Woodcock's Northern Spring

George Woodcock. Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987. 318 pp.


Can anyone imagine an end to the present period of Canadian literature? I don't mean predict what is to come next, but conceive of a time when Atwood, Munro, Lane and Findley are as passé, and spoken of with as much hard-boiled objectivity, as the Confederation poets today? The fact is, the present era in Canadian letters is somewhere between thirty and sixty years old, world Modernism some eighty, and there are no signs of big changes on the horizon. New additions to the roster of Canadian literati emerge and are classified as either modern or post-modern, centralist or regional, literate or vernacular, whatever critical dichotomy suits the mood of the first volume. No poet appears who can call the entirety of the Modernist-Postmodernist program into question, and force the critics to re-value the whole of the canon in accordance with his or her new achievements; no critic appears who is willing, given the inevitability of such a phenomenon, to start the work now by admitting in print that at some point soon the art of late Modernism will be as much a part of the tradition as Keats is today. After all, personal and professional investments in the current version of the Canadian tradition run high, and will not be set aside lightly for the mere probability of change. Critics are not prophets, anyway; until the poets make the changes, the critics cannot be much faulted for failing to analyze new visions. What critics can be faulted for, however, is repeating without question the orthodoxies of Canadian literary history that have sustained us since the early days of A.J.M. Smith's anthologizing. The current version of that history — essentially, of a pioneer culture gradually shedding provincialism, colonialism, narrow nationalism and traditionalism in search of the cold, hard City of the Modern — encourages an exclusivity about the canon which we would find inexcusable in any other culture we studied. As Jacques Barzun has put it, "we [moderns] show a partiality to ourselves which, were it applied to a past epoch, would seem like the absence of critical intelligence".1 One need have no distaste for the modern to recognize the obvious fact that it will one day disappear; the critic who admits this to himself each morning as he rises will soon show in his writings a flexibility about other provinces of the literary canon which may not reflect the arch intentions of the Modernist credo. We may not be able to bring about the literary revolution to come, but may indicate with open-mindedness a climate in which that revolution were possible; we may show a skepticism and irony about ourselves and about our own period which would encourage the period that will throw us back into history. This self-irony is a part of the critical task, not just now but in any day; and it is a task which forms too small a part, to my mind, of George Woodcock's comprehensive, impressive and familiar Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature.

     First things first: there is no denying the power and scope of a mind which can cover so many authors by discussing so many of their works with such evident ease. Woodcock's prolific energy and knowledge of the present conditions of Canadian literature are among the most significant contributions yet made by any individual to our consciousness of ourselves as a literary culture. No degree of dispute can slight these immediately forceful and convincing features of the book; they are what we have come to expect from Woodcock, especially if we are familiar with the first two collections of his essays with which this forms a trilogy, Odysseus Ever Returning (1970) and The World of Canadian Writing (1980). Such powerful recommendations of a book cannot be allowed, however, to disguise the assumptions, the rhetoric and the covert exclusivity which have partially dictated its contents.

     For one thing, the "flowering" in the title suggests a gradual and uninterrupted growth, and a book defining itself with such an image may reasonably be expected to give an overview, a reinterpretation, of Canadian literature as a whole. Woodcock's book is instead a collection of his essays from the past several years, most of them with no explicit relation to one another. He has attempted to bind them with the placement of two essays which introduce the two parts of the collection, one dealing with the major regions of literary Canada, the other with "the emergent tradition" of Canadian poetry. These essays are necessarily general, however, and do not in fact develop critical themes which are later substantiated by the articles on individual writers. They suggest the author's desire to present a unified collection, rather than highlight a unity already implicit in the various chapters. One must wonder, therefore, why Woodcock has arranged the two sections of the book as a critical chronology of Canadian literature, the second (of greater interest to Canadian Poetry's readers) beginning with nineteenth-century narrative verse, for example, and culminating with Patrick Lane. This would seem to indicate his desire to sweep the course of Canadian literature, to indicate trends, schools, influences, traditions and so on. In fact, the arrangement is merely one of convenience; Northern Spring is not a revaluation, but an assortment of insights, most of them provocative, into the works of individual authors with no apparent relation to one another.

