Not of Things Only, but of Thought: Notes on A. J. M.
Smith's Imagistic Poems
By D.M.R. Bentley
The poems which A.J.M. Smith gathered together in the second sections of both his Collected
Poems (1962) and his Poems, New and Collected (1967) can, as George Woodcock
quite correctly perceived in his review of the earlier volume, be broadly categorized as
"Imagistic."1 In varying
degrees and in different ways, most of these poems — there are eight in Collected
Poems and ten in the newer volume — draw upon the theories and practices of the
Imagists to present an external nature that is in several cases recognizably Canadian. Of
Smith's familiarity with imagist poetry and poetics there is no doubt. In the so-called
"Rejected Preface" to New Provinces (1936), he speaks of the attempts
of the McGill poets and their associates to "get rid of the facile word, the
stereotyped phrase and the mechanical rhythm..." and "to combine colloquialism
and rhetoric...." "The imagist," says Smith, "seeks with perfect
objectivity and impersonality to recreate a thing or arrest an experience as precisely and
vividly and simply as possible."2
Consonant with these, fairly standard ideas of Imagism (though the fact that Smith allows
"rhetoric" into the imagist fold should not go unnoticed), most of the Canadian
poet's "imagistic" lyrics are brief, if not precisely laconic (only one,
"The Lonely Land," extends beyond a short page in length); most are written in
relatively free verse (the one conspicuous exception being the rhymed quatrains of
"To Hold in a Poem," though end-rhymes and stanzaic forms appear elsewhere in
the group); and most partake of the distrust of 'poetic' language, the determination to be
colloquial, and the pretense of objectivity and impersonality that, at least since the
'twenties and 'thirties when several of them were written and published in The Dial,
The Canadian Forum, and elsewhere have been considered the hallmarks of Imagism. This
is not to say, however, that these poems are merely derivative of Imagism or, indeed, that
they are successful, even in theoretical terms, as imagist poems. On the contrary, many of
them violate imagist theory as expressed by Pound, Hulme, and others, adapting imagist
ideas and practices in ways that are fascinating and significant especially when viewed in
the light of what has elsewhere been called the ecology of Canadian poetry — the
reciprocal relations between imported poetics and their Canadian environments and
contents.3 An examination of Smith's
"imagistic" poems as a group promises to reveal the complexity of his creative
response to imagist ideas and the importance of such a poem as "The Lonely
Land," which provides an illuminating instance of the adaptation of an imported
poetic under the pressure of an imaginative response to Canadian landscape.
It is inviting to start with "The Lonely Land" if
only because it is the most anthologised and famous of Smith's imagistic poems. But in
order to appreciate why "The Lonely Land" is a felicitous poem and a Canadian
classic it is necessary first to examine the less successful and less well-known poems in
the group. None of the poems of the imagistic group has worn worse than the opening one,
"To Hold in a Poem," which, though given the status of a prelude in the Collected
Poems and in Poems, New and Collected, was subsequently omitted by Smith
from The Classic Shade (1978), his final selected poems. It is not difficult to
understand either why "To Hold in a Poem" was assigned a prelusory role in the
earlier collections or why it was omitted from the final selection, for it is a poem that
makes an important aesthetic statement but does so in a mawkishly patriotic tone which was
bound, sooner or later, to offend Smith's modern and cosmopolitan sensibilities. A
balanced interpretation of "To Hold in a Poem" must seek to understand both its
significance and its failure.
The potential for failure in "To Hold in a Poem"
begins fully to manifest itself in the third line, which speaks of "our snow"
and "our birds."4
(The italics here and in subsequent quotations from Smith's poems are added.) The
possessive patriotism of these parallel phrases is re-echoed in the "our ice" of
the second stanza and refulgant in the final stanza where the avowed cosmopolitan who has
allowed himself to write with an almost nationalistic fervour achieves the disaster that
he has courted from the outset:
To hold in a verse as austere
As the spirit of prairie and river,
Lonely, unbuyable, dear,
The North, as a deed, and forever.
From the moment of announcing its intention in its self-consciously bardic opening line
— "I would take words. . ." — "To Hold in a Poem" might seem
bent on fusing portentous rhetoric with a cognate of the imagist ideal of an objective
language of things — words "crisp and . . . white/As . . . snow . .
.," "clear and . . . cold/As . . . ice . . ." and so on. More apparent,
however, is the poem's debt to the matter and manner of the last Romantics. When "To
Hold in a Poem" was first collected in A Sort of Ecstasy (1954), Northrop
Frye located it in "the Carman tradition..." and described it as "a summary
of Canadian romantic themes."5
Certainly the poem's catalogue of Canada's emblematic attributes — "snow,"
"ice," "a jack pine," "a trillium," "mountains,"
"forests as pointed as grass" (Lampman, it may be recalled, has the "forest
of the grass"6 in the final
stanza of "Among the Timothy") — sounds as if the selection of its items
was governed by the muse of Miss. Crotchet and her Pavlovian companions. In point of fact,
early and very different versions of "To Hold in a Poem" were published in the
literary supplements of the McGill Daily (in March, 1925) and the McGill News
(in March, 1927)7 under the
titles of "Prayer" and "For a Canadian Anthology" — facts which
surely bear on the tone and content of the finished poem. What began as a self-conscious,
patriotic exercise, to some extent remained such.
The lines "As young as a trillium, and old/As Laurentia's
long undulant line..." in the final version of "To Hold in a Poem" are
particularly disappointing because, though doubtless emotionally affective for certain
inhabitants of Ontario and Quebec, they are conceptually and linguistically feeble;
indeed, the word "Laurentia" is a poeticism reminiscent of the
"Canadia" of Canada's earliest poets for whom scansion, in R.E. Rashley's words,
was more important than "the mere name of the country...."8 The following stanza is only better because,
in its final two lines, it almost replaces saccharin with something more genuine; the
subject is still words:
Sweet-smelling and bright
As
new rain; as hard
And
as smooth and as white
As a
brook pebble cold and unmarred....
These and other lines in "To Hold in a Poem" are perhaps best glossed by
Smith's own comments on "romantic" Canadian verse in "A Rejected
Preface": "there would be less objection . . . if the observation were accurate
and its expression vivid, or if we could feel that the emotion was a genuine and intense
one.... But, with a negligible number of exceptions, the observation is general and the
descriptions are vague."9
Outside the Canadian continuity, "To Hold in a Poem"
recalls the middle Yeats of such poems as "The Dawn" (which begins "I would
be ignorant. . .") and "The Fisherman" (which ends with the poet's desire
to write "one/Poem maybe as cold/And passionate as the dawn' "10). Significantly, this is the Yeats whose
"hard, precise, and clear..."11
imagery and relatively 'homely,' 'fresh,' and colloquial diction Smith recognized and
admired. The fact that "To Hold in a Poem" is divided into quatrains, should not
blind us to the possibility that its rhyme scheme (abab) and
strong-stress meter may derive, not inappropriately, from such patriotic, short-line poems
as "Easter, 1916" and "The Fisherman." It may even be that in "To
Hold in a Poem" Smith was attempting a patriation of the Yeatsian ideal of a national
poetry which, in the Canadian poet's own description, would "mean something to
vigorous, simple men...."12 A
presumed audience so constituted would go someway towards explaining, if not pardoning,
the affective nature of the poem. The key to the significance that "To Hold in a
Poem," must have held for Smith himself, however, surely resides in the fact that it
idealizes about a language that would correspond to the supposed reality of Canada and, in
its final two stanzas, articulates the formalistic and linguistic aesthetic that
underlines his poems in the imagist manner. The poem's title directs attention to these
very stanzas:
To hold in a poem of words
Like water in colourless glass
The spirit of mountains like birds,
Of forests as pointed as grass;
To hold in a verse as austere
As the spirit of prairie and river,
Lonely, unbuyable, dear,
The North, as a deed, and forever.
