"We have a wider outlook": Annotated Letters of Duncan Campbell Scott and A.J.M. Smith, 1941-1946

Edited, with an Introduction, by Gwendolyn Guth

Careers have been forged on the ideological gulf that separates the Confederation Poets from the McGill Moderns. As every keen student of early twentieth-century Canadian literature knows, the evidence for that division is obvious. There is the explicit barb in F.R. Scott’s paradigmatic 1920s satire "The Canadian Authors Meet" ("The air is heavy with ‘Canadian’ topics, / And Carman, Lampman, Roberts, Campell, Scott, / Are measured for their faith and philanthropics, / Their zeal for God and King, their earnest thought").¹ And of course, for unparalleled comic boldness, there is the searing commentary of A.J.M. Smith’s "Rejected Preface" to New Provinces (1936), in which Smith castigates the conventional and commonplace in Canadian poetry and accuses "The Canadian Poet," in general, of having "a soft heart and a soft soul; and a soft head" (171). Fighting words, indeed.

It is ironic that much of Canadian literary criticism continues to perpetuate the Oedipal-style schism between these poetic generations as a solid tenet of Canadian literary history, despite the fact that sons often grow up to be fathers themselves, and, at least in the case of A.J.M. Smith, young upstarts tend to publish more tempered critical insights as they themselves mellow into middle age.² We too easily forget the moments of rapprochement between the generations—for instance, that the same A.J.M. Smith who flamed Bliss Carman mercilessly in the "Rejected Preface" went on, a decade later, to deliver a Founders’ Day Address at the University of New Brunswick that was, in part, intent on "rescu[ing] Carman’s reputation from the [negative] reaction that has followed a too-undiscriminating adulation"—a "reaction," it must be said, that Smith himself had worked hard to foster. Smith’s speech continues in this changed vein, claiming soberly that

[t]he unique and unforgettable quality that makes itself felt in Carman’s finest lines is a magic gleam, intense and troubling, a disturbing mixture of the beautiful and the strange, of the attractive and the frightening. His best poetry is the product of an acute and quivering sensibility, and its successful communication to the reader indicates the presence of great technical accomplishment and the power to create images that are heavily charged with emotion. (Smith, "The Fredericton Poets" 73)

It was during the important decade of the 1940s that Smith began to "sort out his interpretation of the Confederation poets" (Compton 37) in a series of essays that began with the Introduction to his carefully researched and assembled work, The Book of Canadian Poetry: a Critical and Historical Anthology (1943). Also in 1943 he released to an appreciative public his first and long-awaited collection of poems, News of the Phoenix, which won the Governor-General’s award for poetry for that year. Essays on "Nationalism and Canadian Poetry" (1945), "The Fredericton Poets" (1946), and "The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott" (1948) helped pave the way for the expanded Introduction to Smith’s second edition of the BCP in 1948, a much-revised collection which bears out the assertion that "Smith’s anthologies were self-correcting," allotting ever more space to early Canadian poetry (Compton 38).³ An as-yet-untold installment of the story of Smith in the productive 1940s involves his rapprochement with one particular Confederation poet whose important place in literary history he acknowledged in the first line of the 1948 essay:

The death of Duncan Campbell Scott [in 1947] has removed the last surviving member of the remarkable group of poets born in the sixties of the last century whose work, which began to appear in the nineties, established a national school of reflective nature poetry and achieved a standard of formal excellence unattained in Canada before and rarely equalled since. ("The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott" 104)

