The Rhetoric of Emancipation in Canadian Public Poetry: from Tom MacInnes to Tom Wayman

by R. Alexander Kizuk


 

A rhetoric of emancipation exists in Canadian public poetry dating from the late nineteenth century onward. This rhetoric is distributed across a field of poetry that includes public writing by such poets as E.J. Pratt, A.J.M. Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Milton Acorn, Tom Wayman, and several poets whose works are all but forgotten in Canadian literary history. Some of the poems treated here are, arguably, texts of high cultural significance; others are automatically dismissed by many critics. I am not concerned with canonizing or counter-canonizing in this short study; nor am I concerned with periodization—romantic, modern, postmodern—nor the study of influence. Within the confines of an historical survey, I approach the poetry in terms of a larger scale. When one takes a step back and looks again, as a Chaos researcher might do, for example, employing scaling procedures, a pattern of recurrent figures of language can be observed. This order in disorder has a demonstrable effect on Canadian poets’ metaphorical choices when it comes to public poetry. This is to suggest that a cultural pre-text or prefiguring has been at work for some time in poetic modes of commemoration and celebration as practised by Canadian poets. Pre-eminent among these tropes is the figure of "Glory": a prospect or possibility of fulfilment in a figural view of reality, often represented through images of brightness. In this prospect, as I shall argue, all Tribes will have returned (historically) in Glory to a legitimate (hallowed) point of origin (humbly) to be freed, presumably from error, or guilt, or worldly cares. Thus, liberation can be seen as one of the themes of this figural reality.

Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode exploded eighteenth-century conventions of the sublime that adhered to the genre of the ode in his day and, in the company of the other Great Romantic Odes, redesigned it to accommodate unique and subjective experience. Anne Williams makes this point in her Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century. She argues, I think convincingly, that a trace of the public ode’s transformation into lyric can be detected in the narrative development of the Prelude which reveals "the emergence of a prophet from a penseroso by means of a selectively dramatized experience with nature," using materials drawn "only from the resources of mind and nature, of mind in nature" (70-71). One Canadian example of public verse written in this High Romantic manner is Charles Mair’s "To a Morning Cloud" (1868). But it is atypical. Most early Canadian public poetry, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts’s "An Ode for the Canadian Confederacy" (1880) for instance, was penned in a pre-Wordsworthian manner. The majority of these works returned to an earlier conception of public verse forms such as the ode as the proper vehicle for revealed truths of religion and the public veneration of monuments and kings.

One reason for this is obvious. The Dominion was a colony. Canadian Imperialists even dreamed of a Second Empire reconsolidated in London before Victoria’s death. A degree of independence for Canadians was won with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and again in 1939 when the inimitable Mackenzie King insisted that his name, not the king’s, should appear on Canada’s declaration of war with Germany. Canadian citizenship was granted in 1947. Early in the century, there was a need in the Canadian public eye or ear for public poetry that would make decorous ceremonial gestures to commemorate events such as confederation jubilees and the veneration of Empire and king. Later, by the middle of the century, Canadian poets were using public verse to celebrate themes appropriate to a cosmopolitan yet regional sense of community— sometimes within the context of a Marxist (or quasi-Marxist) critique. Indeed, it appears that Canadian public poetry has shifted politically in commemorating the local or indigenous in contemporary Canadian life. Regardless of this shift from Empire to Nation to region, however, Canadian public poetry, as a generic "repository of value," continued to resist transformation into lyric through either Romantic self-perfectibility or modernist proprioception. Three specific figures—King, Tribe, Glory—obstinately persist (and despite ideology) in representing the ‘treasures’ of twentieth-century Canadian public verse.

In the first decades of the century, a number of poems, set down in the manner of the traditional ode, appealed to Canadian readers who were loyal to the Empire. MacInnes’ awkward, boisterous poem "For the Crowning of the King" (112-19) is one example, written in 1902, a year after the coronation of Edward VII and Edward's visit to Canada. Like a "storied carpet" before the King, the poem unrolls a narrative of the evolution of "The Briton" and his Empire:

Hail to thee, Edward! Mount the throne!
    That venerable chair
    Whose carven oak, so legends old declare,
    Enshrines the very stone
    That pillowed Jacob’s head, when far alone
    On Bethel plain his dreaming eyes
    Beheld a shining ladder rise
    In glorious portent to the skies.
                                                             (117)

This ode revels in irregularities of rhythm, rhyme and stanza that would have flabbergasted Abraham Cowley, but a serious though not undiscomfited tone does survive MacInnes’s awkwardness. "I see as any peasant sees," he humbly says (in a passage that bears a footnote from Job). The poet praises Edward as a champion of democracy and the enemy of oligarchy: "the whim of mere majority / That substitution for old tyranny, / However it be termed" (113). The poem’s voice is strained. There is perhaps a colonial self-consciousness in the claim that only in the Empire may "The lowliest stranger" address a King "In open day / …say the thing that he would say, / And work and worship without let in his own chosen way" (114).

A long passage follows, devoted to "The Briton’s glorious heritage, / The deep instinct of Liberty—the vigour of the Law," which begins in England’s prehistory, a vast migration of "Outcast, / Forgotten tribes." This passage, so odd in the pattern of its binary oppositions, concludes with the rise of Empire: "By scholar’s pen, by warrior’s blade" and "noble deed of every class." Climactically, gloriously, the "chieftains of the Empire over Seas" march with figures drawn from British history, "In right of old assurance standing forth" to kneel before the King. Thus, sacred origin, legendary and historical continuity, "Treasur’d long thro’ patriarchal days," and the political hegemony of Empire, "in long ascendant line shew forth that dream and prophecy" of Edward’s accession (117). Then follows praise of the King as the guardian of ethics, faith, peace, prosperity, and science that "Shall add to life unwonted zest, / And wizard powers." The ode ends with a prayer for the well-being of "Our trusted Guide": "the Empire’s heart / Sound at the core!" (118-19).