Setting aside, in addition to the sentimentality, such weaknesses as the tautology of
"words" (which is clearly present in the first line of this quotation to rhyme
with "birds") and the imprecision of another rhyme word, "dear"13 (which only avoids contradicting
"unbuyable" if it merely means beloved and not expensive), these two stanzas are
remarkable for their concise articulation of the imagistic doctrine of the transparency of
language and form. As a statement of the relation between content and form "water in
a colourless glass" implies, not only an objective and limpid style, but also,
outside the poem, the existence of a formlessness which the poet wishes to contain
("hold") using an unadorned ("austere") and virtually imperceptible
form ("colourless glass") such as would not impede the direct apprehension of
the "spiritual essence"14
of Canada. The implied function of the poet is to discover and distill the genius of
Canada, and to convey in writing that spirit of place for his presumed readers. Quite
clearly, this is the raison d'etre of that portion of Smith's imagistic verse
— most notably the first section of "The Lonely Land" — which attempts
to present, in an apparently unmediated manner, spiritually significant details of the
Canadian environment.
If it is now clear why "To Hold in a Poem" serves as
a prelude to Smith's imagistic poems, it may also have become apparent that the poem
itself, with its noticeably delineated stanzas and rhetorical techniques seems to fall
short of the formalistic ideal represented by "austere" and "colourless
glass." This, surely, is stained glass rather than crystal. Formalistically "To
Hold in a Poem" should not be hastily dismissed, however; its delineated stanzas do
fulfil the function of placing on view the images that they contain while at the same time
informing their contents and the reader by means of an ordering process.
Furthermore, each stanza until the last ends with a semi-colon, and the continuity thus
achieved encourages the reader, not only to move forward through the syntactically unified
poem as across distinct — yet inter-connected — landscapes, but also to notice
the flowing and unifying progression from "snow" and "ice" in stanzas
one and two, through "rain" in stanza three, to "water" and
"river" in stanzas four and five. Just as the emphasis on the elemental fact of
water, as well as on the water course ("river") in the final stanza, is
appropriate in a self-consciously Canadian poem, so the "interstanzaic fluidity"15 and catalogic structure of "To Hold
in a Poem" are, in turn, ecologically appropriate to its enormous subject — the
spirit of a land so vast as to defy containment in one stanza or in one image. It is a
measure of Smith's ecological intelligence that he never attempted to treat of the
"Lonely . . . North" in a brief imagistic poem, for as Michael
Ondaatje, referring to T.E. Hulme's Northern journey of 1906-7 (of which more later)
astutely remarks: "Canada supposedly sparked the idea for Imagism but it is really
not the country for the haiku. After the perfect lines about the frog or cricket or
eclipse we turn around and have to come to terms with the vastness of our place or our
vast unspoken history."16 The
point may be made now that in "The Lonely Land," and, less successfully, in
"To Hold in a Poem," the ecologically conscious Smith17 fittingly employs a catalogic structure,
which John Gage, in discussing various longer imagist poems, sees as being "generated
by the principle of continuation" and credits with possessing "the expansive
qualities of an accordion file,"18
for depictions of the stretching landscape of Canada.19
There is a further and final reason why "To Hold in a
Poem," for all its shortcomings, is formalistically and ecologically of interest: it
reveals a Canadian poet, none other of course, than the author of the theory of
"eclectic detachment," exercising the wisdom that resides but in choosing for a
writer who finds himself in a satellite rather than a metropolitan culture. The Canadian
writer, Smith argues in the "Eclectic Detachment" essay, "selects those
elements from varied and often disparate sources that are useful to him, and rejects those
that are not." "Where freedom of choice comes in is in the intellectual effort
[required] . . . to pick and choose just those poets (or just those aspects of those
poets) that can satisfy our needs."20
Some intimations of the "intellectual effort" behind Smith's imagistic poems in
general and "To Hold in a Poem" in particular were gained in the earlier
discussions of catalogic structure and Yeatsian borrowings. Further insights into the
ecological intelligence that informs "To Hold in a Poem" become possible when
just two of the poem's rejected options are examined. Suppose for a moment that Smith had
written the poem, as he doubtless could have, in sonnet form. What he might have gained in
spatial and fixative (Petrarchan) or argumentative and closural (Shakespearian) qualities
by employing the sonnet form,21
would surely have stood in, at best, ironic contrast to the subject-matter, imagistic
assumptions, and presumed audience of "To Hold in a Poem." The more the rejected
option of the sonnet is pondered, the more certain the conviction becomes that Smith was
ecologically correct in his decision not to cast any of his imagistic poems of the North
in that form. Suppose for another moment that "Laurentia's long undulant line. .
." had tempted Smith to use Whitman's long line22 as a vehicle for the poem. Although such a choice might have
gained him a form expressive of the democratic vistas and enormous size of Canada, the
associations of Whitmanian free verse would surely have subverted the sense that he wished
to convey of the Northern "spirit" as "austere," "Lonely,
unbuyable...." Smith had too much ecological sense to commit the kind of error
represented by Nathaniel A. Benson's decision to employ the hymn tune of "The Battle
Hymn of the Republic" as the vehicle for depiction of a personified Northland.23 These rejected, American options lend
stature to Leon Edel's comments à propos the final stanza of "To
Hold in a Poem" that "the poetry of A.J.M. Smith," in the "austerity
and frugality" which differentiate it from the "roistering expansiveness of
America," is a "subject open to the deepest exploration" because "full
of wondrous implications for Canada. . ."24
More successful but less significant than "To Hold in a
Poem" is "Sea Cliff," the first of the relatively short imagistic poems in
Smith's two collections to be discussed briefly here. John Ferns understands "Sea
Cliff" merely as an "imagistic piece of verbal representation of the movement of
the sea."25 Quite correctly he
calls attention to some of the stylistic devices, which include alliteration, repetition,
consonance, assonance, end-rhyme, and rhythmical variation (the poem has an iambic norm
but strategically employs hard spondees and light anapests), that Smith musters to enact
the contours and movements of his seascape. But there is more to "Sea Cliff"
than meets the eye and ear. More than just the recreation of a natural scene, the poem,
particularly in its less concrete second stanza, suggests both a sexual rhythm and an
enduring strength which have clear, human referents. Here is that second stanza of
"Sea Cliff" (notice how the only feminine rhyme in the poem, on
"abiding" and "riding" reinforces the concluding sense of uplift):
after—
after the ebb-flow,
wet rock, high—
high over the slapping green,
water sliding away
and the rock abiding,
new rock riding out of the spray.
A full response to "Sea Cliff" will recognize that,
true to its imagist (and, indeed, Romantic) origins, the poem is more than a recreation of
the kinesis and stasis of things; it is an invitation to discover the human significance
of the sea's rhythm and the rock's endurance. One of Smith's detractors, Gordon Harvey
— a writer for whom, as for some Imagists, rhetoric and style are negative concepts
— has observed that in "Smith's poems [in the Imagist] vein, even finally in
'Sea Cliff' . . . style is more noticeable than subject."26 What Harvey does not consider is the
possibility that for a Canadian poet of the classical and humanist tradition such as
Smith, rhetoric and style, a personal voice expressive of a rational consciousness, are a
means of asserting individual and human values in the context of a terrain that is devoid
of human resonances until they are discovered there by the poet. A poem which can be
adduced as further proof of this point is "The Creek," which follows, and in
that sense reinforces, "Sea Cliff" in both of Smith's collections.