Smith went on to claim that although Scott’s poetry was "spared the excessive adulation" that afflicted the work of Carman and Roberts, his work, by virtue of its "contemplative" and "scholar[ly]" nature, had been unjustly neglected by Canadian literary critics ("The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott" 105). Smith’s affinity for Scott’s work would expand over the next decade. In a second essay on Scott, written in 1959,⁴ Smith "looked where no one else had in Scott’s work and found fine things for which Scott is still not well enough remembered" (Dragland, Duncan Campbell Scott 103). Smith found "intense and accurate" imagery; he found "dynamism" and "juxtaposition" (light, colour, sound, sense, emotion); he found "symbolist" works and poems of sexual frankness; he found—and in this he locates Scott’s "characteristic virtue"—"the glowing fusion . . . of keenness of observation with clarity of thought so that the thing and the idea seem to be struck out together" ("Duncan Campbell Scott" 119, 125-26, 130). As Anne Compton points out, Scott reached both forward and backward for Smith, connecting the "pungency" and sensual energy of the colonials and of Crawford with the pure amalgam of "accuracy and passion" that characterized the best of the moderns (38).

It is in the spirit of continuing our re-evaluations of both Smith and Scott—representatives of two different, yet, in this case, mutually respectful poetic eras—that fifteen archival letters are here presented for the first time: letters exchanged between an octogenarian Scott (1862-1947) and a forty-something Smith (1902-1980) in the years spanning 1941 to 1946. Scott writes nine of the fifteen letters from his home in Ottawa—"108 Lisgar St., Ottawa, Ont." (see "Additional Note" to Letter 2). It was here that E.K. Brown talked with Scott on summer evenings in 1942 "in the huge high-ceilinged room at the back of his rambling house,"⁵ a reminiscence memorialized in Brown’s 1943 volume, On Canadian Poetry (142-43). In the closing section of his own essay on Scott in 1948, written some months after Scott’s death, Smith himself similarly recalls "the great booklined room of [Scott’s] Ottawa house" in which the older poet had recited lines from his early elegy, "In the Country Churchyard," "a day or two after his eightieth birthday" in 1942⁶ ("The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott" 113). Smith’s six letters to Scott follow the younger man’s peregrinations to and from Canada, hailing alternately from Westmount (Letter 2), from Magog, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where Smith had a summer home (Letters 4 and 6) and from the Department of English, Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science, East Lansing, Michigan, where Smith served as a faculty member from 1936 to his retirement in 1972 (Letters 8, 10, and 12).

"I have a real admiration for those poets who braved the cold of those early days; it is not much warmer now, but we have a wider outlook."
   (Duncan Campbell Scott to A.J.M. Smith, Letter XIV, November 24, 1943)

Thirteen of the fifteen letters included in this correspondence deal in some way with the ground-breaking 1943 publication, The Book of Canadian Poetry (University of Chicago Press)⁷ that helped to establish A.J.M. Smith as Canada’s foremost literary anthologist. Though it began as "a college anthology," the BCP became, by means of Smith’s high and discriminating standards, "a kind of national textbook, forming the taste of younger poets and encouraging the wider reading of poetry in Canada" (Edel, "A.J.M. Smith" 1077). The present letters reveal, among other things, the unlikely extent to which Duncan Campbell Scott had input into the BCP project from the beginning. Smith’s work-in-progress had, in fact, provided the occasion for the first meeting between the two poets in Scott’s Ottawa home in the early fall of 1941, during which Smith had solicited Scott’s opinion on his Introduction. In the course of their subsequent correspondence, Scott advised Smith on the Introduction (Letter I), suggested other poets who might be (or might have been) included in the anthology (Letters I and XIV), controlled his self-representation in the BCP by permitting Smith only a narrow range of poems from which to choose (Letters III, IX, and XI), vetoed the use of a quotation from a personal letter in the biographical note about him (Letter V), wrote "at once" to McClelland and Stewart in support of Smith’s project, in answer to Smith’s request that he do so (Letter IX), forwardly urged the inclusion of his wife’s poem and asked that she be paid for it (Letters I, III, and XI), and provided a detailed and appreciative appraisal of the finished anthology (Letter XIV). In the "Preface" to the 1943 edition of the BCP, A.J.M. Smith includes "Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott, of Ottawa" in a list of "authorities and . . . friends," all of whom "have read the Introduction and many of the notes and in every case have given me generous help" (iv). Scott, for his part, was likely responding both to this acknowledgement and to an inscription in the anthology itself when he modestly commented to Smith that "[i]t is very generous of you to send me a copy of y^r. anthology. & to write its it [in it] as you did, for I do not feel I did much to help you" (Letter XIII). Tracing Scott’s involvement in Smith’s editorial project ushers us into an important ideological exchange between these representatives of two different literary eras, and provides a point of departure for a host of issues surrounding the production and reception of The Book of Canadian Poetry.