     This is not to say, of course, that separate essays on individuals could not have yielded such an overview. By reading a wide range of poems in some detail (as Woodcock has done), and tracing relations literary, public and personal between the authors (which he has not done), a critic might well create a portrait of a vibrant and richly inter-connected Canadian tradition. Each essay here, however, is a general discussion, an introduction of sorts to the career and publications of a particular author, with some biographical information and a major theme or two given emphasis. This may reflect the publication of two of them as instalments in the Canadian Writers and Their Works series published by ECW Press, and two more in John Moss's The Canadian Novel. Such a format cannot encourage detailed analysis or a sense of authorial relations, but will encourage a quick transition from text to text in order to present a developmental pattern in an author's oeuvre. The format is not without its merits, but as far as "flowering" goes, the reader can learn little of the steady development of a Canadian tradition in these pages.

     As a result of these organizational decisions, there is a queer familiarity about the analyses here, a sense of having heard such discussions (if not the new premises supporting them) often before. All-too-common assumptions underscore most of Woodcock's observations, chief among these his insistence upon definitions of poetry which are exclusively Modernistic. He speaks of "the criteria of poetic excellence that apply in our time, in addition to compulsive devotion to expression in verse: intense visual awareness, sharp verbal accuracy that makes, to adapt Orwell's metaphor, verse like a windowpane; deep moral sensitivity; the intuitive wisdom that in the last resort will accept the irrational as truer than the rational" (p. 284). Who can argue that such criteria are not relevant to the Modernist age? But they are not relevant to all ages, and one has the feeling too often that Woodcock, like so many Modernists, cannot see any poetry clearly but that which can be made to suit the terms developed. Thus the Confederation poets are to be valued not only because they "celebrated Canadian scenes" but also because they "observed with considerable accuracy the human life they fostered and found the language and imagery to describe them". Thus they achieve "a strange luminous factualism in evoking the landscape", as well as "a new use of imagery, of language, of poetic form" (p. 185; emphases mine). These pre-modern gifts notwithstanding, Duncan Campbell Scott was the best of the Confederation poets because he in the end went very near to free verse" (p. 186). A question might be raised as to whether Lampman, Roberts or Scott understood their achievement in this way, and whether these Modernist virtues can be applied wholesale to their corner of literary history. On the other side of the coin, Phyllis Webb is at the essence of language in Naked Poems because the poems are "austere", "hard", "laconic"; Separations shows Patrick Lane's "growing power and assurance", in part because he "never offers us an abstract thought; he presents a concrete and particular instance" (pp. 290-91; emphases mine); and Atwood's True Stories "contains some of the best verse Atwood has yet written, honed down to a stark directness, an accuracy of sound, yet always lit with that visual luminosity and sharpness which makes poetry more than a mere verbal exercise, a Swinburnian patterning of sound" (p. 278; emphases mine). The caricature of Swinburne here betrays the rather imperious assertion of principles which would have less meaning and authority to a poet working prior to the Modernist revolution.

     Any school of criticism will have its favoured rhetoric, of course, but all this talk of "hard", "concrete", "austere", "laconic" poetry has been going on for so long that one has to assume that it has hardened into a comfortable prejudicial code which can obscure as much as (or more than) it clarifies. A similar procedure has disembowelled the idea of Imagism of much of its original force; the word is used so often to describe modern poetry that is simply rich in imagery, even if it has no real relation to Imagism whatsoever, that it has lost most of its usefulness as a descriptive critical term. Woodcock is not innocent of this habit. Naturally enough he finds in W.W.E. Ross a "stress on imagistic clarity" (p. 187), but he stretches the term too far when he then speaks of Canadian Modernism's maintaining "an imagist way of looking which, by stressing the visual, enabled the Canadian poets to see their environment and translate it into words with an appropriateness their predecessors never attained" (p. 187). How much Imagism was responsible for their "way of looking", and how much was it caused by their staring at Group of Seven paintings, and how much it had to do with the travels one or two of them made to Canada's wilderness, is a question the critic needs to ask himself; its answer might not change his methods of inquiry, but it might soften the rhetoric which talks dangerously about techniques the pre-modern poets "never" discovered. The Imagist idea appears to have given Woodcock an easy means of describing some of the poets' effects, but he has also turned it into a cause of those effects, which is an entirely different and much more disputable matter. Similarly, Woodcock makes the now familiar claim that T.E. Hulme was inspired towards Imagism by the Canadian prairies (p. 232); there is, however, a wide gulf, as D.M.R. Bentley has remarked, between Hulme's claim to have understood "the necessity of inevitableness of verse" on the prairies, and his having come up with Imagism.2 Again, only an inordiate distension of the term permits Woodcock to find, in the first stanza of Scott's "Lakeshore", a "purist imagism", simply because "metaphor is slightly and discreetly used" (p. 233).