Edel, whose detailed analysis of "The Creek" in
"The Worldly Muse of A.J.M. Smith" obviates the need for a similar examination
of it here, remarks that "the very shape" of the poem is "human."27 Not only do its two stanzas represent
respectively the female and male profiles, but the "effects of craft" —
assonance, internal rhymes, mimetic rhythms, and the rest — contrive to render the
apparently literal (for Ferns "The Creek" is merely a "delicate and subtle
work of imagistic mimesis"28)
vocal of anthropomorphic significance. It should be noticed that in the first (female)
section of the poem, the terms that are open to humanistic interpretation
("wet", "whips," "wisps," "hair," "lip")
are, so to say, buried within lines of naturalistic description and that in the second
(male) section figure and ground become one in the rhythms of natural and human life. The
"these" which describes only a chaos of things and textures after stanza one
becomes at the poem's end an affirmation of life on the verge of oblivion. "The
Creek":
Stones
still wet with cold black earth,
roots, whips of roots
and wisps of straw,
green soaked crushed leaves
mudsoiled where hoof has touched them,
twisted grass and hairs of herbs
that lip the ledge of the stream's edge:
these
then foamfroth, waterweed,
and windblown bits of straw
that rise, subside, float wide,
come round again, subside,
a little changed
and stranger, nearer
nothing
these
Smith himself described "The Creek" as an example of the "simpler kind
of imagist verse," though he added, as if to stress the presence of style in the
poem: "the reader may notice that the development of the poem depends upon metrical
devices as much as on images; the music is harsh and the rhythm difficult."29 The reader may also notice that in
"The Creek" Smith is consistent with imagist theory and
practice in constructing his poem out of "diverse images borrowed from very different
orders of things"30 — in
this instance, external landscape and human sexuality. In his discussion of the
"ideogrammic method," Pound describes this layering technique as
"super-position,"31 and in
the famous couplet of "In a Station of the Metro"gives it succinct form:
"The apparition of these faces in a crowd:/Petals on a wet, black bough."32 There is an important difference in
movement between this and "The Creek" which should not escape attention. It is
that while Pound's poem moves from the human to the natural order, seeking a pictorial
analogy for the ghostly "faces" of the "crowd" in the realm of
flowers, trees, and moisture, Smith's poem moves in the opposite direction, inviting the
reader to discover human shapes, characteristics, rhythms, and meaning in what seems at
first to be an objective and formless external nature. Or, to put it differently: where
the American poet finds the suggestion of a "wet, black bough" in the dark realm
of experience, the Canadian poet, faced not with the unreal city but with the "cold
black earth" implants in that impersonal nature the semblance of a very experienced
humanity: complete with "hairs," "whips," and "harsh" music,
Smith's "Creek" is no sweet river that runs softly in song. It is, however,
humanizing and liberating — an ecologically appropriate and mischievously provocative
adaptation of an imported aesthetic to the demands of its Canadian environment and to what
some (for example, John Glassco) might argue are the real needs of a Canadian audience.
A different means of humanizing landscape is to be found in
"Swift Current," a poem which clearly belongs with "Sea Cliff' and
"The Creek," if only because it precedes them in Collected Poems, follows
them in Poems, New and Collected, and separates them in The Classic Shade.33 While F.R. Scott has termed
"Swift Current" "purely descriptive"34 and A.M. Klein has called it "strictly Canadian,"35 the poem is not narrowly or necessarily
either of these things; it is, in fact, a remarkably analytical and denatured poem which
defines its subject through metaphor, negation, and abstraction:
This is a visible
and crystal wind:
no ragged edge,
no splash of foam
no whirlpool's scar;
only
— in the narrows,
sharpness cutting sharpness,
arrows of direction
spears of speed.
Since "Swift Current" focuses on a feature of the (Canadian) landscape which,
though "visible" (if only relative to the utterly invisible "crystal
wind"), lacks the texture, sounds, shapes and anthropomorphic possibilities (it has
"no . . . scar. . .") that are the staples of imagistic verse, the poem is
forced, paradoxically, towards abstractions for the purposes of mimesis. While "the
narrows," a phrase which concentrates the river's water and the reader's
concentration, is physical enough, the line following — "sharpness cutting
sharpness" — is, curiously, both textural and abstract: "sharpness" is
both an unspecific quality yet, in the context, of "sharpness cutting sharpness"
it is harsh, grating, almost painful, in its physicality. It thus serves as a transition
from the relatively concrete "narrows" to the more abstract, significative, but
still representational terms — "arrows of direction/spears of speed" —
with which the poem closes. The effect of these final lines — which recall the
force-lines that represent energy, movement and direction in futurist art — is to
allow the reader alternately to view either the vectorial signs — "arrows"
and "spears" — or the swift current, the conception of the latter being, to
some extent, dictated by the former.36
While the poem's title, "Swift Current," should ensure that, finally, the water
rather than the vectors will be in the foreground in the reader's mind, the abstract, yet
visual, quality of "arrows of direction/spears of speed" also ensures that, when
attention is paid to these as one-dimensional, representational signs which are,
nevertheless, inseparable from the water, the reader gains an impression as of a futurist
(or cubist) painting. Finally, the responsive reader should leave the poem, not grumbling
with Ferns that "it is much easier to visualize Smith's creek than his swift
current,"37 but aware that a
difficult, and almost scientific, process of observation, analysis, and description has
occurred, that under the pressure of a rational and imaginative engagement with his
intractable subject-matter, Smith brilliantly — and in an almost painterly manner
— succeeds in rendering the swift current dynamically visible and humanly
intelligible.
The four poems that follow "Swift Current" in Poems,
New and Collected, "Walking in a Field, Looking Down and Seeing a White
Violet," "Wild Raspberry (For W.W.E. Ross) ," "Birches
at Drummond Point (Lake Memphremagog)," and "Tree" have a curious
provenance which must be taken into account by an interpretation of them. Of the four, two
— "Walking in a Field. . ." and "Birches. . ." — were
not present in the earlier Collected Poems,and two — "Birches. .
." again and "Tree" — were excluded from The Classic Shade.("Wild
Raspberry" is thus the only one of the four poems to appear in all three volumes.)
With a poet and anthologist as fastidious as Smith, it is essential to ask, not only why
certain poems are excluded from a given collection, but also why one poem precedes or
follows another in a volume. In the case of the four poems under consideration, it is
clear from the presence of "Birches..." and "Tree" on facing pages in Poems,
New and Collected and the absence of the arboreal pair from The Classic Shade,that
Smith came to view the two poems as symmetrical and complementary — head and tail, so
to say, of the same coin or beast. The same holds true of "Walking in a Field..
." and "Wild Raspberry," for although the latter poem was written and
collected earlier (not fortuitously, it is paired with "Tree" in Collected
Poems), it faces the former in Poems, New and Collected and The Classic
Shade.38 What the four poems
have in common beyond these pairings (of which more in a moment) is that each is the
exploration of a poetic, and, hence, epistemological alignment, a probe (to borrow
McLuhan's term) of a semi-serious nature into a mode in which Smith, the classical
ironist, participates at the technical level but knows intellectually to be limited. Such
a practice of poetic probing by imitation is one aspect of eclectic detachment in action:
it allows the Canadian poet to discover both the strengths and the limitations of an
imported poetic in the only really sure way: by demonstrating them to himself. When a poet
publishes his poetic probes he assumes a reader who does not simple-mindedly equate
imitation of an intelligent, exploratory nature with a failure of creativity.
