a typically modernist quality they claim to be unavoidable for the contemporary poet. Klein, however, suggests that this situation presents an aporia: that the modern poet’s social empathy with the public is negated by his or her modernist poetics. Though his own poetry is by no means a model, he suggests that the modern poet should move toward plain language if the subject of a poem invites public audience. Scott, in response, asserts that the public must be willing to move as well—toward some comprehension of modern modes of poetic expression. Yet his insistence that the public accommodate itself to new modes and standards of poetry seems to preclude any education of Preview’s readers, contrary to the pedagogical approach later instituted by Anderson ("An Explanatory Issue"). These considerations of a public audience indicate the social value that the Preview group assessed for itself and the social function that they believed poetry could fulfil.

That the group hoped to publish the proceedings of this meeting in order to provoke a response speaks to its self-appointed public role. Discontented with its isolation from public culture, the Preview group considered its debate on issues of poetic nationalism and modernism material for general consumption. Perhaps it is telling that these notes were never transcribed and published, even if only in Preview itself. The closed format of this meeting is indicative of the communication problems encountered by the Preview group. Like the little magazine that it produced, its discussion of modern poetry in relation to national and public culture was restricted to a limited audience.

The group’s ambivalence about its audience is amply demonstrated by Preview’s publication history. The Preview group originally intended to produce only six issues, declaring its publication "no magazine" in the first issue (Anderson, et al, "Statement") and, in the fourth issue, a "private ‘Literary letter,’ distributed to about a hundred subscribers or potential subscribers, and . . . in no sense a ‘magazine’ on sale to the general public" (Anderson, "Note" [June 1942]).8 At the same time, the editors were eager to make contact with national and international writing movements (Anderson, et al, "Statement") and share news of their correspondence with internationally respected editors such as George Dillon of Poetry, James Laughlin of New Directions, and Cyril Connolly of Horizon (Anderson, "Note" [June 1942]). After sending out a questionnaire in August 1942 with the sixth issue, the editors must have received sufficient response from its then "eighty subscribers" to warrant continued publication (Anderson, "Note" [Aug. 1942]), deciding to change the periodical’s format from a single-stapled newsletter mimeographed on Preview letterhead to a side-stapled magazine with mimeographed content pages and printed covers. Although replies to its questionnaire are not extant, the Preview group’s subsequent investment in higher production values was most likely implemented as a result of feedback from current subscribers and, moreover, as an expedient means to attract a new ones. But even with subscriptions at their highest estimates, Preview could never claim to circulate among the general public, despite its editors’ assiduous efforts to broaden its readership.9 After changing its format in September 1942, Preview seems to have increased its modest circulation and, in any case, continued for another seventeen issues, its twenty-third and final installment appearing in early 1945.

If the Preview group was genuinely concerned with its reception by a wider Canadian public, then John Sutherland’s March 1945 proposal to consolidate the rival Montreal little magazines First Statement and Preview must have presented a partial solution to the problems that the members of Preview had discussed at their meeting a year earlier. The erratic publication of Preview during the year following the March 1944 meeting signalled that the group was, at that time, in a period of decline prior to the merger with First Statement.10 Like Preview, the First Statement group had encountered financial difficulties during 1944, forcing them to miss two months of publication and then to move from a monthly to a bi-monthly schedule. With the loss of the Shaws after the October 1943 issue, the departure of Page to Victoria in the fall of 1944, and the involvement of the Andersons in editorial and production work for the leftist cultural magazine En Masse by early 1945,11 members of the Preview group had also become otherwise and elsewhere occupied. Even though the addition of James Wreford in Hamilton as a "contributing editor" in the May 1944 issue (no. 20) (Anderson, "Editors’ Note") and the relocation of Page to Victoria expanded the geographical base of Preview, their distance from the Montreal group prevented them from taking part in the editorial meetings and the physical production of the magazine. This broadening of Preview’s editorial base gestured toward a national audience but, in the end, failed to satisfy the group’s desire to ameliorate its readership. So the amalgamation of Preview with First Statement to form Northern Review in June 1945 seems to have stemmed from a common interest, both in combining their human and financial resources and in expanding their audience at a national level.12 Sutherland’s proposal to found "a national literary magazine" offered the Preview group a new forum in Northern Review to disseminate its poetry and poetics to a wider Canadian public (Sutherland to the Editors of Preview, 27 March 1945; Letters 23). For its first five issues at least, Northern Review would realize in its editorial organization and its contents the integration of nationalism and internationalism that the Preview group had advocated for a modernist magazine culture in Canada.
 