MacInnes’ Edwardian ode lacks any sense approaching the skepticism of a Wells or a Shaw. The figures the poet chooses are marshalled towards the representation of a "glorious heritage" for "chieftains…overseas." While MacInnes envisions a future of "zest" and "wizard powers" for his own people, he does not stake out a claim on "that dream and prophesy" that will remain securely with the King. Ultimately, he remains a conflicted penseroso who contemplates a humble emancipation for his "lost / Forgotten tribes" at the same time as he commemorates "the Empire’s heart / Sound at the core." Thus, Canadian public poetry at the turn of the century appears to be at odds with a Romantic conception of liberty. Furthermore, the language prefigures a fulfilment as opposed to romantic yearning or the modernist Wastelands that were about to dawn sootily over English poetry in only a few years. Many Canadians of this period were happy with the then popular political thought in which annexed colonial territories were seen as part of a greater whole. Nevertheless, the eccentricity of the ode’s poetic formulation is remarkable, strangely caught up as it is in an uneasy paradigm of binarisms that includes King and peasant, law and liberty, science and "wizard powers," centre and periphery, outcast and heritage.

Other names can be applied to the essence, "sound at the core," of the figural reality such public poetry attempts to represent. In can be said that the pretext of King, Tribe, Glory as represented in these poems is the Old Testament paradigm of the Tribes of Israel returning to heavenly Glory with the King of Kings. In this, a temporal king would be the first substitution. For John Daniel Logan (an influential Victorian-Romantic and man of letters in his day), the King becomes a Strong Poet. Logan published two formal odes in the 1920s, Mater Coronata: an Ode with Lyrical Interlude and Lux Ignatiana: an Inaugural Ode.1 At this time in his life, Logan had advanced from his earlier metaphysics of lyrical beauty to a more fully orthodox religious position. He was also campaigning for what Tom Wayman would call ‘a government job’—Associate Dominion Archivist—and for election into the Royal Society of Canada. But it is his earlier and less formal public poem "An Epistle in Verse: To Bliss Carman in Vagabondia" (1913) that best illustrates the sort of values a Canadian Romantic might store away in his public verse. This commemorative "lyric coronet" begins "in thrall" to (one must suppose) imaginative "lust" as the happy homager pores over Carman’s books. As a figure of the Strong Poet, Logan’s Carman is an "untrammelled Wanderer" whose "glamorous Arcady" remains a place where men may muse in "Unsullied, care-void dreams." Here, deference to an idealized Poet displaces veneration for the King. Logan dubs Carman the "securest King / Of Joy and Self-control." Later, this shift from sovereign to poet will continue its devolution in Canadian public poetry so that it becomes but one decent human being that occupies the tropic space of the King.

1927, the year Canada sent its first ambassador to Washington, saw the appearance of Wilson MacDonald’s An Ode on the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, and E. J. Pratt’s The Iron Door: an Ode. These poems, the first more romantic than modern, the second more modern than romantic, privilege social configurations of typological abstractions over either the romantic "I" or the modernist "that"— the being-in-language of MacLeish’s "Ars Poetica." MacDonald’s ode is simple and plangent in diction, serious, and cautionary. It is also colonially eccentric in the sense of being detached from what it celebrates.

Each of the eleven ten-line stanzas encapsulates a thought; the whole celebrates the mature English culture as a completed Glory— a "rich storehouse of the mind" that (colonial) poets and martyrs may be privileged to supplement. MacDonald’s poem condescendingly reminds Canadians that they are the inheritors and not the creators of the nation’s resources and magnitude. Canada’s role in World War I is touched upon in images drawn from falconry, and these falcons do hear the falconer. For MacDonald a diminution of the universal order he celebrates would be unthinkable. England’s lofty castles contrast with Canada’s "Dark, unmeasured quarries." Interestingly, MacDonald shifts from third-person public address to the first person singular in order to present his readers with a visionary journey into the underworld. In this, we may see a trace of the transformation into lyric of public poetry similar to that treated by Anne Williams in her work on the Prelude (70), but there is a crucial structural difference in this case. In Wordsworth, "mind in nature" acts as an organizing principle; in MacDonald, the visionary self is typological, or ‘merely rhetorical’ as opposed to a more integrated connection with the world. In the vision-sequence, the King’s torch awakens "All our dead," and the founding fathers "Stand there erect, expectant of this day." Then, returning to the public mode, MacDonald points out (in deference to Empire) that his vision is an inheritance of the "seership and prophetic powers" of the British race. He then prays that Canada be known in future as a lover of beauty and truth "and a thrall / Of justice; fair and tolerant to all." Aspirations toward Glory and vision are, in practice, vain for colonials, "but not in vain such dreams; / For in their exaltation we arise,"

And, girded with new vision, we return
     From the high, splendid clouds, like April showers;
And, at our touch, the flame of sleeping flowers
     In the cold, hueless hearts of men will burn;
For, as in dreams of night arose the morn
So all deathless deeds in dreams were born.

MacDonald’s imperial vision-King relinquishes none of his power. Indeed, the poet admonishes Canadians for wanting a local Glory, sanctified and legitimized by the colonizer’s rich store-house of the mind. As in MacInnes, here, too, we may note a conflicted configuration of interiority and exteriority ("girded with new vision"), emergent from within a pattern of binary oppositions (height and depth, thraldom and tolerance, heat and cold, and so forth).

MacInnes uses Old Testament imagery to prefigure the British dream and prophecy reaffirmed by Edward’s accession. In contrast to MacDonald’s deference to Empire, MacInnes’ King’s underworld torch does reveal the possibility of a future national Glory. In E. J. Pratt’s The Iron Door: an Ode (1927), this possibility acquires substance. In this poem, an enigmatic iron door, wrought "cruciform" by a giant hand and embossed with death’s crest, "in ironic jest" (205), stands in the way the spirits of the dead must pass, in the poem’s close, to "wide majestic spaces; / Of light abundant" (213). Thrones in MacInnes and MacDonald, and the Poet-King’s in Logan, are bathed in light. In Pratt, only a sense of dreadful authority presides over "The case for life before the throne of death" (212). In the place of the (errant) Tribes whose wandering shall have come to an end—MacInnes’ lowliest peasants and MacDonald’s upstart Canadians—Pratt substitutes the figure of a good and decent woman. Unnamed in the poem, she was inspired by the poet’s mother, whose death in December 1926 was preceded by a period of blindness and deteriorating health. Pratt’s biographer explains that, in The Iron Door, Pratt severed most ties with his past, "with Newfoundland and his ministerial commitments," having survived a crisis of faith, to enjoy "the prospect of a future which held rewards that now were his for the taking" (Pitt 366-67). In an effort to understand such suffering, and struggling also to discover some tenable continuity between on-going life and an utterly particular death, Pratt altered significantly the indigenous rhetorical conventions of Canadian public poetry.