Since the four poems on view are poetic probes, craftsmanlike
but only semi-serious explorations in and of imported modes, it would be perverse to
subject them to close aesthetic analysis. The techniques and assumptions of Hopkins or
Sitwell or Thomas per se are better explored in the originals than in poems by
Smith. "Walking in a Field. . .," and "Wild Raspberry," "Birches.
. ." and "Tree," are worth considering, however, for what they reveal about
Smith's mentality, specifically about his attitudes to various
nineteenth-and-twentieth-century ideas about nature, perception, and art.39
As the very title of "Walking in a Field, Looking Down
and Seeing a White Violet" and the somewhat unsubtle isolation of "the
eye" on a pivotal line at its centre suggest, this is a poem concerned with ways of
seeing. It is also a poem about pathetic fallacy and about Romantic illusions. In the
first stanza, "the eye" is engaged in the activity of "Threading" its
way among the objects, shapes, and textures of a field in spring, making virtually no
effort to do other than record, with occasional, authropomorphic readings (such as
"avid arches"), the external nature through which it passes. In the second
stanza, however, the eye is more consciously, albeit innocently, directed: it "plays
Jackstraws/to disentangle/the skywhite skyblue/first sky white shoot/of a white
violet...." By the middle of the second stanza, if not before, it becomes quite
apparent that "Walking in a Field. . .," particularly in its use of compound
adjectives is, stylistically, an exercise in the Hopkins or Thomas manner and,
generically, an assignment in the Romantic-Victorian tradition of single flower poems,
which includes such gems as Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall," Rossetti's
"The Woodspurge," and Carman's "A Windflower." Following its stylistic
and generic roots to their underlying assumption that nature's minute particulars can
yield lofty meanings to the visionary eye, the poem concludes with an intimation of
something very curious: "the old/grayblack earth's/mother-milky breast." The
mawkishness of these lines is part of their strategy. Together with the sly humour of an
"old," "grayblack" earth with yet a "mothermilky breast," it
points to the fallacy of the shift from the natural and experiential to the supernatural
and fanciful, criticizing also, perhaps, the cult of mother earth as infantile. The very
fact that the concluding lines and insights of the poem lie outside its lengthy and
prosaic title, reveals them to be unsupported by ocular proof and epistemologically
unverifiable. If "Walking in a Field, Looking Down and Seeing a White Violet"
reveals the fallacy of the subjective, Romantic view of nature, its companion poem in Poems,
New and Collected and The Classic Shade, "Wild Raspberry,"
addresses the limitation of the supposedly objective, imagist view of things.
Although "Wild Raspberry" is dedicated to W.W.E.
Ross, the poem's irregular lines are arranged in couplets, a form not at all typical of
Ross, but, rather, suggestive of William Carlos Williams' work in the imagist or
objectivist mode. Such couplet poems as Williams' "Nantucket" and "Flowers
by the Sea" (which Smith quotes and discusses in "Refining Fire," his 1954
essay on "The Meaning and Use of Poetry"40) may well be the referents for a formalistic allusion in
"Wild Raspberry." The poem is less subtle in remembering the famous "Red
Wheelbarrow" (whose lines are also arranged in groups of two), making what in essence
is a verbal and visual allusion from its own "after the rain/gashes of
red/glisten/among slipp'ry green leaves..." to the "red wheel/barrow/glazed with
rain/water/beside the white/chickens"41
of Williams' poem. "Wild Raspberry" thus becomes, in one of its aspects, a
learned joke shared between Smith and Ross, a witty exercise in the imagist manner which,
like "The Creek," invites the reader to discover the metaphors of human
sexuality that are superimposed upon the leaves "sticky" with sunshine and
"slipp'ry" with moisture, the "gashes of red," the "Yellow
whips," and the "prickly little branches/... pulled into curves/by the big
berries...." "Wild Raspberry" may incidentally show the kinship between
imagist simultaneity and metaphysical wit, but if its final couplet — "The eye
feasts on [the big berries]/and feels refreshed" — is given a full reading the
poem acquires the force of a critique of the imagist emphasis of sight and the sensual
over thought and the metaphysical. The gustatory "eye" that simply
"feasts" on the "berries" evidently does not share the reader's
"intuitive flash"42 of
awareness that the wild raspberry bush (which, it is worth noticing, is addressed as a
second person from the outset) can be perceived sexually and metaphorically, that a
wittily intellectual correspondence between nature and man is imaginatively possible.
Moreover, the eye merely "feels refreshed": even the satisfaction of
its appetite is an illusion. The qualifications introduced by the last couplet of
"Wild Raspberry" indicate that here, as in "Walking in a Field..."
Smith is reenacting for the purposes of examining an alignment vis-à-vis the
perception of external nature which he sees as potentially lacking in honesty and
intelligence, and, when so, as insufficient and illusory. This reading of "Wild
Raspberry" may help to explain why W.W.E. Ross, in a letter to Smith in January,
1958, was troubled by what he saw as a "slight falling off" towards the end of
the poem and suggested that Smith "might put . . . 'The eye feasts on these' rather
than 'The eye feasts on them' " — a change which, he thought, would enable
" 'feels' [to be] . . . replaced, simply, by 'is'."43 Such changes would have diminished the
subtle critical force of "Wild Raspberry," and Smith did not make them.
Just as the juxtaposition of "Walking in a Field..."
and "Wild Raspberry" prompts the recognition that those poetic probes are
thematically linked explorations of epistemological positions, so the pairing of
"Birches..." and "Tree" reveals these poems to be examinations of
different yet related alignments. Like its immediate predecessors in Poems, New and
Collected, "Birches at Drummond Point" presents and questions an
epistemological position, this time the Romantic proposition that a receptive and
privileged observer can receive valuable lessons from external nature, from the impulse of
a vernal wood. "The older masters," writes Smith of the 'Confederation Poets' in
The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), "sought a spiritual nourishment in the
beauty of their natural surroundings.... The poets of today, inheritors of what I.A.
Richards has called the "neutralisation of nature,' . . . can no longer find [their
subject matter] in the beauty of nature — a beauty that seems either deceptive or
irrelevant."44 "Birches at
Drummond Point (Lake Memphremagog)," finds the modern Canadian poet
tentatively adopting the stance of one of the "older masters" to wonder whether
external nature has an intelligible message for him or whether that possibility is itself
a deception:
Leaning over the lake
slim white birches
curved by the south-west wind
offer a silent rebuke
or seem to. . .
The next section, an elaboration of the possibility of receiving an impulse from the
birches, is almost Leacockian in its parodic depiction of the trees as Aldis Lamps:
When the sun glints
on their leaves
dark green or light green
they seem to be flashing
a message. . .
It is as though Wordsworth were to have depicted the leech-gatherer as a practitioner
of semaphor. Now tilted towards the facetious, the poem moves ingenuously and quizzically
to its conclusion:
When a breeze
makes them rustle
I listen:
What do they say?
or seem to?
The uncertain ending of "Birches at Drummond Point" might seem to add nothing
to its beginning. But the fact that the poet's initial uncertainty has now found shape in
two questions, the first assuming the existence of a message from nature which he tries to
understand and the second undercutting the first in its suggestion that to conceive of a
message emanating from the birches is a delusion, indicates a crystalized scepticism
regarding the Romantic epistemological assumptions that the poem investigates. The
inference to be drawn from "Birches at Drummond Point" is that for the modern
poet to fancy external nature as anything other than neutral is futile, and delusive,
albeit still attractive.