Notes to the Introduction

 

I have transcribed the notes from holograph as they appear in the original scribbler. Ampersands (&), used in shorthand in the original, I have expanded to full words ("and") throughout. Otherwise, emendations and additions to the notes appear inside square brackets. Where abbreviated names are used to identify speakers in the original, I have replaced these with full surnames.

I am grateful to D. M. R. Bentley and I. S. MacLaren for helpful editorial recommendations. To P. K. Page I would like to offer my gratitude for allowing me to make this conversation among the Preview editors public. As well, I would like to give thanks to Mr Sandor Klein and Mr Colman Klein, Ms Jennifer Whitby, and Mr William Toye for their generous permission on behalf of A. M. Klein, Patrick Anderson, and F. R. Scott.

  1. F.R. Scott Papers, box 84, file 21.
  2. F.R. Scott Papers, box 84, file 21.
  3. For autobiographical accounts of the founding of Preview, given by Scott, Ruddick, Shaw, and Day, see Bentley and Gnarowski 94–95. Page’s recollections of her first encounters with the group are recorded in an unpublished December 1968 interview with Dorothy Livesay, and in an interview with Sandra Djwa (41). For Anderson’s memoirs of Preview, see "A Poet"; "A Conversation"; and his Introduction to the 1980 facimile edition of Preview. For a concise history of Preview, see O’Rourke.
  4. For an informative biography of Day, see Whitney, "First Person Feminine."
  5. Between July 1943 (when he was last named as an editor on the cover of issue fourteen) and March 1944, Shaw contributed only one item, "The Maple Leaf is Dying," a critical review of the Book of Canadian Poetry, edited by A.J.M. Smith. Published in the December 1943 issue, this review would be Shaw’s last contribution to Preview.
  6. Both Kit Shaw and her husband would relinquish their positions in the group prior to the October 1943 issue, though extant correspondence indicates that Neufville Shaw continued with the group in a casual capacity. See Neufville Shaw to Miriam Waddington, 16 March 1944 (Miriam Waddington Papers, box 34, Preview file); see also Shaw to Dorothy Livesay, 16 March 1944 (Dorothy Livesay Papers, box 2, file 17). Kit Shaw’s liminal position in relation to the editorial members of the Preview group is recorded in Patrick Anderson’s 18 November 1942 letter to her, the only extant document in which she figures so prominently and occupies a central position in the group. He addresses her "as someone in the preview group" and goes on to apologize for his recent animosity toward her and, afterward, to refute her "‘sexual’ or ‘Freudian,’ or alternately ‘up in the clouds’ theory" concerning his poetry (F.R. Scott Papers, reel h– 1211). Evidently, she too participated in group discussions of the work published in Preview.
  7. See Anderson, Search Me 149. See also Anderson’s letter to A.J.M. Smith: "I feel quite bitter about Preview’s attitude towards Peggy. She spent hours mimeographing the magazine, carrying paper etc. and actually called most of the meetings. She never got a word of thanks" (Patrick Anderson Papers, box 1, Correspondence 1945 file [n.d.; circa 1946-47]). Patricia Whitney excerpts a longer passage from this letter in "From Oxford to Montreal" (45) and notes: "This holograph letter is written on Northern Review stationery and is undated. There is a note added in Anderson’s hand: ‘(I very much doubt that this letter was sent./ P.A. / Sept. 1973)’" (48n41). It should also be noted that Page and her employment in war offices would prove indispensable to the physical production of Preview, as she had access to a heavy typewriter, which she used to cut the stencils for the magazine (Letter to author; see also Page to Scott, 18 July [1942] [F.R. Scott Papers, reel H–1121]; and Anderson to Page, August 1942 [P.K. Page Papers, box 6, file 7]).
  8. The circulation figures for Preview vary, depending on the source. David Mc- Knight notes that the magazine was "[p]rinted in runs of between 80 and 125" (5). Even the editors themselves would dispute their recollection of figures, ranging between 100 and 150 (Bentley and Gnarowski 96, 106). Both David O’Rourke and Don Precosky arrive at a median figure, suggesting a circulation of approximately 125 (O’Rourke; Precosky 75). No doubt subscription numbers were variable, rising and falling over the course of Preview’s nearly three-year run.