I do not want to suggest that MacDonald’s ode is an antecedent to The Iron Door (Sir Charles G. D. Roberts’ "Beyond the Tops of Time" might do better as such.) But in the beginning of Pratt’s ode there is a recurrence of the dream-vision that MacDonald had inserted into his. My point in noting this is merely that certain specific rhetorical strategies were available to both poets. At any rate, Pratt begins with a vision, where MacDonald’s vision is an insert. Pratt's visionary persona floats high above or beyond creation gazing upon the "vain credulities" of "mortals." S/he is not a "mind in nature" but a mind confronted by all that would challenge faith in the modern world. It is also a mind out of time, which hears "the beat of Time with slow, / Immeasurable stride." Once again, we find that the ‘organic’ romantic tie between intellection and nature is absent. Gradually, "In broken chord," "tragic dreams" are heard:

Awaiting unfulfilled decrees,
Some brighter than the purest gleams
Of seraphic ecstasies.

"Fragments of speech" rise "upon the pauses of the wind," and in imagery of fleeting revelation, "grew / Into the shapes of persons I knew / Who had tasted of life and had died" (206). Pratt distances himself from the expression of private grief by adopting the mask of an envoy (and a witness) sent, as it were, to the border of death’s other Kingdom. In the place of MacInnes’s errant tribes, MacDonald’s cue of forefathers, and Logan’s "genial woodland-comrades," we find here a file of shades who, like the "One who sought for truth," must confront "the clench of evidence / That the whole cosmic lie was predisposed" (209). Then the representation of a procession ceases, and a "sharp insistent cry, / Above all other notes, arose, — / A miserere" flung desperately against "the unhearing ears of God" (210). In counterpoint to the ascending cry, the disembodied persona’s view descends through eddying storm-clouds to rest upon "a woman’s face, / Eroded with much perishing" (210). Thus, recalling the deference of earlier Canadian public poetry, the poet distances himself from his mother’s pain, transforming himself into a Dreamer and her into Everywoman and Eve, mother of all Tribes. Now the persona may approach his "darkest moment," in which all forms of language are but background noise to this woman’s cry, and "all the light remaining [is] bereft / Of colour and design in full eclipse" (211). "Then with a suddenness beyond surprise," new "lights and shadows" leap up and the Dreamer attains the affirmation he seeks. Why, "I do not know," the Dreamer tells us, "But in the dream the door began to move." The poem closes with the statement that reality could not cancel "half the meaning of that hour" in which the dreamer suffered a vision of immortal souls travelling into the white light of heaven,

Of life with high auroras and the flow
Of wide majestic spaces;
Of light abundant; and of keen impassioned faces,
Transfigured underneath its vivid glow.

This vision of Glory passes, and the dreamer is "left alone, aware / Of blindness falling with terrestrial day." The vision pales, but not its story, for the narrative retains what the Dreamer calls the "supreme authority," the determination that a good and decent woman’s death has value and meaning once its story has been told. The light from beyond the door scatters in hurrying streams like some "weird prophetic code" of "multitudinous voices that would tell / Of the move of life invincible." Rising upon the swell of these voices, the dreamer’s own exultant cry is "winged into language." This second cry directs the reader’s attention to the text at hand, which must be "read" before one can decipher "The faded symbols of the page which keeps / This hoary riddle of the dead."

In this text, the central "dream and prophecy" of the earlier poems is displaced by the eccentric and personal visions of a Canadian penseroso. The personal language is made public, however, and private grief is made to constitute a "weird prophetic code." This code substitutes one woman’s cry "against the arrest / Of hope" that Jesus, too, encountered at death’s door. It is language (or signifying codes) that would prophesy, not poet or temporal king. Family and personal acquaintances displace the Tribe, and the miracle of an individual affirmation that is accessible only in a fiction ("winged into language"), displaces the earlier tropes of an inherited Glory. MacInnes celebrated the King who would tolerate "The lowliest stranger" speaking "In open day / …the thing that he would say." This heavily qualified aspiration was recognized by MacDonald and then rejected for the sake of Empire. Logan had, however, already elevated the "stranger" as a speaking subject, and Pratt found a real affirmation, if not an achieved and redemptive Glory, in the local story of a good woman’s pain and death. One can see this process of figural substitution (and its deepening sense of place) also appearing in formal odes by the little known Nathaniel A. Benson.

One thing that Benson’s public verse has in common with all of the poems so far discussed is a certain self-consciousness and discomfiture whenever the speaker attempts to exalt sovereignty. In an ode on the death of George V (1936), Benson writes, "The king is dead—now Death is Emperor," but Death is God’s "dark courier," and it is God who "makest all true men kings!" Like The Iron Door, this lesser poem goes behind the back of the King, so to speak, in order to appeal to a higher authority in God. A similar shift occurs in the trope of Glory. Radiance is the chief figure in Benson’s odes on the coronation of Elizabeth II (1953) and her visit to Canada (1959), yet Elizabeth’s Glory is out-shone by "Strong Commonwealths," "Far islands, set like jewels in tropic sun," and "our great Continent’s Heart" and "ten-fold splendours." In a Dominion Day ode and "An Ode for Toronto’s Centenary (1834-1934)" a legacy of warriors, bards and sages drawn from Canadian history, and the dignity and orderliness of a local community "revealed to history’s gaze," replaces MacInnes’s and MacDonald’s heroic Teutonic migrations of the first millennium. In "An Ode for the Centenary of University College" (1963), "the Wanderer" may "rest unchanged" in a local "Vision that can never be put by." In "To the Singer Asleep (for Bliss Carman)," "a true memorial wrought" displaces inherited Glory so that Canadian eyes may know "perpetual star and sun, / The lyric fire of everlasting light."2

The persistence of this typology can also be noted in two of George Herbert Clarke’s odes (27-41). The "Ode on the Burial of King George the Fifth," excises the heroic ideal so that the ode is more formally sublime. As in Pratt’s ode, it is by an effort of understanding the meaning of the death of a decent human being that men achieve affirmation, "and these things must / Be writ in your hearts, as in that royal heart." For Clarke, the King symbolizes in life and death the peaceful centre and essence of an orderly realm, yet the King is a "comrade fain" whose decent humanity enables all men to share in an understanding of the meaning of his death,

That shall enlighten our long, stubborn blindness
Until the primal jungle-lust shall fade.
In that determined dawn, new luminous
Liberal fountains shall flood our troubled globe
With unexampled radiance—the robe
Of the spirit of Peace—and we shall seem
Incredibly healed, no more the prey of sorrow,
No more self-traitorous—
All men for all men in the coming morrow.