     At their most dangerous, these hardened Modernist codes encourage Woodcock towards some disturbing ideas about pre-modern Canadian poetry, as when he says of Crawford, "The diction, the imagery and the metrical shape of her poems are not greatly different from English later Romantics, and if Keats and Shelley had not written, and Landseer not painted, Crawford would not have been quite the poet she became" (p. 184).   Woodcock's implication is that these patterns of influence are only apparent in the pre-modern Canadians, but one could of course formulate the same sentence of any modern poet of stature: "if Purdy and Birney had not written, and Frye not cogitated, Atwood would not have been quite the poet she became". One senses here the Modernist unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of literary influences, and attribution of such patterns of influence to an age in which originality of vision was ostensibly not of paramount concern to the poet. These small sentences carry enormous implications, and Woodcock's readers must recognize that they are being manipulated by hidden assumptions, even those who find themselves in rough agreement with those assumptions.

     A more political version of such modern prejudice occurs when Woodcock faults the pioneer poets for failing to understand the implications of their desire to tame the wilderness: "For if we envy the cheerfulness and joy of these poets", he writes, "if we admire their confidence and eagerness, it is with the sense that such admirable traits, because they were united with a less admirable lack of prophetic insight, produced those very consequences in terms of the thoughtless exploitation of the natural world that have made our age one of anxiety rather than confidence, of apprehension rather than joy" (p. 198). Absurd as it is to imagine an immigrant poet lamenting his need to exploit the environment of his new found land, one could still defend the old poets by pointing out that the environmental damage which Woodcock justly decries is a product not of the first stages of colonial development but of the last thirty to fifty years; nothing implicit in the pioneering mentality guaranteed that damage, and to blame the poets of that time for a "lack of prophetic insight" into pollution and land-stripping is to expect their sensibilities not only to match but to prefigure our own, which is cultural hubris.

     The pioneer vision simply cannot consent to modern doctrine on every level. When Woodcock reads the scenes of Indian butchery in Joseph Howe's Acadia he feels that "there is obviously a part of the mind of this fierce fighter for rights and liberties [i.e. Howe] that feels with the savage victors, and their inevitable and doomed resentments" (p. 203). What Howe in fact reveals in Acadia is a brief sympathy for a kind of savage that never existed, the Noble Savage (as Woodcock admits) of European fancy. But Howe's "divided sensibility"3 is utterly unable to reconcile this version of the Indian with the bloodthirsty assassins of the later section of his poem, so his apparent sympathy is a result of his distortive literary vision of them. Woodcock, desirous to "read" Howe as the champion of the under-dog, blurs or forgets this distinction, and treats Howe's lament for the Noble Savage as proof of some sympathy for the later-rendered attackers. It is the kind of error an acutely politicized mind will make when eager to extend its dominion onto writers and into eras that are fundamentally recalcitrant.

     A Modernist career as vigorous and as essential as George Woodcock's need make no apologies for itself. He has earned the right to these prejudices, in a sense, having paid for them with a lifetime of critical assertion. This does not change the fact, however, that they are prejudices, that they cannot be applied to all poets, and that if their rule is maintained much longer poetry will wither under them, as it will wither under any set of codes so thoroughly acceptable to the critic. Firmly committed Modernists will not find Woodcock's codes restrictive, of course, so the same general point might be better illustrated with reference to another of the major issues of the book: the question of "regionalism", which should stir up rather more willing controversy.