  9. In August 1943, under the auspices of Preview, Anderson launched the Victory Broadsheet, a single sheet of newsprint consisting of leftist "war songs" written by Anderson himself. The broadsheet was distributed as an insert in the August 1943 issue of Preview (no. 15). His editorial headnote targeted the general public: "Take one of these broadsheets. Pin it up in your livingroom, kitchen, bathroom, workbench—any place you like." He explained the purpose of the broadsheet more extensively in a note in the magazine itself: "For some time past the preview group has been discussing the position of poetry in war-time and the possibility of appealing to a wider public. We have attempted to solve this problem by the publication of a subsidiary which will be printed in the thousands and distributed, probably free, to factories, schools, bookstores, newsstands, etc. . . . It will contain poetry of a simpler, more popular kind than that usually obtaining in the parent magazine. . . . The general idea is 1) To bring poetry to the people 2) To stimulate morale by explaining the issues of the war and the problems of the peace in terms of Canadian history and life" ("Note" [Aug. 1943] 12). The broadsheet was discontinued after only one installment.
  10. As early as December 1943, the group issued an insert in the magazine (no. 17) entitled "The preview Fund" in which it outlined its financial situation: "The production of all little magazines is hazardous and many, too many of them, fold up within a month or two of their first appearance. They are the dragonflies of the literary world. Our case is somewhat different for we are an inexpensive, modest but tenacious insect. We can resort to the cocoon of the clique or the caterpillar stage of limited circulation. But to make ourselves heard, to multiply, to take the nuptial flight—for this we need money. Not a great deal. But some. We need your nickels for our gold, upon your quarters and dollars our irridiscence [sic] depends" (n.p.). The group set a goal of one hundred dollars as its target. A reminder about sending contributions to the Preview fund appeared in the February 1944 issue (no. 18) ("Note" 10); no subsequent issues contain notices about fund. How the group planned to invest the money from the fund is unknown; it is possible that the group hoped to afford to have the magazine printed instead of mimeographed. The First Statement group had recently obtained a printing press and had started to issue a printed magazine in August 1943; the group had announced the First Statement fund in the 13 March 1943 issue in order to raise money to purchase the press (Sutherland, "Role" 1– 2).
  11. For histories of the Andersons’ roles in the production of the Montreal-based periodical En Masse, see Gnarowski; and Whitney, "En Masse," and "From Oxford" 39–43.
  12. Plans for the formation of a new magazine had been proposed as early as July 1944. A preliminary meeting of the Federation of Canadian Writers (fcw), an organization proposed as an alternative to the Canadian Authors Association, was held in May or early June 1944 (see Dorothy Livesay to Earle Birney, 7 June 1944 [Earle Birney Papers, box 13, file 23]; and A.J.M. Smith to Livesay, 24 June 1944 [Dorothy Livesay Papers, box 5, file 15, item 2]). The provisional executive committee of the fcw included Patrick Anderson, A.M. Klein, and Neufville Shaw of the Preview group and Irving Layton and Louis Dudek of the First Statement group. Others in attendance at the original fcw meeting were Audrey Aikman and John Sutherland of the First Statement group and F.R. Scott and Bruce Ruddick of the Preview group, among others including A.J.M. Smith. Among the suggestions raised at the fcw’s preliminary meeting was a proposal to "consider the creation of a national magazine, perhaps through the amalgamation of existing magazines" ("A Proposal for a Federation of Canadian Writers," 29 July 1944; Dorothy Livesay Papers, box 1, file 1, item 11). Although the fcw itself never moved beyond the planning stage, its proposal for a national magazine would eventually take the form of Northern Review, whose founding editorial board chiefly consisted of members of the provisional executive committee of the fcw and others from the First Statement and Preview groups in attendance at the meeting.
 