I remember that in response to your request I made a few remarks about the Introduction; if I had been able to read it one or two other points might have occurred to me. It sticks in my mind that I would like to suggest a revision of the first paragraphs. As I remember them they bring up the oft debated question as to whether there is any Canadian literature, and you quote a disparaging remark of Prof. Phelps. As you are introducing a body of verse or poetry some of which you admire and of which you know the historical background, I would like very much to ^{have you} open with a confident note and not discount the value of the work at the outset. A remark of Prof. Phelps will in a few years have even less value than it has now. You might like to consider this. (Letter I)⁸

Aside from the fact that Scott was wryly prescient about the waning influence of McGill University’s Professor Arthur Phelps (and managed to convince Smith to omit Phelps’ remark),⁹ we observe the older poet here urging the younger poet to choose generous critical optimism over trendy literary judgment: to sound "a confident note" rather than "discount[ing] the value of the work from the outset." To his credit, Smith seems to have accepted Scott’s suggestion. Indeed, in a letter dated October 25, 1941, Smith thanks Scott for his "remarks on the essay I read you," and admits that "You are quite right about the need for a more enthusiastic tone at the beginning" (Letter 2). The opening line of the 1943 Introduction (unchanged in the 1948 revision) reads as follows:

At a time when Canadian poetry is entering a period of renewed vitality it is good to look back over the span of a century and a half during which people living in Canada have tried to interpret the life around them through the medium of verse. (3)

Smith self-consciously manages to have his cake and eat it, too, of course, since his appreciation for past literary endeavours is continually couched in terms of his own "contemporary bias"¹⁰ (hence the loaded reference to "renewed vitality"). Small wonder, then, that the second line of the Introduction states, in somewhat equivocal language, "It will help us to appreciate the poetry of the present if we can see it beside that of the past." In paragraph two, Smith’s ideological agenda becomes unmistakable:

The main purpose of this collection is to illustrate in the light of a contemporary and cosmopolitan literary consciousness the broad development of English-Canadian poetry from its beginnings at the end of the eighteenth century to its renewal of power in the revolutionary world of today. (3; emphasis added)

Such a division exists—indeed, has existed from the beginning—but it is neither so fundamental nor so wide as the breakup of the material into two parts was taken to imply. Furthermore, as has already been pointed out, the most significant tendency of recent Canadian poetry has been the merging of these two traditions in the work of Birney, Livesay, Klein, Page, and, possibly, Anderson. (viii; emphasis added)

If Smith was open to Scott’s advice about changing the tone of the Introduction, he was equally open, or at least courteously willing (in the 1943 edition) to respect Scott’s rather autocratic views about his own poetic representation in the anthology. Scott begins the process in the fall of 1941 by sending Smith a copy of his eighth book, The Green Cloister (1935),¹¹ which, we discover, contains markings beside various poems. Smith offers alternatives to some of these suggested poems; Scott replies with the following rather contradictory clarification:

The poems marked in The Green Cloister were xxx so marked by my wife who wished to draw your attention to them, I think she would like to see ‘Compline’ in the final choice but the markings were intended as alternatives to ‘The Nightwatchman,’ which you, at first sight seemed to like. I think it might be well to take ‘At Gull Lake’ instead of ‘The Forsaken’ [Smith had made this suggestion in Letter 2], which has been quite often pudlished [sic]. And the lines in the Dedication [also suggested by Smith; see Letter 2, nt 6] I would like to see reprinted; but in making these remarks I do not for a moment desire to influence you in the selection of my peices [sic]. (Letter III; emphasis added)