Benson and Clarke fall short of the progress made towards a Canadian domestication of public poetry, which Pratt accomplished in his. Yet with humanity, elegance and dignity, Clarke’s commemoration odes for McMaster and Queen’s Universities (1940, 1941) do attempt to demonstrate that the natural and intellectual history of Ontario (the story of the local Tribe) rightfully belongs in a history of man’s "eternal thoughts."

In contrast to this developing sense of value in the local, however, A. J. M. Smith’s "Ode: On the Death of William Butler Yeats" and the Pindaric "Ode: The Eumenides," return figurally to the ghostly hosts and ideas of an endogenously inherited Glory present in earlier twentieth-century public verse. Smith’s point of departure is MacInnes or MacDonald, so to speak, rather than Pratt. Yet Smith’s figures do carry forward indigenous cultural work, for they assert ultimately that the Glory the poems express belongs now to both Canadian and Western culture alike. In other words, Smith takes Canadian development of the genre two steps back, yet there is an important step forward as well. Hence, without wanting to suggest influence, anxious or otherwise, one may suggest that Smith’s rhetoric—if not his politics—operates in a manner not unlike that of MacInnes in his coronation ode, describing an ascending movement which serves to connect a series of contraries to an essential surety, sound at the core. Unlike the earlier public verse, however, and concomitant with Pratt, for whom, finally, the authority of fiction and interpretation reigns supreme, Smith posits language and not "the significant dark / Of piety and fear" as that which men must attempt to comprehend in order to tame the Furies of modern life.

In the Yeats ode, for example, "A stony place," desiccated and unreal, suddenly bursts into flower when,

Under the central dome of winter and night
A wild swan spreads his fanatic wing.
Ancestralled energy of blood and power
Beats in his sinewy breast.

These lines allude of course to Yeats’ "The Wild Swans at Coole." But in the place of Yeats’ "Mysterious, beautiful," autumn swans, "lover by lover" (Yeats 131), Smith evokes a wintery and definitely non-mysterious, knowing swan, who moreover knows with certainty, rather than loving-kindness. Located in an awkward trope of centrality ("the central dome"), Smith’s swan is an image of surety and the power of tradition, ruling for his "first-last hour" over "shivering Europe" at a time when war is drawing near. Smith was profoundly influenced by Eliot, and it is conceivable that he would have read Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which Eliot had cited in the notes to The Waste Land. May not Yeats’s soul in Smith’s poem be seen to partake of that sacred sovereignty whose death revives the wasteland? This Swan King, like the Kings of pre-modernist Canadian odes, connects high and low, desolation and fertility, time and eternity, and so forth. This sovereignty arises, moreover, in an exultant flight from the heart of all that conspires against life to glory "not for an hour": an immortal, "cold and passionate song." The rhetoric of the earlier poems promotes the theme of democratic freedom (under the firm rule of a strong king). This poem, however, demonstrates how the power of the poet’s word can transcend "the hiding clouds’ rhetorical tumult"—which leads to lack of conviction, specious intensity, even war. The ode grafts a belief in the freedom of poetic language to change in the face of convention onto a response to an indigenously felt need for a calm centre, a dream, and Glory beyond all obscurity.

"Ode: The Eumenides" can be read as a poem about war in which the "innocent wood" of an honourable death or strife is no longer tenable due to the slaughter of World War II. In this, a need to reclaim belief or innocence or the hope of redemption now encounters only a darkness lacking even the form and terrible authority that Pratt gave to the figure of the Iron Door. The "significant dark" is significant only in that it lacks relevance to a society so complacent in materialism that it does not know how to ask for what it needs. Those who embraced the socialist experiment now "see / The reaper felled" by the corruption of their humanitarian dreams. "Our secular prayer, / Sincere and passionate," has become a "Power and instrument" in its own right. This is a power and instrument that will empty and butcher hope, "In lives and deaths made / Meaningless froth." In opposition to this power, recalling Logan. Smith posits the imagination of the Strong Poet as the source of true authority in our culture.

This imaginative (and linguistic) power is not innocent, however. No modern Athena will spring from this source to protect our cities because "Where foreheads bleed / The cry is blood!" "In the stifling dark, / Where the Furies are," the dead,

With accurate eyes levelled
Wait in the enchanted shade.

Where we spilled our bloodshot seed
They wait, each patient ghost
My ruined son.

These Furies are a projection of the self as sovereign and yet guilty, sacrosanct but not innocent. Emancipation is inaccessible, the Tribe corrupt, and Glory dark. The ode in effect dismantles from within the belief-system that chooses Glory as its chief trope. It initiates a dialectic between anti-materialism and puerile self-centredness in which intelligent political skepticism opposes ideology—capitalism and communism alike. Imagination opposes scientific fact. In the final syphilitic image in reference to "My ruined son," Smith, as the Strong Poet himself, assumes a sense of responsibility toward a society that refuses to bear its own culpability. Glory will remain unachieved, due to the corruption of the Tribe to which the poet belongs. Hence the poem becomes an anti-ode in which the values it expresses are not those held in common by its readers. The object of celebration is not the sovereign other, but instead the detached and suffering self. De Man notes in an early essay that the rise of a specifically modern lyric poetry in Western culture has been seen to reside historically "in a loss of the representational function of poetry that goes parallel with the loss of a sense of selfhood" (158-59).3 We do not see this here. The poem does rely heavily on its meticulous demonstration of modernist prosody, but there remains within it a return to romantic concepts of the self in an effort to redefine the self. Within this redefinition, it is not a communal subjectivity that contains the Dream, nor even some such figure of that subjectivity as a messiah—the ruined son is not the Son—but rather tensions that exist, ultimately, within the poetic text itself. This is because the text is not merely an expression of the self here, but an extension of it. Ultimately, in Smith’s odes, the Canadian penseroso remains a penseroso, without the mind resident in nature and culture that is a prerequisite of the vatic mode that can, presumably, prophesy an achieved Glory.