 

March 13, 1944

Preview meeting

 

What’s the subject of our discussion[?]

Anderson We want to take the original statement in Preview, March 1942, and see what changes we feel ought to be made in it. (Reads)1

 

[STATEMENT

This is no magazine. It presents five Montreal writers who recently formed themselves into a group for the purpose of mutual discussion and criticism and who hope, through these selections, to try out their work before a somewhat larger public.

As the group takes shape, it becomes clear that general agreement exists on several points. Among them are the following. First, we have lived long enough in Montreal to realize the frustrating and inhibiting effects of isolation. All anti-fascists, we feel that the existence of a war between democratic culture and the paralysing forces of dictatorship only intensifies the writer’s obligation to work. Now, more than ever, creative and experimental writing must be kept alive and there must be no retreat from the intellectual frontier—certainly no shoddy betrayal, on the lines of Archibald MacLeish, Van Wyck Brooks and others, of those international forces which combine in a Picasso, a Malraux or a Joyce. Secondly, the poets amongst us look forward, perhaps optimistically, to a possible fusion between the lyric and didactic elements in modern verse, a combination of vivid, arresting imagery and the capacity to "sing" with social content and criticism.

Thirdly, we hope to make contact, as a group, with new creative writing movements in England, the United States and other parts of Canada. We will welcome such contributions as space and the aims expressed above permit. We have envisaged from the start a gradually [sic] widening of our group to about twice its present size. And may we add that you can receive six issues of "preview" for the sum of fifty cents, mailable to any of us.]

That statement is rather glib and experience has not borne out the views.

When P[review] started, we wanted a group to criticize their work[—m]utual discussion and criticism. [It h]as not been that so much as a group concerned with bringing out a magazine.

The "isolation" was of an artist to another. Also we opposed Brooks[’s] and M[a]cLeish[’s] "isolation."