The conceptual generality of its title, "Tree,"
indicates that the companion poem to "Birches at Drummond Point" concerns itself
neither with a particular vernal wood nor, in contrast to an imagist poem such as
F.S. Flint's "Trees" (plural), with specific things and their
significance. Smith's "Tree" is, in fact, a sympathetically assertive but not
entirely credulous instancing of the high, orphic claims made by poets of the symboliste
tradition — such as the Mallarme of Variations sur un sujet and the
Prévert of Paroles45
— concerning the power of language and art to create their own worlds as real as
objective reality. "Tree" thus explores an alignment which, though very
different from that of "Birches. . .," has its origins in Romanticism, in the
idea that, through the power of the word, the poet is able to partake in the creativity of
God and to call into being a world of his own. The opening stanza of "Tree"
recalls the conclusion of "Swift Current" as it assigns to words the mysterious
power to designate the vectorial characteristics of occurences in the mental and physical
worlds:
Words are ciphers
denoting speeds and directions
not of thought only but of things.
From this statement of the referentiality of language, the poem proceeds, by means of
an allusion to Mallarmé's "Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l'oubli . . . se leve . .
. l'absente de tous bouquets"46
to show an orphic utterance creating a world:
I say tree
and the rain falls
and the sun gets to work
and the seed breaks
and the sprout appears
and the years pass
and here it is spring again.
The colloquial tone and casual syntax of this passage might obscure a full reading of
the final line where "here" surely refers to the environment called into being
by the poetic utterance. Once inducted into the circumambient world of the word's making,
the reader can be invited to observe its texture and inhabitants:
See what the word
has split the earth with—
gray, black, knotted, gnarled—
with even a boy
carving a heart
and a name.
The function of the imagistic series of adjectives at the centre
of this passage is, of course, to reify the tree, to transform what had before been a
generalized abstraction ("tree") into a visual image in the reader's mind. The
function of the concluding stanza is more complex. That it strikes a sentimental note may
at first seem disappointing. Is it a failure of control on Smith's part that bathos is
allowed to call the question on the ability of "the word" to create human life,
to bring into being a "boy" with the capacity to love and to (pro)create —
for surely the name that he carves on the 'tree' is, in the logic of the poem, the first
stage in the creation of yet another world? Against such an interpretation stands the
phrase "even a boy," for it is in the slightly surprised "even" with
which the poet extends his proposition into the realm of the unexpected that he uncovers
his own and the reader's certainty regarding the limits of what has transpired. Something
that can be theoretically conceived and verbally created in the realm of art has an
existence which it is both surprising and sentimental to imagine issuing into any other
realm. The "words" of the poet, however vividly they may create in a reader's
mind the image of a "tree," have not the constitutive power of the Word of God;
or as Yeats put it: "the only real Imagist was the Creator of the Garden of
Eden."47
Following "Tree" in Smith's two collections is his
most famous poem in the imagist vein. Although the poet's placement of "The Lonely
Land" after "Swift Current" and "Sea Cliff" in The Classic
Shade might seem to confirm its affinities with those more obviously imagistic poems,
Smith's own description of it as "romantic" and "theatrical"48 should warn against too rigid a
distinction between "The Lonely Land" and his poetic probes. Indeed, one way of
approaching "The Lonely Land" might be to ask how it is possible to reconcile,
on the one hand, Smith's view, in 1977, that the poem had been over-anthologised in
relation to its merits and, on the other, the widespread public and critical acceptance of
it as "a Canadian classic."49
Part of the answer to this question may reside in the ecological fitness that resulted, in
"The Lonely Land," from a difficult (and, to Smith's mind, not entirely
successful) poetic experiment — namely, the adaptation of the imagist mode to the
needs of an imaginative vision and understanding of the Canadian North.
It has in recent years become a critical orthodoxy in Canada
to claim that one of the archimedean points of Imagism can be located in Hulme's journey
in 1906-7 across Northern Ontario and the Prairies.50 Of his experience in Canada, Hulme later wrote: "the first
time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce
the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of
the virgin prairie of Western Canada."51
From this statement, coupled with Hulme's seminal role in the imagist movement, Canadian
critics have been perhaps too eager to reach the conclusion that, in Sandra Djwa's words,
"vers libre and imagism, [are] particularly well-adapted to a depiction of
the Canadian landscape. . ."52
Leaving aside the questions begged by the phrase "the Canadian landscape" (Djwa
perhaps means to say Canada's hinterland terrains), and granting that free verse may be a
fitting form for those landscapes that are conceived as open,53 it is still necessary to question the
attractive equation, by way of Hulme, of imagism and the landscapes of the Canadian
hinterland. For Hulme does not say that he discovered the idea of the image on the
prairie but, rather, that he experienced "the desire to reproduce the peculiar
quality of feeling . . . induced . . ." by the prairie, a quality which he
defines elsewhere as "a feeling of separation in the face of outside nature" and
"the fright of mind before the unknown. . ." which "created not only the
first gods, but the first art." "The flats of Canada," he wrote, "are
incomprehensible on any single theory."54
Hulme's remarks have been quoted here at length because they provide one key to an
ecological explanation of why "The Lonely Land," with its abstractions and
generalizations, is not a pure imagist poem but, more valuably, an intelligently eclectic
and syntropic adaptation of several imported aesthetics — including those of the
imagists, the picturesque, and the middle Yeats — that attempts to reproduce, not
merely an accurate visual impression of the Shield country, but also an adequate emotional
and intellectual response to it. For a humanist such as Smith, an adequate response is of
course one that affirms a human presence and human values even in a region like the North,
which Martha Ostenso characterizes in Wild Geese as "beyond human warmth . .
. beyond even human isolation...."55
The very title of "The Lonely Land," while it may well have been culled from two
Group of Seven paintings — MacDonald's The Solemn Land and The
Lonely North56 — is a
pathetic fallacy, an instance of Romantic empathy, which serves notice of the humanistic
stance and assumptions of what follows.
Thanks to Desmond Pacey's assemblage of the early published
versions of "The Lonely Land" in Ten Canadian Poets,57 the provenance and evolution of
the poem are the best known of any in Canadian literature. A comparative examination of
the 1926 (McGill Fornightly Review), 1927 (Canadian Forum),
and 1929 (Dial), versions reveals that "The Lonely Land"
gradually assumed the bipartite structure which is reinforced in Collected Poems,
Poems, New and Collected, and The Classic Shade by the placement of the
first, more objective section on the left-hand page and the second, more abstract section
on the right. (So marked is the division between presentation and commentary in "The
Lonely Land" that it calls to mind such antinomies as body and soul, classical and
romantic, mirror and lamp — dualities that have never been far from the centre of a
literature which, from the start, has been faced with the double-task of recording
Canadian reality and discovering man's place in it.) There can be no doubt that in
1926-1929 Smith revised the first section of the poem — the section ending, in the
final version, with "smooth, flat stones" (a phrase added in 1927) — in
accordance with imagist principles and practice, deleting "high-sounding
rotundities"58
("Hark" and "monstrous plaint" went after the first version),
replacing the abstract with the concrete ("Accusing barbs" became "sharp
barbs" with the final version), and freeing his verse from conventional rhyme and
delineation to enact the contours of its subject-matter. The result is that in the first
section of the final version of "The Lonely Land" Smith achieves, to the
satisfaction at least of writers such as W.W.E. Ross and George Woodcock (if not of Gordon
Harvey) a fitting congruency of matter and manner.59 Notice particularly the mimetic quality of the lines
describing the call of the "wild duck":
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
and cloud-piled sky;
and in the bay
blown spume and windrift
and thin, bitter spray
snap
at the whirling sky;
and the pine trees lean one way.