Watson Kirkconnell’s "To Horace" (1935) and his sombre "Ode On the Death of Marshal Joseph Pilsudski" (1946) are mid-century poems that compare well in their use of language with Smith’s odes. Ferns notes that Smith’s "language here [in the odes] is direct and simple and has the kind of eighteenth-century clarity that his best work possesses" (65). Kirkconnell’s "To Horace" was performed for Latin scholars at the University of Manitoba and admirably captures the gusto, humour and erudition of its classic precedent: that is, "To celebrate, with wagging jaw," Horace’s birthday "in absentia"(147-50). Moreover, one can see the progress made toward an indigenously figural sovereignty by Logan, Pratt, and Smith continuing in Kirkconnell’s poems. For it is in these representative texts that Canadian public poetry seals itself off from the "Mysterious, beautiful" poetic language of the early part of the century. At the same time, however, the basic tropes persist. Kirkconnell's cosmopolitan subject in the Pilsudski ode (one of his best original works) is a hero and martyr of Poland’s struggle for sovereignty against Russia and Germany. The chief trope of surety in Canadian public verse—a "democratic" King with whom the common man can identify—is clearly expressed in the language of ceremonious public utterance,

Hew tributes out of marble to the best
Of all whose blood for Poland has been shed,
Even this uncrown’d king, who sought instead
Of sceptred pomp, a citizen’s behest.

Kirkconnell’s Pilsudski also represents the "corner-stone" of an orderly realm, a "state of adamant" and a victory of freedom and nationhood over oppression. This "living rock" is bathed in the light of "myriad mournful torches in the rain" carried by the crowd attending Pilsudski’s funeral. The figure of the errant community at last at rest in mourning is appropriately pathetic, as is the long cue of the spirits of "Statesmen and heroes, warriors and bards" walking in "mute sorrow" (170-73). Here, the cultural investment in the rhetoric of Glory and the secondary tropes of the King and the Tribe are maintained. Moreover, it sustains a genuinely powerful emotion, though this emotion, far from being affirmative, is a vast and inexorable sadness.

Indeed, mid-century Canadian public poetry loses its capacity for positive affirmation in Smith and Kirkconnell. At the same time, the social and cultural analysis implied by these poems is far more probing than ever before.4 In later public verse, however, tropes of oppression became more figuratively significant than the King, the Chosen Poet, the Good Man or Good Woman. A case in point is the public verse of the socialist poet Patrick Anderson. Anderson was active within the milieu of the "new poets" of the 1930s and 1940s, among whom Smith had been dubbed "the Prufrock of Montreal." F. R. Scott helped a small group of young poets, among whom were Anderson and P. K. Page, to start Preview (1942-45), a poetry magazine that was later opposed by First Statement (1942-45), edited by John Sutherland and supported by Irving Layton, Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek. The point of contention was Smith’s evaluative privileging of a "cosmopolitan" over a "native" poetry in Canada, but it is also true that the former group (including Anderson) was pro-English while the latter was pro-American. Though established at Oxford and in New York, Anderson’s poetic and concept of the social role of art and the artist were shaped by these specifically Canadian literary experiences.

Anderson’s "Capital Square," chosen by Smith for The Oxford Book of Canadian Poetry (318-319), creates an ironic monument to middle class values: "statues stiffened in silence / with No upon their lips and the heart at zero." The poem challenges the dominant class in its complete denial of bourgeois commemorative values. The Square has no warmth, "only an abstract good." The "Ode in Triumph and Despair to Benjamin Robert Haydon" (1976) is a more formally rhetorical example of Canadian socialist public poetry at mid-century. The poem’s subject is not so much the Victorian Haydon, a debt-ridden painter of large historical canvases, as it is Anderson’s modernist reading of Haydon’s Autobiography (1847), which is remarkable for its accounts of eminent artists and politicians of the day. The poem is remarkable for the extremes to which its substitutions go in the matters of Glory, King and Tribe. For Anderson, Haydon’s only claim to Glory is "a candle clowning in his hand" as he walks through a "historic vision" of his time. Within this vision the "greasy candle flame" contrasts with the splendid heroes Haydon painted in his youth, "precisely, lovingly, not well"—particularly Hodgson, "a tower of modelled light." Responding to the effect of aging upon Haydon’s later work, Anderson’s ode grows replete with images such as "Hodgson, / wounded, wounded, by a monstrous dream /of whiskers falling and of snowy hairs." Haydon, a Helpless Artist figure (that one may add to the King, Strong Poet, decent person paradigm), serves to connect such pairings as the eminent and the unremembered, light and dark, and youth and age, and so forth. To this series of binaries, Anderson adds art and labour by asking what happens to the imagination of an artist whose unrenowned labour joins "the general loam / of failure," the old "business of farming unrecorded hours / and working mills of blood." The answer—"Grant him the immortality / Of those who try"—is bracketed by the assertion that art is a "deliberate prison." The ode commemorates the "horror and the dream" of imaginative labour that remains free of canons in the on-going unsung struggle of the oppressed, "children playing on a dusty floor / or servants climbing to a windy rafter." Haydon’s death dramatically contrasts with the end of his age: "The Regency is gone,"

and Keats is done, and Lamb and Wordsworth dead.
Pictures don’t sell, and Haydon who once said
he felt balloons were tied
under his arms, has tried
too long, his bosom brightening into courage—
too long the debts, the critics and the fury,
he lies, throat slit and bleeding like a pig,
below "King Alfred and the British Jury."

Anderson’s subject, "throat slit and bleeding like a pig," clearly opposes the sovereignty figure. As well, the poem’s figural displacements as a whole occur in a potentially infinite series of re-readings. Haydon’s ‘reading’ of his time by the jeering reflected light of a candle, and Anderson’s sympathetic reading, and our own, as Canadians, combine like a palimpsest or a ‘horizon of reading’ in the serious reflection occasioned by this poem by a writer who has contributed significantly to Canadian literary history. This light may only be a greasy candle flame, but it is burning where Smith’s and Kirkconnell’s had guttered.