     The opening essay of the volume, "The Meeting of Time and Space: Regionalism in Canadian Literature", lays the foundations of a preconception of poetic value which riddles Northern Spring. In it Woodcock suggests that "to deny regionalism is to deny the Canadian nation as it historically and geographically exists and as it is likely to exist in any foreseeable future" (p. 23). In the essentially political prologue to the essay Woodcock posits this view of Canada explicitly against the "Jacobinical" and "centralist" vision of Canada espoused just as vehemently by Pierre Trudeau. The opposition to the regional lies in "openly centralized public corporations like the CBC, and the National Film Board, and less overt centralized institutions like the Toronto publishing industry and the Ontario-based national magazines", which "have always worked against regional cultures" (p. 32). Centralism has made of Ottawa and Toronto governing foci of Canadian culture which tend to assert themselves "by drawing into their orbit many of the best talents from Canada outside the St. Lawrence valley" (p. 32). Woodcock's favoured writers, however, are those who have found their voice, content and imagery by refusing such "centripetal tendencies", by steadfastly expressing the culture and spirit of the locale in which they live and work.

     So far, so good; but the details of this polemic are difficult. Woodcock identifies seven regions: Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Québec, Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia and the North. This would seem to indicate, attractively, that vigorous "regionalism" does not require a rejection of the cultural value of Toronto and central Canada, merely of its historical priority as a region. If this were as far as it went there would be no reason to argue with Woodcock's vision of Canadian culture, because all he would be saying is that in a vast nation like Canada literature tends to arise in relation to a given locale, not to a "national consciousness" reflecting political rather than human geography. Unfortunately, there is more to Woodcock's regionalism than a spirit of fair play demanded for the Maritimes and the West and North. The real spirit of his argument seems to emerge when he writes that "All the really important innovative tendencies in English-Canadian literature have originated in the regions, especially if one regards anglophone Montréal as a region in its relation to the centralist axis of Toronto-Ottawa" (p. 32). In other words, "Toronto- Ottawa" is not a fair partner among the seven regions after all; it has produced no "important innovative tendencies" and must be carefully distinguished from the inherent cultural value of Montréal. Woodcock's regionalism ceases to be, at this stage, a matter of fair play for the various cultures of Canada, and becomes a polemic intending the devaluation of the supposedly centralist culture of the English-speaking metropolises of Ontario. This unfortunate vision particuarly emerges as Woodcock ranges from east to west describing the development of Canadian literature: he treats of Newfoundland, the Maritimes and Montréal, leaps Ontario to the Prairies and concludes with British Columbia. Thus Raymond Souster receives brief mention and reluctant praise as having created "an unexpectedly poignant expression of local feeling in a place we are so often led to think of as the great enemy of Canadian regionalism" (p. 37).

     The political statements which begin the chapter, therefore, envisioning a Canada consisting of ten "sovereign nations that had made an agreement to their mutual advantage" (p. 24), are much transformed to arrive at the loaded critical assumptions which conclude it, in which one of those "sovereign nations", Ontario, has contributed little to the culture except a centralizing "hegemony" (p. 32). Thus Woodcock can acknowledge that Pratt became a "Canadian" before Newfoundland joined Confederation, but won't mention where he lived for four decades when he became one (p. 33); he will talk about Birney's evocative sense of the west coast (p. 42), but not his intermittent periods of residence in Toronto; he can talk about the Montréal poets of the 1940s, but cannot mention that Livesay, Layton and Souster had known or would know various "Toronto years". If we were really talking about a spirit of regional fair play, this wilful myopia would not occur in Northern Spring. Indeed, the political tone of the chapter's opening pages and Woodcock's obviously heart-felt attack on Trudeau have little place in a book dealing with the regions of Canada in an ultimately apolitical and prejudicial manner. (Woodcock would, I realize, reject out of hand this request for a distinction between political and literary contexts).