A wild duck calls
to her mate
and the ragged
and passionate tones
stagger and fall,
and recover,
and stagger and fall
on these stones —
are lost
in the lapping of water
on smooth, flat stones.
Sandra Djwa speculates that Smith's literary model for these
lines was the "pointed pines" and "rocks" of H.D.'s "Oread,"60 a possibility which serves to emphasize
the fact that, unlike the mountain nymph who speaks the American poem, the speaker of the
Canadian poem does not desire "pleasant obliteration"61 in the forest/sea, but, on the contrary,
remains resolutely distanced from a landscape which threatens its inhabitants with
obliteration. The details selected for inclusion in "The Lonely Land" emphasize,
on the one hand, those aspects of the landscape that are inhospitable or actively
threatening to life (the "snap" of the "bitter spray" implies an
active hostility that contrasts nicely with the passive expansiveness of Pratt's
Laurentian lizard) and, on the other hand, those features of the landscape
("Cedar," "fir," and "pine trees," the "wild duck"
and "her mate") whose very existence is an affirmation of life —
"passionate" life, the poet plausibly wishes to believe — in an environment
that induces an awesome sense of non-entity.62
Of course, the call of the duck, skilfully presented by Smith as a series of dying falls,
prepares the way for the humanistic affirmation that comprises the poem's second section.
The mention of "Oread" as a possible model for the
first section of "The Lonely Land" points up the fact that, much more than
H.D.'s short lyric, Smith's poem is catalogic in nature, enumerating significant details
in an accumulative manner which, as was suggested in the earlier discussion of
"To Hold in a Poem," is appropriate to Canada's open and stretching landscapes.
Consistent with the poem's desire to discover human resonances in the North, the poem
contains visual images and structural devices which not only call to many minds such
paintings as Tom Thomson's The Jack Pine,63 but also serve to suggest an older pictorial analogy in
the picturesque convention. For the opening section of "The Lonely Land" is
broadly consistent with picturesque seeing both in its emphasis on differing textures
(from "jagged" to "smooth") and, more importantly, in its division of
the scene into background (the trees against the sky), middleground ("the bay"),
and foreground ("these stones"). Edel goes so far as to say of "The Lonely
Land" and of Smith's other Canadian poems that "the poet takes . . . symbols of
Canadian nature, but gives . . . a feeling that behind his framed picture he is looking,
as in a montage, at a much tamer landscape . . . the senses of the poet turn nature's
rudeness into a beautiful composition. . . [that is] perhaps classical-modern, say
Constable with a touch of the early Cezanne...."64 Precisely; for Smith, as much as the poets writing in Canada
nearly a century and a half earlier, places on view a vision of the landscape that is, in
the fullest sense, informed by pictorial and rhetorical conventions which order
and humanize the chaotic and inhuman reality.
It is a matter of considerable interest that as Smith revised
the first part of "The Lonely Land" to convey a sense of the 'thingness' of the
Northern wilderness he also expanded and elaborated the second part of the poem as if to
counterbalance imagistic presentation (where subjectivity is suppressed) with humanistic
commentary (where it is implicitly affirmed). A comparison of the three versions of
"The Lonely Land" suggests, moreover, that Smith revised with one eye on his
intended audience; in The McGill Fortnightly the second part of the poem is,
predictably, tinged with adolescent melancholia ("It is good to come to this land . .
. And . . . Find for a tired heart relief. . ."); in The Canad ian Forum, again
predictably, the poem is burdened with a baldly nationalistic statement ("These are
the poems of Canada. . .") and an emblematically Canadian place name ("Long
Lake..."); and, finally, in The Dial, the Yeatsian note that had sounded
loudly through such phrases as "desolate splendour" in the two previous versions
is skilfully muted, as is the explicit nationalism, to yield the confident assertion of
aesthetic qualities and spiritual values which may now be quoted:
This is a beauty
of dissonance,
this resonance
of stony strand
this smoky cry
curled over a black pine
like a broken
and wind-battered branch
when the wind
bends the tops of the pines
and curdles the sky
from the north.
This is the beauty
of strength
broken by strength
and still strong.
The function of the "This. . ." which begins, paces,
and, finally, serves notice of closure in the second part of "The Lonely Land"
is pivotal and complex: it confirms and carries forward the 'thingness' of the previous
imagistic presentation ("This. . .," "this smoky cry. . ."); it
inaugurates and maintains the magisterial tone of the commentary ("This is. .
."); and it compels and advances the consolidation of the details accumulated earlier
into a single vision that is amenable to abstraction and analysis ("This is a
beauty/of dissonance..."). While imagist principles and practice are clearly
discernible in the central part of the passage (from "stony strand..." to the
full stop), its beginning and its conclusion — where, to borrow Smith's own phrase,
"mind comes flooding in"65
— unabashedly violate the imagist proscription of abstraction, and, as their use of
two tropes, concordia discors and paradox, indicates, derive from metaphysical
sources, from Donne and Vaughan, Yeats and Eliot. Smith's method of elaborating the
"beauty/of dissonance...," which is to yoke together sensual and visual
impressions for the purposes of conveying a feeling of the elemental movement and enduring
strength of the North, derives, of course, from the imagist idea of simultaneity and draws
heavily on the principle of synaesthesia. But the excursus with which the poem concludes
is indebted to the metaphysicals for its paradoxical definition of the moral-aesthetic
that the humanistic poet discerns in the northern landscape. The purpose of the second
part of "The Lonely Land" is thus to inform the reader, as no further
accumulation of mere images however skilfully shaped by pictorial conventions could, that
the Canadian North is a repository, not just of curiously shaped trees, moving waters,66 and wild ducks, but of a particular and
individual beauty whose significance is not simply aesthetic but metaphysical, moral, and
spiritual. The broad implication of "The Lonely Land" is that the Canadian
character, even the Canadian identity, draws its strength from the Northern climate and
landscape. That view has its origins in the environmentalism of Montesquieu, and it has of
course appealed to Canadian poets from the beginning, particularly in times of national
self-consciousness such as the 'twenties.67
"The Lonely Land" must therefore be seen as a modern poem, certainly, but also
as a poem with deep roots in European tradition and the Canadian continuity.
Various writers other than Smith himself have expressed
reservations about "The Lonely Land," particularly about its painterly quality,
its traditional component, and its instructional conclusion68 — aspects of the poem which the present discussion has
attempted to understand. Some readers have been dismayed to learn that when "The
Lonely Land" was written "Smith had never been to the North shore of Lake
Superior, or to the particular region from which Lawren Harris, Tom Thomson and Arthur
Lismer took the inspiration for their paintings."69
Needless to say, such a consideration is irrelevant. (As F.R.