Anderson’s strategy is to arouse the reader’s anger at the inequality of a culture that privileges a "deathless name" over the Helpless Artist, a canon over those who try, and history over reading. Milton Acorn, relying on a soap-box-prophetic tone of voice, attempts to express in somewhat similar tones the ‘treasures’ or values that he believes ought to be held in common by Canadian readers. Acorn, like Anderson, was a member of the Labour Progressive Party (as the Communist Party was known in the 1940s and 1950s). "The Canadian Statue of Liberty Speaks To the U. S. Draft Dodgers" (I’ve Tasted my Blood 16), "In Victory Square" (I’ve Tasted My Blood 95-96), and "Poem On the Toronto Fall-Out Shelter" (Jawbreakers 18-19), are poems that condemn a social system which requires surplus labour for economic efficiency. Acorn’s grass-roots rhetoric is a gesture of solidarity with the unemployed, the desperate, and the powerless whose eyes are black as the dust of pavement, whose wombs are poisoned by their bosses’ bombs, and whose "STATE IS COMPLETELY LAWLESS!"

The tropes of King, Tribe, and Glory also persist in Dorothy Livesay’s work, the poem "Montreal: 1933," for instance, in which the implied reader is clearly the collective public of the nation. This poem negatively commemorates that city’s Dufferin Square as a site of oppression in which leftist invective and topicality engage dialectically with the high seriousness of such men as Archbishop Gauttier of Montreal, whose answer to socialist struggles abroad was that "‘no one has died of starvation / In this country.’" The poem closes,

Dufferin Square is a playground
Where big words sound lovely
But there are words being spoken
That hold meaning and action.
There are thoughts being lighted!
Cuba’s Machado still fears the street.
                                                  (77)

Many of Livesay’s poems antithetically commemorate in serious public language the harshness of the people’s struggle to make their voice heard by an errant bourgeois community. In "London Revisited: 1946," "For Abe Klein: Poet" (1967), "The Pied Piper of Edmonton" (1971), and documentary poems like "Day and Night" (1939-1944), "Call My People Home (A Documentary Poem for Radio)" (1948-1950) and "The Second Language (Suite)" (1960-1964), a suppressed lyrical consciousness as base engages the capitalist superstructure. These poems attempt to make this dialectic a gift to the people of a language—"thoughts being lighted!"—in which the bourgeoisie, its bosses, its wars, and the vestiges of nineteenth-century colonialism could be effectively challenged. Livesay’s radiantly proletarian song, a product of the workers’ Tribe, moreover, amounts to a source of figurative language that parallels and challenges the myth and fiction of Smith and Pratt.

Livesay, Anderson and Milton Acorn, despite the shift from a middle class to a socialist frame of reference, continue to address public themes in the tropes of sovereignty, the people, and "thoughts being lighted!" In Acorn’s "Monument" (1969), for instance, an unnamed speaker, who lost his family to the "gas chamber boys," marries "to give the vision / which is life" to his son, who plays nearby surrounded by a Tribe of gossiping ghosts (I’ve Tasted my Blood 16). The 1972 "Ode to the Timothy Eaton Memorial Church" (More Poems For People 50-51) substitutes for the King, "That vision of a decent Man," which,

Bearing all sorts of pains for the sake of sinners.
Or to put it more bluntly—the rich;
Does give a certain satisfaction
I’d say a certain peace of the spirit
As long as a few amendments are made
Like, You, the guilty
Suffering instead of the innocent.

Acorn dares the middle class to bear "the royal pricks" and the crown of thorns—i.e., the Glory of the worker-Tribe. For himself, he says, "I’d like to stand in for the Devil on his day off" and conduct an orchestra among the "fiends of Hell." Like MacDonald and Smith, however, Acorn would like to take the matter of an indigenous Glory into his own hands.

In different, more distanced tones, Dennis Lee’s "More Claiming," published in Civil Elegies (1968), admits that, as a boy, the poet never knew "the sabotage kids," abnormal, irreverent adolescents who had the power to douse "epiphanies" (21). Like so many of Lee’s earlier poems, "More Claiming" is a lyrical yet public exploration of the self, yet the self here exists in a multiplicity of selves. One of these selves squandered his boyhood "belting thru / school to the rhythms of glory,"

For there were treks, attacks and
tribal migrations of meaning, wow
careening thru his skull, the doves &
dodos that descended, scary
partnerships with God, new selves erupting
messianic daily—all the grand
adrenalin parade!
                                                           (26)

Here, lyrical-prophetic Glory and the errant Tribe find their expression in ironic terms. The self is central, rather than such forms of discourse as reading or the angry songs of the proletariat, yet (as in Smith) the self remains problematic. Much of the enduring power of Lee’s "Civil Elegies," composed in a hybrid lyric form that is personal yet addressed to the nation’s citizenry, derives from his determination to probe the self through a profoundly ironic sense of place and belonging. These poems, in a manner not conducive to the prophecy of Glory, commemorate deficiencies instead of wishes in Canadian culture, and they echo with great anguish in the writer’s disintegrated self. The pain of this condition is elevated to the level of public discourse in such lines as, "Gentlemen, generations of / acquiescent spectators gawk at the chrome / on American cars on Queen Street, gawk and slump and retreat" (36). This language intensifies Lee’s expression of a personal mise en abîme, which appears to have become one of the more recent substitutions for the sovereignty trope within the rhetoric of Canadian public poetry. Furthermore, in terms of the figure of the people, Lee laments the absence of any centre or essence in his sense of place. Thus, it would appear that the figure of the King has developed in recent times into of the figure of a fragmented and multifarious Everyself, and the lost Tribe is losing its sense of community or cohesion.

Another instance of this move can be found in Tom Wayman’s poetry. A paradox of most socialist verse—indeed of any poetry that has some polemical purpose—is that it seeks an audience among those of whom it is critical. This is a problem for Acorn because it leaves him open to the charge that he is middle class in a work-shirt. (To be sure, a similar charge can be made against anyone who writes satire.) Still, what does it mean when he says, in "In Victory Square," that the lives of the oppressed have become desperate, "as the smallest things have come to be desperate / in my world as well as theirs" (I’ve Tasted My Blood, 95-96). Nevertheless, and with remarkable originality, Tom Wayman combines the boss/ worker dialectic, and the dream and prophecy of labour as a cultural value, with Lee’s concept of the self as an ironically exploded container of meaning. Wayman, however, goes much farther afield with this intellectual strategy. In Wayman, the exploded self converts to a kind of figural labour in which the poet-penseroso becomes his own errant Tribe and Glory. At the turn of the century, MacInnes praised Edward as the champion of democracy "in all our scattered states." Wayman’s collection of ironic, humorous, and self-mocking poems on his persona at work, The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (1981), praises labour as the central experience of all his scattered ‘Waymans.’ In "Milton Acorn: a Reading in Vancouver," from Industrial Poems (1977), one ‘Wayman’ refers to Acorn’s poetry in much the same way that Logan and Benson referred to Carman’s. Here, the figure of Acorn becomes a crease over which a series of contraries is folded: eyebrows "like rotten moss / or seaweed" and skin "seared in some frightening fire," beer parlour desuetude and the "strange twisted dream" inside the drinkers’ heads, the helplessness of the aged and the "beautiful words" of every "self-pitying garret adolescent poet" (78-79). One of Wayman’s historical odes, the 1975 "Fort Rodd Hill National Historic Park," (Money & Rain 26-37) commemorates the unsung labour of Vancouver Island miners and mining, which has vanished beneath the erection of a monument to military Glory, like coal, "like coast defence. Nothing is their monument. / Now they are gone they do not mean a single thing / like you, like me." As in Anderson, Wayman’s ‘reading of the case’ attempts to subvert the accepted history.