When not constrained to be polite, Smith’s letters reveal how his exacting standards both did and did not hamper his desire to be wide-ranging in his editorial representation of Canadian poetry. A quick perusal of the table of contents tells us, for instance, that the anthology includes the work of George Herbert Clarke, a poet recommended by Scott in Letter I.¹² To Scott’s further suggestion, however, that the work of Wilson MacDonald have "a little more room on your pages" (Letter I), Smith makes a terse reply:

As to Wilson Macdonald [sic], I have always felt that his verse was for the most part sentimental and glib, while his exaggerated sense of his own worth has called for some sort of corrective criticism. I will look up the poems you mention, as I certainly do want to make the book as genuinely representative as possible and to keep it from any narrow prejudice. (Letter 2)

MacDonald’s work did not find its way into the anthology. It is possible, of course, that Smith never had any intention of including it, and that he attempts merely to be respectful with his talk of looking up MacDonald’s poems.¹³ A life-long anthologist, Smith never lost his sense that "evaluation is the raison d’être of criticism."¹⁴ As such, though Smith admired a certain early poem of MacDonald’s (see Letter 2, nt 7), that poet’s uneven and disproportionately popular oeuvre¹⁵ likely represented for Smith the glaring weakness of previous anthologies of Canadian poetry, collections that—as Smith himself put it in another volume—"overpraise the native product" ("Introduction," Masks of Fiction vii). Concurrent with his compiling of the BCP, Smith was no doubt preparing the essay that emerged in 1942 under the title "Canadian Anthologies, New and Old." Here he would pronounce John Garvin’s 1916 anthology the worst of a bad lot for its "outrageous over-estimat[ion] of the genius of Canadian poets" (qtd. in Compton 30). Smith felt that such indiscriminate praise was lethal; in "A Rejected Preface" he refers to "the great dead body of poetry laid out in the mortuary of the Oxford Book [ . . . of Canadian Verse, ed. Wilfred Campbell, 1913] or interred under Garvin’s florid epitaphs [Canadian Poets, 1916; 1926]" (171). Wilson MacDonald’s work—acclaimed by Garvin as "verse of unusual excellence" (432)—had been praised to death, and as such it did not merit a place in Smith’s anthology of vibrant Canadian writing.

A comparison of Garvin’s anthology with another contemporary collection, Bliss Carman’s and Lorne Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature: Representative Verse, English and French (1922; 1923; 1934),¹⁶ demonstrates one more problem plaguing pre-Smith anthologies: the extent to which they systematically reproduced the usual suspects. Of their seventy-five and eighty-eight entries, respectively, the Garvin and Carman/Pierce anthologies contain sixty-one authors in common,¹⁷ the majority of whom are contemporaries of the editors themselves. This sort of boosterism, with little or no attempt at historical contextualization, was anathema to Smith. Ironically, it was the "Modernist" Smith, and not previous editors of a more nineteenth-century persuasion, who was to reclaim Canadian literature's early poetic offerings. In contrast to Garvin, who includes only Sangster, Mair, and Valancy Crawford as representative of pre-Confederation Canadian poetry, and unlike Carman and Pierce, who go back only slightly further to John Galt, Susanna Moodie, James McCarroll, and Sir J.H. Hagarty, Smith adventurously opens his anthology with "Indian Poetry and French-Canadian Folk Songs" and then proceeds to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century work of Goldsmith, O’Grady, Howe, Heavysege, McLachlan and others in a section titled "Pioneer and Emigrant: The Rise of a Native Tradition." In his penultimate letter to Smith, Scott quibbles with the BCP’s inclusion of Heavysege ("I told you at the time that I could not read Heavyseage [sic] and I still cant"), nevertheless he continues, rather playfully, "but I let you have your way with him and I hope readers will look him up and agree with you" (Letter XIV).¹⁸ Scott’s next sentence reinforces the collegiality he feels toward Smith, aligning the two of them as contemporary poets looking back to a world less hospitable to Canadian writing: "I have a real admiration for those poets who braved the cold of those early days; it is not much warmer now, but we have a wider outlook" (Letter XIV).