Klein Were you not too nationalist?
Scott Not at all—where did we write about moose and canoes? All we were concerned with was the development of art in Canada. Art in Canada is different from"Canadian art[.]"
Shaw We want literature written in Canada that is "literature. Naturally much of it will deal with Canadian things.
Anderson It is possible to have a cultural nationalism and an internationalism at the same time. Internationalism is part of our culture, but so too is Canadian life and landscape.
Shaw We must have a poetry that is vivid and concrete [—i]mmediate. A good poem has a physical quality, like a peach or an orange, and in that sense it is Canadian.
Scott Poetry draws on all experience—some is more universal than others. Landscape is local[;] philosophy is not.
Klein What is the difference between poetry in Windsor and in Detroit?
Scott If poems are about letter boxes, one will be red and one green[.]
Page Subject matter is not much different in two closely related places.
Anderson Montreal is crying out to be written about. If we were socially aware we would write about them[.]2
Page Yes—he3 could not help drawing upon his environment, and that would be Canadian[.]
Ruddick Canadians used to take [the] moose and use it as [a] symbol. It had an associational use. This was false, as it was not a direct writing.
Scott We have never had a good poem about a moose yet. We just use the same moose as a piece of shorthand. The real moosiness4 has never come out. I think we should discuss why there has not been more poetry and more interest in poetry in Canada.
Shaw There has been a revival lately. Preview, First Statement, and Con[temporary] Verse all appeared within a year.5 Why did that happen[?]
Anderson Canada took some time to be influenced by new poetic influences. England’s group did not start till [the] 1700s.
Scott Why were we not influenced by [the] USA—as were [the] Fortnightly crowd?6 Perhaps we did not publish enough. Nothing came in book form till 1933–[3]6.7
Anderson That’s a problem. We do not take enough care to get our stuff around. We must push our wares.
Ruddick Society regards poetry as shameful—they won’t go after it. It is not regarded as a worthwhile activity in Canada[.]
Shaw Still, we do little to make our stuff known.
Scott After all, that is the purpose of this meeting—to get at the roots of the problem of creative literature in Canada, and to publish the results in the hope that it will evoke a response.
Anderson People look on poetry as a jigsaw puzzle with a meaning[.]
Page That is because we make it that way.
Ruddick I don’t think so. In [the] U[nited] S[tates] no poetry sells very much—even verse that is plain reading[.]
Page I still think that to [the] average reader our poetry’s a puzzle. The poetry they read in school is not a puzzle. So they don’t start looking for a puzzle.
Ruddick All poetry is today suggestive and a poetry of implication.
Scott Today poetry has moved on from its former base and people are not trained to keep up with it. Poets write in the newer manner and hence are further and further away from the common reader.
Anderson If we were really "singing with social content," people would like the singing and would read it anyway[.]
Scott There is too much virtuosity in modern poetry. Poets too easily get effects they like[.]
Anderson Yes—and the poets are escapist in enjoying their own poetry because they cannot enjoy much else. Formerly they had (1) to enjoy writing and (2) enjoy the fact that others would enjoy it.
Scott Poets today know the old order of values and ideas is passing. They have not found their new universals. They are struggling for a new order, knowing only they cannot accept the old. The ordinary people have not yet gone so far forward, and the gap between the poet and public is wide. Not till a new age dawns with a new equilibrium will poet and public walk in tune.
Shaw Poets of [the 19]20s had destruction to occupy them. That was easy. We have to construct—that is difficult.
Ruddick Poets today have no faith, no attitude.
Klein That is irrelevant. Good poetry can be made out of unbelief as well as belief[—e.]g. Baudelaire[.]
Ruddick We are marginal men—caught between the old and the new.
Scott I think we are obscure because the present and future are obscure[.]
Klein Past[,] present[,] and future have been obscure, and yet their poetry was transparent[.]
Anderson Yes, but we have more obscure things to deal with. Psychology has upset us. Neurotics are about us—for the first time with new scientific analysis. This confuses us.
Klein In the writing [that] shows the most promise there is a contradiction. Poets are normally conscious and seek to give no universals, yet they use a restricted technique. They cannot speak to the masses they love. Richness of imagery is O.K. but it is not communicated. These people are also aware of their schizophrenia.
Scott Why should poets write in language of the old order of society[?] People have not seen as much of the new world as the poet does. The poet is out ahead. In time the people will catch up.
Anderson Our poets are afraid even to come out with a straight-forward statement. It would be "corny." They cannot say "Love your neighbour."
Klein Yes—so [the] modern poet overdecorates his ideas so that they look modern. Then if [a] reader finds a platitude buried away in it[, it] is his big discovery and not the poet[’]s making. I am not talking about the poems of personal sensibility—in which the poet can be as individual as he likes. But if he wants to make a simple and true statement he should use simple and true language which communicates.
Shaw We must have an advance in language and expression. We have been changed by new developments in every field.
Scott Yes—and why should we not ask the reader to move a bit too—to be ready to look for new modes of expression and to try to understand them[?]
Anderson   We like strangeness too much, seem afraid of truth[.]
Scott Let[’]s accuse Canadians of being backward in their education, reading[,] and thinking[.]
Anderson Canadian youths have far too happy a childhood. Hence they do not turn to poetry at 15.
Page Would you8 have been less a poet if you had been brought up in Canada?
Scott Yes—he would have had far fewer thoughts and far nicer ones.

 
 Notes to the Document

  1. Anderson, Patrick, et al. "Statement." Preview 1 (1942): 1. The full text of this document, read by Anderson, appears in square brackets below.

  2. The elided antecedent of "them" is, presumably, the people of Montreal.

  3. The poet.

  4. moosiness] mooseness    Possible variant. Compare Djwa’s quotation and explication of the phrase "moosey-ness of the moose" (214). Although vaguely attributed to the Preview group, and quoted in close proximity to a passage from "Four of the Former Preview Editors," the phrase itself does not appear in Bentley and Gnarowski and is uncited in Djwa.