     Quite apart from the political exclusivity it generates, one must presume that there is a critical-aesthetic value-system built into this regionalist terminology as well, or else Woodcock would not utilize it with such repetitive determination. It does seem to colour his judgments of the canon at times, for when he tells us about New Provinces he remembers Smith, Scott, Pratt and Klein, and leaves out Robert Finch and Leo Kennedy, the two least "regional" poets in the book (p. 229). There is some strange urgency in his telling us that the earliest Canadian poets "reacted with emotional violence against . . . the historic and cultural region which their very presence was creating" (p. 29); that "of the three Stricklands, only Catharine Parr Traill emerges as a truly regional writer" (p. 30); that what Thomas McCulloch and Thomas Chandler Haliburton "wrote was in the best sense regional literature" (p. 35); that Roberts and Carman initiated "exploration of the regional landscape and the regional way of life" in Fredericton literary circles, one result being the work of Lampman, "the first poetry that expressed the real nature of Ontario as a region" (pp. 35-36). Leon Surette's warnings against "the topocentric axiom of cultural history —that culture is a product of physical environment"4 — question profoundly the assumptions lurking in all these statements. Obviously their regionalist metaphor is crucial to Woodcock's vision, but I cannot share his enthusiasm for them. Once we conclude that so-and-so is a "regional" writer, what aesthetic point have we made? In Woodcock's terms, that he or she is rooted in "time and space", that the poetry arises from lived experience, not from fantasy and dream but in some manner from the world it is the poet's duty to express. The same criteria apply, of course, to more "cosmopolitan" writers (to use A.J.M. Smith's equally dangerous dichotomy) who deliberately refuse explicitly Canadian and hence overtly "regional" content. Michael Ondaatje, for instance, not mentioned in Northern Spring, exemplifies the Canadian writer who can find unabashed inspiration in New Orleans, in a lost Ceylon, in the American west, without thereby surrendering his value to Canadian literature. Smith himself is another good example: there never was a less "regional" poet in this country, but who would say that his poetry lacks cultural rootedness and Canadian significance because of it? Regionalism, in other words, may be a virtue, but it is not an exclusive one, and it is the weakness of Woodcock's analysis that it becomes so.

     Otherwise he would not have trouble with Raymond Souster, who, when he comes up again in a later essay, can only be praised as "that rare phenomenon, an urban regional poet" (p. 191). He would not otherwise have trouble with Patrick Lane as a regional poet; Lane has drawn much of his inspiration from British Columbia, which makes him one, but, as Woodcock says, "The difficulty about classifying him as a regional poet arises when one encounters Lane writing with equal intensity and authenticity about other regions" (p. 299) like South America. When we hear argumentation like that we should recognize polemic and unaccount able prejudice, not criticism. No one can deny the heat of the regionalist issue in Canadian literary circles these days, nor that there is some need for the discussion as Canadian literature and criticism re-shape them selves in accordance with developments of the past two or three decades. As Woodcock presents the question, however, it is a non-issue, because "classifying" poets smacks of exactly the kind of centralist mentality that Woodcock so decries.

     Reading Northern Spring, then, is not a relaxing delight, but an exercise in staying on your toes as a critic. The reader who is in complete agreement with the Modernist and regionalist rhetoric will enjoy the book no end, and the reader in disagreement, who recognizes its rhetorical power and stays alert, will find the experience rewarding for the passages in which the rhetoric is laid aside in favour of some really first-rate criticism. Woodcock is particularly strong in his chapters on Phyllis Webb, Margaret Atwood and Patrick Lane, because the frequent quotation and slighter critical discourse permit the poets to emerge in their own right. His sensitivity to Phyllis Webb's exploration of the line is admirable, and as he relates her "To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide" to the austerity developing in her poetry as she writes Naked Poems, he reveals an appealing sensitivity to the relations between private experience and poetic experimentation. It is excellent to be led by him through the various images of metamorphosis in the recent volumes of Margaret Atwood; poet and critic collaborate naturally in this revelation of a central Atwood theme. His discussion of Lane proves challenging, presenting with equanimity the violence of Lane's poetry and defending him eloquently against "those who have assumed, from the content of his poems, an essential brutality in Lane's vision, a rejoicing in the violence and horror he sees in the world" (p. 290). No one could read Woodcock on Lane and maintain such an opinion. These parts of the book reveal, to my mind, what we value George Woodcock for, rather than for the rhetoric that too often interferes with such clear-sightedness.

     Why would a critic with these talents refuse once again (as in the earlier collections) to offer an essay dealing with any of the Confederation poets in detail? It is a real disappointment to scan the contents here and see the chapters leap from Heavysege to F.R. Scott. Scattered throughout Woodcock's writings are brief references to the Confederation poets, but these will never obviate the need for a Woodcock-on-Lampman or Woodcock-on-Scott article. How many of his present brief assertions about them would hold water after such an article? Despite Atwood's reducing rather than increasing their representation in the new Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, Woodcock considers her a "scholar respectful of the past" (p. 183); would he continue to think so after granting them as much of his energy as he has given to other under-dogs of Canadian literature?