Scott notes: "nor had Coleridge ever been to sea before he wrote 'The Ancient
Mariner.'") What is important is the fact that "The Lonely Land" vividly
and intelligently recreates an imaginative experience of the North, combining materials
derived from several sources — imagist poems, Group of Seven paintings, metaphysical
poetry — into a poem that is successful in its own terms. By selecting and adapting
his poetic models to the needs of his inspiration and his audience Smith shows in
"The Lonely Land" the intellectual acumen and creative skill that prevails in
the most accomplished Canadian poets. In the case of "The Lonely Land," where
eclectic detachment issues in ecological fitness, a final judgement of the poem must
surely tilt the balance away from counting it a mere poetic probe and towards according it
the status of a Canadian classic. The final poem to be considered here and the last
one of the imagistic group in Poems, New and Collected and The Classic Shade (in
the Collected Poems it appears between "The Creek" and "Wild
Raspberry") is "The Convolvulus." While its central technique, the
superimposition on the titular flower of images evocative of religious ritual, derives
from Imagism, "The Convolvulus" is an authentic statement, a joyful celebration
of life and living. A cursory reading of the poem might place it with "Walking in a
Field, Looking Down and Seeing a White Violet" and "Birches at Drummond
Point" as a semi-serious exercise in Romantic typology, in this instance a matins
service in the Wordsworthian cathedral of nature with a sermon on little flowers made
vocal of lofty meanings. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that in "The
Convolvulus" Smith draws on these traditional associations, not for the purposes of
questioning their validity, but to add resonance to his celebration of "being."
The poem is an address delivered to the convolvulus flower in the imperative tone of the
preacher or the bard and calling upon it to unfold its petals, to affirm life; its
"diapason" recalls that of Milton's "At a Solemn Music:"
Open your narrow throat
convolvulus, and cry
Let your paean of being
ring like a great shout
distinguished
in the diapason
of the yellow sun
and a million green shoots
—in the communion of summer
and the morning's glory.
The metaphorical and religious aspects of this passage — the flower as praising
"throat" and church bell, the sun as organ note, and the summer as holy
"communion" — serve as an imagery of magnification through which the
"paean of being" that is the unfolding of the convolvulus is imaginatively
articulated. The delight of recognition and involvement attends the reader's recognition
that the poem's closing words, "morning's glory," are a witty play on the
familiar family name of the convolvulus, a freshly-minted statement of the flower's very
identity which, in a marvellous manner, identifies and surrounds it with a radiance, a
glory, bestowed by the poet's imaginative participation in the fellowship of all being.
"The Convolvulus" is a good poem on which to
conclude because, despite the slightness of its stature beside "The Lonely
Land," it points up some of the enduring qualities of Smith's best imagistic poems:
their celebrating energy, their rhetorical skill, their linguistic brilliance, their
memorable cadences, and, above all, their combination of vividness and intelligence.
Smith's tendency to analyse as well as to describe, to affirm the human presence in a
neutral nature, may push some of his imagistic poems farther into the realm of the
abstract than some readers may wish to accept. But that intellection, humanism, and
abstraction may well be a necessary and correct response to the Canadian environment if it
is to be imaginatively conceived and rationally understood. No doubt "The Lonely
Land" is less than successful if judged in strict imagist terms, yet it is, in its
own terms and in Canadian terms, a successful poem — a judgement which, incidentally,
is not based on a double standard. Even in his very minor poems, Smith, far from
evincing an uncritical reliance on his models, reveals a combination of intelligence and
creativity which allows for a detached participation in various stances and styles, for an
argumentative probing of modes and assumptions. To an appreciation of the descriptive
skill and keen intelligence that are found in Smith's best imagistic poems, must therefore
be added a recognition of the poetic and cultural responsibility that governed his
formalistic and rhetorical choices. There is nothing arbitrary about the verse pattern of
"To Hold in a Poem," the typographical layout of "The Creek," or the
jagged free verse of "The Lonely Land." Nowhere is Smith's responsibility more
evident than in what has been called the ecological fitness of his best poems; the Smith
of "Swift Current" and "The Convolvulus," no less than of "To
Hold in a Poem" and "The Lonely Land," understood that "the size of a
canvas is not irrelevant to the picture painted on it," that "they need to fit
each other."70 The successful
poems in the imagistic sections of Collected Poems and Poems, New and
Collected were won, not easily, by a poet dedicated to the ideal of acquiring an
"eye made aquiline by thought."71
For a concluding description of Smith's best work in whatever section of his various
collections, it would be difficult to improve upon his own description of poetic
excellence in the "Refining Fire" essay: "clarity, wholeness, integrity,
depth, intensity, and" — the inevitable and incorrigible Smithian caveat —
"universality."72
Notes
This paper, a shortened version of which was delivered at the Northeast Modern Language
Association Convention in April, 1982, has benefited greatly from suggestions by Malcolm
Ross and Alfred Bailey, as well as from conversations with colleagues and students
at the University of Western Ontario. Smith's own comments on the nature of his poetry as
criticism at the conclusion of his interview with Michael Heenan (which, unfortunately, I
had not read at the time of writing) lead me to hope that he would have found congenial
some of the arguments advanced in the paper.
"Review of A.J.M. Smith's Collected Poems," reprinted in The
McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, and Leo Kennedy, ed. Peter
Stevens (Toronto: Ryerson, Critical View on Canadian Writers 1969), p. 124. ; [back]
"A Rejected Preface," Canadian Literature, 24 (Spring, 1965), 8.
See also "Introduction," The Book of Canadian Poetry (Toronto:
Gage, 1943), p. 28: "The modern revival began in the 'twenties with a simplification
of technique.... Canadian poets turned against rhetoric, sought a sharper, more objective
imagery, and limited themselves as far as possible to the language of everyday and the
rhythms of speech." [back]
See "A New Dimension: Notes on the Ecology of Canadian Poetry." Canadian
Poetry, 7 (Fall/Winter, 1980), 1-20. Hereafter cited as "A New Dimension."
[back]
This and subsequent quotations from the poems of A.J.M. Smith, unless otherwise
noted, are from Poems, New and Collected (Toronto: Oxford University Press,
1967), pp. 42-52.[back]
The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi,
1971), p. 37. [back]
The Poems of Archibald Lampman (including At the Long Sault), ed. Margaret
Coulby Whitridge (University of Toronto Press, Literature of Canada, 1974), p. 16. [back]
For this and subsequent information about early printings of Smith's poems, I am
indebted to Michael Darling, "A Variorum Edition of the Poems of A.J.M. Smith with a
Descriptive Bibliography and Reference Guide," Ph.D. Dissertation, York University,
1979. Hereafter cited as "Variorum Edition." [back]
Poetry in Canada: The First Three Steps (Toronto: Ryerson, 1958), p. 44.
[back]
Canadian Literature, 24 (Spring, 1965), 6-7. [back]
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 164
and 167. Smith, who of course wrote his M.A. thesis on Yeats, quotes the opening lines of
"The Dawn" in his "A Poet Young and Old," University of Toronto
Quarterly, 6 (September, 1939), 259 and alludes to the final lines of "The
Fisherman" at the conclusion of his "Ode: On the Death of William Butler
Yeats." [back]
Ibid., p. 258. [back]
Ibid. [back]
In the McGill News the line had read "Lonely, untouchable,
clear"; see "Variorum Edition," p. 82. [back]
John Ferns, A.J.M. Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1979), p. 41. Hereafter cited as A.J.M.