Throughout the compilation and publication of the BCP, Scott expressed generous support for what he felt to be a worthwhile project conformable to his own critical standards. As far back as 1922, in his presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada, he had expressed the feeling that Canadian poetry must not be perceived or excused as "a special and peculiar brand  . . .  it is simply poetry, or not poetry; literature or not literature; it must be judged by established standards, and cannot escape criticism by special pleading." Furthermore, added Scott, "[i]f there be criticism by our countrymen, all that we ask is that it should be informed and able criticism, and that it too should be judged by universal standards" ("Poetry and Progress" 127).¹⁹ It is clear that Scott considered The Book of Canadian Poetry to be an example of such criticism; as such, when Smith asked, in 1942, if Scott might find time to "express to McL. [McClelland and Stewart] a word of approval of the project" (Letter 8), Scott wrote "at once" to his publisher, "speaking cordially of [Smith’s] enterprise" (Letter IX). Because of Scott’s intervention, McClelland and Stewart agreed to "cut their usual permission fee of $25 per poem in half," a favour for which Smith felt duly grateful (Letter 10). Scott was equally generous in his appraisal of the completed anthology. In a letter dated November 24, 1943 he lauds Smith for the breadth and scope of his historically important panorama of Canadian poetry:

The Introduction and the mass of verse that follows make up the most impressive presentation of our claims that has been, and a new generation, or many new generations must arise before it is superceded and even then it will always have its place. (Letter XIV)

Mr. Smith’s study of the pre-Confederation poets is the only one that has been made from anything like a modern point of view. In Charles Heavysege he has unearthed—the word will not be too strong for most of his readers—a genuine Canadian Beddoes, a poet of impressive power and originality: and he has given Isabella Crawford enough space to show that she is one of the subtlest poets that Canada has produced. (207)

B.K. Sandwell noted that while some readers might register "indignation" at Smith’s unflattering characterization of Carman, there could be little disagreement with the anthology’s "high estimation of Duncan Campbell Scott." Sandwell further comments appreciatively that "Mr. Smith has omitted a full thirty of the belated and imitative Romantics who loaded down John W. Garvin’s 1916 selection, and nobody will complain about more than three of them" (3).²⁰ A.S.P. Woodhouse’s review, in the University of Toronto Quarterly in April of 1944, praises Smith’s anthology alongside E.K. Brown’s 1943 collection of essays, On Canadian Poetry, for its outstanding historical and critical contribution to Canadian literature.²¹ Even John Sutherland, who so vehemently criticizes Smith for his native-cosmopolitan thesis, twice uses the word "comprehensive" to describe the anthology, ending his 1944 review with the salutary opinion that Smith’s book "deserves praise as the most comprehensive collection of Canadian poetry that has so far appeared" (20).

"I am again in your debt, I wish I could get credit by sending you something that would give you as much pleasure as your News of the Phoenix has given me."
   (Duncan Campbell Scott to A.J.M. Smith, Letter XIV, November 24, 1943)

In a correspondence ostensibly organized around the efforts of an editor (Smith) to obtain material from a poet (Scott) for publication in an anthology (the BCP), the present letters contain a surprising number of references to the poetry of the editor himself and to the other influential book that he releases in 1943, News of the Phoenix. Significantly, all the references to Smith’s writing proceed from Duncan Campbell Scott (Letters III, VII, IX, and XIV), and each one conveys encouragement for what he calls "[Smith’s] distinctive work" (Letter VII). Already in Letter III we see Scott suggesting that the younger man "properly and adaquately" [sic] represent his own poetry in the BCP ("and do not be too modest about restricting the allotted space"²²); within a few lines he mentions Smith’s poetry in New Provinces ("my wife likes particularly The Lonely Land and there are several ^others I admire"), and then proceeds to the further suggestion that Smith "get [his] poems together soon and under one cover." The same letter finds Scott citing a review he had read in The Nation (of Richard Aldington’s 1941 publication, The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World) "which quite properly xxxxxxxxx mentioned [Smith’s] name." The context here is significant. The Nation’s reviewer sets up a dichotomy between a "general" anthology and a "personal" anthology: suitable for the first sort is John McCrae’s well-known war poem, "In Flanders Fields," the token Canadian piece in Aldington’s volume;²³ suitable for the second sort (and of course not included in The Viking Book) is "the more interesting work of A.J.M. Smith" (Humphries 337). Clearly, Scott’s point in mentioning the review is to emphasize that Smith’s work deserves, and is beginning to garner, a wider audience. Before leaving the subject, he aligns himself with the younger man by joking about their shared status of neglect: "[C]onsidering the size of the Anthology and the amount of rubbish there must be in it, Aldington might have spared a few pages for ours; No, I don’t mean for our rubbish!" (Letter III).