Also collected in Money & Rain, "Cumberland Graveyard, February 1973," a poem that recalls interestingly Allen Tate’s "Ode to the Confederate Dead," suggests that the struggle of "A Worker’s Friend," martyred for "having a sort of dream," lives on in the labour of those who know how to read between the lines of history, so that "even , years later / you start another dream in which suddenly you are aware / this is a dream you began once before" (26-37). Like Pratt’s fiction, Smith’s myth, Livesay’s proletariat song, and Anderson’s reading, Wayman’s dream-labour suggests that affirmation is accessible not in consciousness as an index of meaning, but rather in the context that public poetry opens to the collective wishes of the nation. It must be said, however, that for Livesay, Anderson, Acorn, and Wayman, that nation does not belong to the oppressors, however they may be named. The rhetoric of Glory, always unachieved, has in Canada implied a public discourse of wish-fulfilment. The national anthem promises that with glowing hearts our sons will know their true hearts strong and free, but the rhetoric of Canadian public poetry casts this promise, and the affirmations of Roberts’ "Ode on the Canadian Confederacy" into profound, yet creative, doubt.

Edward Said has said that the self-effacement of modernist literary texts was at least partially a sort of palms-up gesture of the dominant world culture, disclaiming responsibility for the effects of colonization upon the colonized—a gesture that some theoretical formulations of the postmodern have repeated, such as Lyotard’s influential text, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (Said 222). Specifically, Said refers to Lyotard’s idea of a failure of the Two Great Myths of Western (colonizing) culture, enlightenment and emancipation. In this minor study, I have been concerned with colonial and postcolonial texts that respond to the second of these Great Myths, that "dream and prophesy" which takes place— in a wonderful formulation of Foucault’s—in that "space that is rigid and forbidden, surrounding the quest, the return, and the treasure (that’s the geography of the Argonauts and of the labyrinth)" (80).5 This is the prefigural and fictional space of narrative, but it is also the provenance of a non-prophesying public poetry, which celebrates legitimations of monuments and climactic events occurring in the story that an indigenous culture would tell about itself at home and in other lands.

In the 1920s, T.S. Eliot rejected the "progressive centrality of the self as a register of meanings, literary and otherwise," that he saw as the only "repository of value" in Matthew Arnold’s time (Levenson 23-27).6 In 1926, a remarkable critic of Canadian literature, Lionel Stevenson, wrote that: "it will be fatal to poetry if the element of thought was ever considered "an essential attribute of lyric poetry" (103).7 It is not far from this statement to the well-known modernist slogans: "No ideas but in things," "Go in fear of abstractions," "A poem should not mean, but be," and so forth. Later, Charles Olsen would add his "Wash the ego out." By 1976, American critic Robert Pinsky had concluded that phrases like these suggested "an intellectual and poetic devotion to the utterly particular moment, the unique instant caught by the senses as in one flash of the retina" (61). This unique instant of perception will be focussed, however, not upon the self but on the other—through what Olsen called proprioception (1). De Man, in the essay previously cited, concurred, noting that the rise of modernist lyricism parallels the appearance of an exploded self such as that which we have seen in Lee and Wayman. In this context of a decline of the Victorian-Romantic ‘I’ and the rising importance of a modernist ‘camera-eye’ poetic, early twentieth-century Canadian poets faced an unhappy dilemma, as many were loyal to Victorian Romanticism, and Yankee-prosodic gimmickry was not trusted. Today, in Canada, the cynosure, the focus of surety, the King whose presence pre-figures the Glory, has become the figure of a writer whose ego has come apart in an effort to speak of public themes in poetry.

At one point the need for a central and legitimate figure in such verse became a dark despair, as in Smith’s Eumenides ode. In Leonard Cohen’s "For E.J.P.," Canadian readers will remember, Pratt’s poetics and religious faith became an absent monument in lieu of which the contemporary poet must believe that "Something forgets us perfectly" despite the "dynasties sown and spent / to serve the language of a fine lament" (69-70). It was left to the next generation of poets, as Cohen saw in "For my Old Layton," to bound drunkenly "from monument to monument" in the postcolonial, postmodern world of a vast and "automatic laboratory," devoid of dreams (36-37). In an effort to recover that dream, Canadian public poetry may be said to have fastened upon the sense of place and belonging of socialist poets: a place in which only the self can be King. Perhaps it is as Mark Kingwell has said recently in his book Dreams of the Millennium: Report from a Culture On the Brink— "Despite the much-ballyhooed collapse of Soviet communism, then, the harsh reality is that Marx really was right about the social world: understood properly, class is everything" (127). Reflecting upon studies of increasing separatism among the elites and violence in the underclass, Kingwell goes on to say that "Sensitive readers might be tempted to react like medieval peasants or Renaissance Florentines: by diving to the floor, curling up into the foetal position, and hoping the walls don’t crumble on top of them" (127). Be that as it may, the new public poetry in this country lays down an extreme motility of the self as slippery stepping stones between the Canadian people and the old "dream and prophecy" of liberation. That pre-figural Glory is no longer illuminated by the light of a wished-for legitimating point of origin. The figural chain of King, Chosen Poet, Good Person, Worker and Everyself has become a scattering of broken links. The logocentric King is dead; long live the cognitive space he once occupied. The humble penseroso of the people in Canadian public verse today may not have come closer to the hallowed, backward-shining light, but s/he may well be seeing it more clearly.