     Perhaps Woodcock feels that the Confederation poets have been remembered primarily as part of what he calls (speaking of the renewed interest in Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist) "the attempt on the part of Canadian scholars and critics to create a past for the national literature" (p. 45). The verb is revealing; the best critics of nineteenth-century Canadian literature, far from "creating" their subject, are attempting to understand a past which, however sparse and hard to see at this distance, is the source of the national tradition in its present form. The best of these are setting aside old prejudices about the period and trying to examine from scratch the records and archives which will help them generate a revitalized image of this obscure period in our literary history. Thus it will not be possible for long for critics to say, as Woodcock does, that one of "the most discouraging aspects of a writer's life in mid-Victorian Canada was usually its isolation" (p. 210). More and more evidence is emerging on the contrary that nineteenth-century writers in Canada created surprisingly close ties among themselves; even Standish O'Grady, whose The Emigrant of 1841 is as much a poem-in-isolation as one could ask for, found some literary friends in Sorel, Québec, in 1836, and through them appears to have contacted the publisher of his volume in Montréal. Mary Lu Macdonald has in fact documented a suprisingly vibrant literary community in Montréal in the mid-1820s;5 Elizabeth Waterston records the successive emergence of small literary circles throughout Upper Canada from the turn of the nineteenth century in Niagara-on-the-Lake, to Guelph, Peterborough and the Ottawa of Lampman and D.C. Scott.6  No Mallarméan cénacles, perhaps, but signs nevertheless that the isolation so often emphasized in the poetry and prose was often mitigated in the actual life. The famous "isolation" of poets in these communities is an over-emphasized feature of their situations, one which would be horrific to modern poets with their little-mags, conferences and creative-writing classes, but might well have pained the early pioneer poet, in a literary sense, to a lesser degree than was once thought.

     It would be possible of course to bicker with other of Woodcock's conclusions in Northern Spring, to find this or that detail of an argument with which one is in particular disagreement. The "seeming inconsistency" (p. 228) of F.R. Scott's championing of individual rights and a strong central government with a vigorous authority in times of crisis is, for instance, more "seeming" (and more interesting for his critics) than Woodcock is willing to admit, and his warm re-assessment of Livesay's propaganda-poetry of the 1930s indicates, again, a political rather than an aesthetic sympathy. The authorial convictions motivating such comments are, however, fairly apparent, matter for each of Woodcock's readers to digest as they see fit. My real dispute with the book is not with its specific conclusions, for in that sense it is of course generally pleasurable, enlightening and convincing. Indeed, when the assumptions that motivate Woodcock's criticism are ignored, the book can serve as an example of critical energy, width of understanding and rhetorical effectiveness. But the time must soon come, has come already, when those assumptions must be questioned with the same skepticism and sense of distance that Modernist critics usually apply to pre-modern periods of literature. Without benefit of such skepticism, Woodcock has produced in Northern Spring another of those monolithic critical texts which dominate the Canadian literary scene, texts which will have to be turned aside by the gathering momentum of whatever is to come.


Notes

  1. Jacques Barzun, Classical, Romantic and Modern (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1961), P. 116.[back]

  2. D.M.R. Bentley, "Not of Things Only But of Thought: Notes on A.J.M. Smith's Imagistic Poems", Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, No. 11 (Fall/Winter, 1982), pp. 39-40.[back]

  3. Susan Gingell-Beckmann supports this dispute with woodcock in "Joseph Howe's Acadia: Document of a Divided Sensibility", Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, No. 10 (Spring/Summer, 1982), p. 26, and provides in her title an appropriate means of describing Howe's Indian portraits.[back]

  4. Leon Surette, "Here Is Us: The Topocentrism of Canadian Literary Criticism", Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, No. 10 (Spring/Summer, 1982), p. 51.[back]

  5. Mary Lu Macdonald, "Some Notes on the Montréal Literary Scene in the Mid-1820s", Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, No. 5 (Fall/Winter, 1979), pp. 29-40.[back]

  6. Elizabeth Waterston, "Regions and Eras in Ontario Poetry", Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, No. 18 (Spring/Summer, 1986), pp. 1-10.[back]

    Brian Trehearne