Though generally free with his opinions, Scott appears to have been careful to keep certain of them to himself, as the existence of draft Letter 9 proves. There are oddities about the draft that would seem to indicate that he very nearly mailed it to Smith as it was: it is typed (as compared to the handwritten final copy that Smith received) on heavy cream paper on which is embossed Scott’s address, "108 Lisgar Street Ottawa," in the upper left corner; it is nearly twice as long as the final version that Smith received; and, unlike all of Scott’s other drafts, it is dated and signed. Some of the excised material in the draft concerns the reprint of the University of Toronto Quarterly essay, "Our Poets" (1942-43), that Smith had sent to Scott in November 1942 and which represented "an expansion of the middle part of the introduction [to the 1943 BCP] that you saw this summer" (Smith, Letter 8). In the draft, Scott disapproves of Smith’s comparison of Heavysege and Shakespeare, but he omits this remark in his final copy.²⁴ He also leaves out the rather humble observation that "I think you have extended somewhat the remarks about my own work" (draft Letter 9). (Indeed, as compared to the BCP Introduction, the "Our Poets" essay significantly expands the Scott section by including Scott’s twelve-line poem, "At the Lattice," and by adding eighteen lines of wide-ranging and enthusiastic analysis.²⁵) The final version of Scott’s letter concentrates, instead, on downplaying his objections and thanking Smith for sending the reprint of the essay: "I do approve of much of it and read it all with pleasure. I think you already know of the points on w^h. we dont concur" (Letter IX). A similar leveling occurs in Scott’s alteration of his remarks on Smith’s poetry. Here are the draft and the final versions, respectively:

I am an admirer of yours when I can understand you, and that is often but I wish you had a body of your poems that one could take up and enjoy as a whole; when will we have that? You young writers must swing into ^[the] flood of tradition and add something to it; I see by a late lecture of T.S. Eliot that he has about come to that conclusion.
                                                                 (draft Letter 9, November 21, 1942)

I am an admirer of yours & I wish we had your poems in book form so we cld take them up & enjoy them as a whole; when shall we have that book?                                                                (final Letter IX, November 21, 1942)

A goodly number of the poems were known and, as I told you, have been admired  by me, but there are many unfamiliar and the greater number only confirms my liking for your work. I like it best when I can fully understand it; not in the intellectual meaning of that word, but in the higher poetical application, when I can feel the poem as a whole. . . .  (Letter XIV; emphasis added)

Smith must have welcomed both Scott’s general encouragement and his specific praise;²⁶ the letters give us some sense of how he might have reciprocated in kind. Letter 4, written by Smith from his summer home in Magog on August 12, 1942—approximately a week after his second visit with Scott in Ottawa (see Letters VII, nt 1 and 8, nt 6)—is the only piece of Smith’s correspondence independent of the concerns of the BCP. Penned in thanks for Scott’s gift of an inscribed copy of his fourth volume of poetry, Via Borealis (1906), this letter can well be described as the most intimate of Smith’s exchanges with Scott. In it, Smith mentions that he is "delighted" and "deeply grateful" to have the volume, especially since it contains the first edition of the poem "Night Burial in the Forest" about which Smith had heard from Pelham Edgar, in the context of Edgar’s trip "into the wilderness" with Scott in 1906. (Scott’s reply, in Letter V, provides what must have been a disappointing correction about this anecdote, telling Smith that ". . . nearly all the poems in the booklet [Via Borealis] were written on that trip, but not Night Burial.") Smith then mentions that he has been re-reading Scott’s "first memoir of Lampman in the large collected edition" (The Poems of Archibald Lampman, 1900), adding that he has been "deeply touched by it." He continues:

If you will permit me saying so, I think it worthy to stand beside the Lives of Walton. I wish it could be reprinted in some compact and convenient form, or best of all, perhaps, accompanied by a selection of 30 or 40 of Lampman’s best poems. (Letter 4)

Obviously Smith’s intention here is to offer a profound compliment to Scott and to express his sense of reverent respect both for the dead master and for his tirelessly dedicated friend. Scott, however, at a distance of years from the Memoir, replies in a more practical vein than Smith had likely been expecting: "I like your remark about the first A.L. Memoir. I dont think we could get any publisher adventurous enough to embark on the scheme you suggest" (Letter V). (Indeed, to date, no publisher has been "adventurous enough.") In a subsequent exchange about publishing, Smith expresses his admiration for Scott’s book of short stories, In the Village of Viger (1896), but laments that he has "never been able to find a copy." He then pays Scott’s fiction a high and deserved compliment: "I don’t know why our Canadian publishers should let our classics get out of print and stay out!" (Letter 6; emphasis added). (A Canadian edition of Viger, published by The Ryerson Press, would not appear until 1945, three years after this letter and almost fifty years after the book’s original publication by Copeland and Day in Boston.) Interestingly, Smith’s biographical note on Scott in the 1943 BCP claims that Scott’s In the Village of Viger and The Witching of Elspie (1923) "are among the finest contributions to the art of the short story in Canadian literature" (213).²⁷

As if to reciprocate Scott’s thoughtfulness in sending him volumes of poetry, Smith responds to the older poet’s comment that he would "very much like to have a view of Lake Memphramagog" by mailing a set of postcard photographs which, Smith hopes, "may revive pleasant memories" of Scott’s college days in the region (Letters V and 6). Scott is grateful for the gesture: "The Post Cards you so kindly sent brought back old scenes & old associations & I am glad to have them" (Letter VII). In the final letter of the correspondence, sent by Scott in January 1946, we learn of other gestures of friendship exchanged between the two men: that Smith had sent a "card" (likely for Christmas, 1945), and that Scott and his wife "had planned something pleasant during y^r stay but you had to leave & I never knew that you got any message [from the hotel staff]" (Letter XV). A letter from Scott to E.K. Brown clarifies the reference to Smith’s "stay" in Ottawa—the third meeting between the two men—which seems to have taken place in late October of 1945:²⁸

Smith was here the other day and came in to see me with Pelham [Edgar]; I thought I might do something for him and his wife whom he expected to come from Montreal but their child fell ill and he went to M[ontreal] and that was the last of it."
                   (Scott to Brown, October 30, 1945, in Bourinot, More Letters 72)