  5. Contemporary Verse: A Canadian Quarterly, the Victoria and Vancouver-based poetry magazine, first appeared in September 1941, followed by the Montreal-based little magazines Preview in March 1942 and First Statement in August 1942.

  6. The McGill Fortnightly Review, founded and edited by Scott, A.J.M. Smith, and Leon Edel in November 1925.

  7. Scott must be referring to the so-called Montreal poets of the 1920s, Leo Kennedy, Smith, Klein, and himself. Kennedy’s The Shrouding was published in 1933, New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (with Kennedy, Smith, Scott, Klein, E.J. Pratt, and Robert Finch) in 1936. Scott evidently counts as "nothing" the collections published by W.W.E. Ross, Laconics (1930) and Sonnets (1932), and by Dorothy Livesay, Green Pitcher (1928) and Signpost (1932), though he seems to restrict his generalization to the Fortnightly group.

  8. Anderson. Born in Ashstead, Surrey, England on 4 August 1915, educated at Worcester College, Oxford (Whitney, "From Oxford" 27).


Works Cited

Anderson, Patrick. "A Conversation with Patrick Anderson." With Seymour Mayne. Inscape 11.3 (1974): 46–79.

——. "Editors’ Note." Preview 20 (1944): 4.

——. "An Explanatory Issue." Preview 21 (1944): 1–3.

——. Introduction. Preview. Fascim. ed. Millwood, ny: Kraus, 1980. iii–v.

——. "Note." Preview 4 ([June] 1942): 1.

——. "Note." Preview 15 ([Aug.] 1943): 12.

——. "Note." Preview 18 ([Feb.] 1944): 10.

——. "The preview Fund." Insert. Preview 17 (1943).

——. Search Me: Autobiography—The Black Country, Canada and Spain. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.

——, et al. "Statement." Preview 1 (1942): 1.

——. ed. The Victory Broadsheet 1. Montreal: Cambridge P, 1943.

Bentley, D. M. R. and Michael Gnarowski, ed. "Four of the Former Preview Editors: A Discussion." In "Three Documents from F. R. Scott’s Personal Papers." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 4 (1979): 93–119.

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

Djwa, Sandra. The Politics of the Imagination: a Life of F. R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland, 1987.

Dorothy Livesay Papers. A. Arch 2024. Queen’s University Archives, Kathleen Ryan Hall, Queen’s U.

Earle Birney Papers. MC 49. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, U of Toronto.

F. R. Scott Papers. MG 30 D211. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

Gnarowski, Michael. "New Facts and Old Fictions: Some Notes on Patrick Anderson, 1945 and En Masse." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 6 (1980): 61–8.

McKnight, David. "An Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Little Magazines: 1940–1980." ma thesis. Concordia U, 1992.

Miriam Waddington Papers. MG 31 D54. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

O’Rourke, David. "Preview." In The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997. 969.

Patrick Anderson Papers. MG 30 D 177. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

Page, P. K. Interview. With Dorothy Livesay. Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Sound and Moving Images Division, Victoria. Item 1620.

——. Letter to author. 9 August 2000.

——. "P. K. Page: a Biographical Interview." With Sandra Djwa. Malahat Review 117 (1996): 33–54.

P. K. Page Papers. MG 30 D 311. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

Precosky, Don. "Preview: An Introduction and Index." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 8 (1981): 74–89.

Sutherland, John. The Letters of John Sutherland, 1942-1956. Ed. Bruce Whitman. Toronto: ECW, 1992.

——. "The Role of the Magazines." First Statement 1.15 (1943):1–2.

Trehearne, Brian. The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999.

Whitney, Patricia. "En Masse: an Introduction and an Index." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 19 (1986): 76–91.

——. "First Person Feminine: Margaret Day Surrey." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 31 (1992): 86–92.

——. "From Oxford to Montreal: Patrick Anderson’s Political Development." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 19 (1986): 26–48.