Smith. [back]
This is Charles G.D. Roberts' phrase from the "Prefatory Note" in his Selected
Poems (Toronto: Ryerson, 1936), p. viii. [back]
"Introduction," The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto: Coach House,
1979), p. 11. [back]
See, for instance, Smith's comments on "Spring on Mattagami" in "The
Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott," On Poetry and Poets (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, NCL, 1977), p. 52. [back]
In the Arresting Eye: the Rhetoric of Imagism (Louisiana State Univ. Press,
1981), pp. 114-119. [back]
See also "A Stretching Landscape; Notes on Some Formalistic Continuities in the
Poetry of the Hinterland," CVII, 5 (Summer, 1981), 6-18. Hereafter cited as
"The Stretching Landscape." [back]
"A Rejected Preface, " pp. 8 and 12. [back]
See "A New Dimension," pp. 9-12. [back]
See "A Stretching Landscape," pp. 12-15. It is worth noting that
in the McGill News "Laurentia's long indulant line . . ." was "the
Rockies' irregular line . . .," a phrase which would have been ecologically in
keeping with a free verse poem. See "Variorum Edition," p. 82, and also Michael
Darling's paper in the present issue of Canadian Poetry. [back]
Modern Canadian Poetry, ed. Nathaniel A. Benson (Ottawa: Graphic, 1930), p.
226. [back]
"The Worldly Muse of A.J.M. Smith," University of Toronto Quarterly, 47
(Spring, 1978), 213. [back]
A.J.M. Smith, p. 42. [back]
"A.J.M. Smith and The Classic Shadow," The Compass, 8 (Winter,
1980), 8. [back]
"The Worldly Muse of A.J.M. Smith," p. 207. [back]
A.J.M. Smith, p. 43. [back]
"A Rejected Preface," p. 8. [back]
This is Hulme's translation of Bergeon, as quoted in Gage, ln the ArrestingEye, pp.
11-12. [back]
Ibid. [back]
The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1956), p. 35. [back]
While "The Creek" was first published in The Dial in November,
1928, "Sea Cliff' and "Swift Current" both appeared in The Canadian
Forum for June, 1930. [back]
"A.J.M. Smith" in Leading Canadian Poets, ed. Percival (Toronto:
Ryerson, 1948), p. 239. [back]
"The Poetry of A.J.M. Smith," The Canadian Forum, 23 (February,
1944), 258. [back]
Cf. Gage, In the Arresting Eye, pp. 57-63. [back]
A.J.M. Smith, p. 43. [back]
"Tree" was first printed in Here and Now for May, 1948;
"Wild Raspberry," with "The Convolvulus," "Thomas Moore and Sweet
Annie," and "The Haggard Moon," in Pan, 1958; "Walking in a
Field..." in Canadian Literature, Winter, 1963; and
"Birches..." in Quarry, Summer, 1967 where, as in a later appearance in
Canadian Literature, Spring, 1968, it is printed in italics — perhaps to
point up its stylized quality. [back]
In his "Prologue to a Poetry Reading: Address to the Audience"
("Variorum Edition," p. 241), Smith makes a characteristic assertion of
impersonality ("I am not I/not the I of the poem"), but adds: "under
several layers of art/or artifice/and several layers/of subconscious compulsion /lurks/no
one but I...." [back]
See On Poetry and Poets, pp. 60-61. [back]
The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, introduced by Randell
Jarrell (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 30. [back]
On Poetry and Poets, p. 61. [back]
"On Poetry and Poets: The Letters of W.W.E. Ross to A.J.M. Smith," ed.
Michael Darling, Essays on Canadian Writing, 16 (Fall/Winter, 1979-80), 120. [back]
On Poetry and Poets, pp. 40-41. [back]
Smith's translations of Mallarmé include "Le Vièrge, Le Vivace et Le Bel
anjourdt hui" and "Canticle of St. John," and those from Prévert "The
Important Personage and the Guardian Angel," "The Keys to the City" (see
"Variorium Edition," pp. 211-212) and "May Song." See
particularly "Pour faire le Portrait d'un Oiseau" in the Paroles (1945)
volume. [back]
Oeuvres Complètes (Tours: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1945), p.
368. F.R. Scott may have in mind the same passage in Mallarmé in "Poetry," Events
and Signals (Toronto: Ryerson,1954), p. 24: "If I write 'ostrich'/Those who have
never seen the bird see it...." [back]
Quoted by Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (1931),
vii and again by Gage, In the Arresting Eye, p. 22. [back]
In "An Interview with A.J.M. Smith" by Michael Darling, Essays on
Canadian Writing, 9 (Winter, 1977), 58-59. [back]
Desmond Pacey, Ten Canadian Poets (Toronto: Ryerson, 1958), p. 212. [back]
See, for instance, Barry Callaghan, "Memoir," Shapes and Sounds: Poems
of W.W.E. Ross (Don Mills: Longmans, 1968), pp. 4-5 and George Woodcock,
"Nationalism and the Canadian Genius," artscanada, 36
(December/January, 1979-80), 2. [back]
Quoted by Alun R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of T.E. Hulme (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1960), p. 23n. [back]
" 'A New Soil and a Sharp Sun': the Landscape of a Modern Canadian
Poetry," Modernist Studies, 2 (1975), 7. [back]
See "A Stretching Landscape," pp. 6-8 and 15-16 especially. [back]
Quoted by Jones, p. 23. [back]
Wild Geese (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, NCL, 1971), p. 32. [back]
See Djwa "'A New Soil . . .,'" p. 12. [back]
Ten Canadian Poets, pp. 212-214. Quotations from the early
versions of "The Lonely Land" are from this source. Darling, "Variorum
Edition," p. 91 notes another early printing, essentially the same as in The
Canadian Forum, in The New Outlook for October 5, 1927. [back]
Harriet Monroe, quoted by Gage, In the Arresting Eye, p. 33. [back]
See "On Poetry and Poets: The Letters of W.W.E. Ross to A.J.M. Smith," ed.
Michael Darling, Essays on Canadian Writing, 16 (Fall/Winter, 1979-80), 82-83,
Woodcock "Nationalism and the Canadian Genius," p. 9, and Harvey, "A.J.M.
Smith and the Classic Shadow," p. 8. [back]
"'A New Soil . . .,'" p. 12. [back]
Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908-1920. (University
of California Press, 1969), p. 35. [back]
Two comments which Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, NCL, 1957) pp. 19 and 100, gives to Mrs. Bentley are pertinent
here. Of the hymn-singing Prairie farmers she observes: "it was as if in the face of
so blind and uncaring a universe they were trying to assert themselves, to insist upon
their own meaning and importance." And later she says: "Eternity . . . was too
big for me, and even while we sat there, looking at the hills, I slipped away from them to
think of us." [back]
See Djwa, "A New Soil. . .,'" p. 7 and Woodcock "Nationalism and the
Canadian Genius," p. 9. [back]
"The Worldly Muse of A.J.M. Smith," p. 211. [back]
"F.R. Scott and Some of His Poems" in The McGill Movement, ed.
Peter Stevens, p. 87. [back]
See "An Interview with A.J.M. Smith," p. 58. [back]
Djwa, " 'A New Soil. . .,' " pp. 4-6 discusses the Northern
vision in the painting and poetry of the post-World War I period. See also S.M. Beckow
"From the Watch-Towers of Patriotism: Theories of Literary Growth in English Canada,
1864-1914," Journal of Canadian Studies, 9 (August, 1974), 9f. [back]
See, for instance, Pacey, Ten Canadian Poets, pp. 214-215 and
Harvey, "A.J.M. Smith and the Classic Shadow," p. 8. [back]
F.R. Scott, "A.J.M. Smith," p. 243. [back]
Bernard P. Davenhauer, Silence: the Phenomenon and its Ontological Significance (Indiana
University Press, 1980), p. 10. [back]
"A Poet Young and Old," p. 259. [back]
On Poetry and Poets, p. 68. [back]
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