 

Notes

 

  1. John Daniel Logan’s life and writings have received valuable attention in Foshay (46-59), but a study of the influence of his colonial Romanticism upon Canadian letters has yet to be done. The odes mentioned here are: Mater Coronata: an Ode with Lyrical Interlude (Halifax: Dalhousie Alumni Assoc., 1924), and Lux Ignatiana: an Inaugural Ode composed for the Rev. William M. Magee, S.J. as President of Marquette University (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1928). Logan became Head of the English Department at the Jesuits’ prestigious Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1927, two years before his death in 1929, at tha age of sixty (Foshay 46-59). [back]

  2. Benson, Ode On the Death of George V (Toronto: Ryerson, 1936); rpt. in his The Glowing Years (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1937), pp. 106-08. "Ode for Dominion Day," "To the Singer Asleep for Blis Carman," "An Ode for Toronto’s Centenary," Glowing Years, pp. 102-03, 109, 122-24. "A Canadian Ode for the Coronation," "An Ode for the Centenary of University College 1855-1953," "An Ode fo Welcome for the Queen of Canada," One Man’s Pilgrimage (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1962), pp. 69,70-71, 81. [back]

  3. In this essay, de Man goes on to deconstruct this historicist notion. Objecting that "Poetry does not give up its mimetic function and its dependence on the fiction of a self that easily" (171), he argues that the distinctiveness of the modern lyric may be found in its encounter with the irrepresentability of representability: "the absolute ambivalence of a language" that "makes lyric poetry into an enigma which never stops as King for the unreachable answer to its own riddle" (175-76). [back]

  4. I have tried to avoid evaluative criticism in this study, and not always successfully to be sure, yet within the genre of Canadian public poetry the poems of Smith, Kirkconnell, and Wayman do seem to shine with a somewhat deeper gleam. I would say that this is because of the precision of their analyses. In another context, however, one could say that they are more successful in terms of their poetics than other examples cited in this essay. [back]

  5. Foucault’s metaphors for the critique of enlightenment themes, which he finds in Roussel, are equally strongly poetic: "the other space—communicating, polymorphous, continuous, and reversible—of the metamorphosis, that is to say, of the visible transformation of instantly crossed distances of strange affinities, of symbolic replacements (the place of the human beast) (80). [back]

  6. Of course, Eliot’s statement reflects his own struggle, as a young man, to confront otherness and thereby exocise Romantic self-consciousness in himself and his early poetry. Indeed, as Maud Ellmann has suggested, Prufrock’s "subjectivity is all too fixed, ‘pinned and wriggling’ in a paranoiac opposition to the other" (370). [back]

  7. Stevenson was arguing for what he called the "lyrical lyric" fashioned from a "pure" and "selfless" devotion to the "swift connotative phrase," that could give readers "a share in the ecstasy of the angels" (123). As has been noted (by Donna Bennet in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature), Stevenson anticipates Northrop Frye’s mythopoeic literary theory in many ways, as, for example, in Stevenson’s definiton of the "pure lyric": "freedom from individual traits…ancestral memories…rooted in us at the present day, giving our imaginations a hereditary stimulus…" (106-06). [back]

 

Works Cited

 

Acorn, Milton. I’ve Tasted My Blood. Poems 1956 to 1968. Selected by Al Purdy. Toronto: Ryerson, 1969.

——. Jaw Breakers. Toronto: Contact Press, 1963.

——. More Poems for People. Toronto: NC Press, 1972.

Anderson, Patrick. A Visiting Distance: New, Revised, and Selected. Ottawa: Borealis, 1976.

Benson, Nathaniel A. The Glowing Years. Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1937.

——. One Man’s Pilgrimage. Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1962.

Clarke, George Herbert. Selected Poems of George Herbert Clarke. Toronto: Ryerson, 1954.

Cohen, Leonard. Flowers for Hitler. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964.

de Man, Paul. "Lyric and Modernity." Forms of the Lyric: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. Reuben A. Grower. New York: Columbia UP, 1970.

Ellmann, Maud. "The Spider and the Weevil: Self and Writing in Eliot’s Early Poetry." In Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry. Ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Ferns, John. A. J. M. Smith. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Foshay, Toby A. J. D. Logan: Canadian Man of Letters. Wolfville, N. S: Acadia University Library, 1982.

Foucault, Michel. Death and the Labyrinth: the World of Raymond Roussel. Trans. Charles Ruas. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

Kingwell, Mark. Dreams of the Millennium: Report from a Culture On the Brink. Toronto: Penguin, 1996.

Kirkconnell, Watson. Centennial Tales and Selected Poems. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1965: 147-50, 170-73.

Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: a study of English literary doctrine 1908- 1922. London, New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Livesay, Dorothy. Collected Poems. the Two Seasons. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972.

Logan, John Daniel. "An Epistle in Verse: To Bliss Carman in Vagabondia," In To Bliss Carman: on the Anniversary of His Nativity Born Anno Domini One Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty-One the Fifteenth Day of April. A little Anthology by Four Admirers who dwell in the Canadian Homeland. Privately printed, 1913. [Unpaginated.]

MacDonald, Wilson. An Ode on the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation. Toronto: author, 1927. [Unpaginated.]

MacInnes, Tom. "For the Crowning of the King: an Ode," Complete Poems of Tom MacInnes. Toronto: Ryerson, 1923.

Pratt, E.J. The Iron Door: an Ode. Toronto: Macmillan, 1927. Rpt. in E.J. Pratt: Complete Poems, Part 1. Ed. Sandra Djwa and R.G. Moyles. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1989: 204-13.

Olsen, Charles. Proprioception. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1965.

Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry Princeton. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1976.

Pitt, David G. E.J. Pratt: the Truant Years 1882- 1927. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984.

Said, Edward W. "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors." Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 205-25.

Smith, A. J. M. Poems. New and Collected. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1967.

——, ed. The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1960.

Stevenson, Lionel. Appraisals of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Macmillan, 1924.

Wayman, Tom. Free Time: Industrial Poems by Tom Wayman. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977.

——. Money & Rain: Tom Wayman Live. Toronto: Macmillan, 1975.

Williams, Anne. Prophetic Strain: the Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984.

Yeats, W. B. The Poems of W. B. Yeats: a New Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finnerman. New York, Macmillan, 1983.