In light of the revelations of the Scott-Smith letters—revelations of mutual admiration, of mentoring, and even of a sort of friendship—it is puzzling to discover the extent to which A.J.M. Smith desired to downplay his relationship with Scott in his published articles of criticism. Much has been made of the "impersonal" style of Smith’s poetry, and of his fondness for Rimbaud’s declaration "Je est un autre" that finds clear expression in pieces like his 1963 essay, "A Self Review" (213).²⁹ Well known, too, are the various "‘feuds,’" defenses, disagreements, and rebuttals that Smith carried on—in print—with fellow poets and critics (Compton 28). Not to be forgotten is the blitheness with which Smith could, in his early career, dismiss an entire constellation of Canadian poets as pejoratively native because their poetry of "social significance" struck him as "journalism rather than poetry" (75).³⁰ More recently in this same vein, archival research has brought to light that although Smith had an early correspondence with Raymond Knister (1927-1928) that dealt precisely with the idea of co-editing an anthology of Canadian poetry, Smith "no where acknowledges" in The Book of Canadian Poetry that "Knister’s keen sense of the poetic tradition" influenced him, "nor does he list Knister’s essays in the bibliography despite a note on him as ‘one of the first critics to welcome the new poetry movement in Canada’"³¹ (Burke 135). Perhaps most telling, for present purposes, are the instances of Smith’s revisionist tendencies about his own past, which cannot be excused as mere lapses in memory. As Brain Trehearne points out, "[t]o suggest that he was imitating the moderns in his earliest apprentice verses—as Smith himself has done^32—is to repress or ignore about two-thirds of the truth" (252).

Contradiction and ego were at work in Smith’s character, it would seem, but should we be surprised? (Indeed, whole books have been dedicated to that same phenomenon in the lives of countless writers, including one Duncan Campbell Scott, sensitive poet and—simultaneously—efficient Indian Affairs minister of assimilation.)³³ Then again, the Scott-Smith correspondence compels us, at the very least, to speculate about some basic issues, including the responsibility that a writer/critic has to the creation of knowledge—what we might call, in another age, the facts of literary history. Smith’s 1959 essay on Scott provides an interesting case in point. It begins with an unqualified denial of the personal ("I shall not attempt to write in a personal vein about Duncan Campbell Scott") only to veer back, at the end, to "one brief reminiscence and one word of tribute to the man" ("Duncan Campbell Scott" 115, 133). Why, one wonders, does Smith return to the world of the personal—a realm he calls "a mere chronicle of dates and facts"—if his intention is to misrepresent these very elements, as he does when he subsequently claims the following about a visit in 1942:

I only met Duncan Campbell Scott once. It was the same summer that E.K. Brown was so frequent a visitor to the poet’s Ottawa home. The classic account left by Professor Brown of an evening ‘when I talked with him in the huge high-ceilinged room at the back of his rambling house’ is such an exact replica of my own experience that I cannot read it without recapturing my vivid impression of the poet’s charm and courtliness and of the grace and warmth of his interest in the new poetry that was beginning to be produced in Canada by younger men. ("Duncan Campbell Scott" 133)

Though the details of the account are surely accurate, and Smith’s sentiments ring true, the first line of his reminiscence is patently false. The Letters prove that the two men met three times: in 1941 (Letter I), in 1942 (Letters VII, 8, and XIII) and in 1945 (Letter XV). Indeed, further corroboration can be found in the larger body of Duncan Campbell Scott’s correspondence, as in an annotation by editor Arthur Bourinot in which he vouches for the 1941 visit, claiming that he himself had "introduced [Smith] to Scott" (More Letters 73).³⁴ Is Smith, then, intentionally falsifying information in the 1959 essay passage? Or is he, perhaps, attempting to condense his many dealings with Scott into a single symbolic—and therefore appropriately fictional—encounter? (We can assume that the 1942 visit made a great impression on Smith, since he gives it brief but moving treatment in his 1948 essay in reference to Scott’s reading of the elegiac "In the Country Churchyard." See Letter VII, nt 1.) How else to explain why the 1959 essay mentions Scott’s autographed gift of The Magic House but withholds information about the other gifts presented to Smith by Scott, including copies of The Green Cloister and Via Borealis (Letters 2 and 4)? How else to explain the silence about Smith’s own 1943 publications, inscribed and sent to Scott? Further, if Smith were serious about paying "tribute to the man," as he claims, why does he avoid all mention of the meaningful correspondence that passed between himself and the older poet over a period of five important years? Why does he choose to piggyback on E.K. Brown’s personal reminiscence—an "almost legendary picture" that "has become in some respects the authorized version of the Scott image" (McDougall, 127, 129)—when he could have acknowledged, from his own experience, all that was charming and encouraging about Scott, the very poet whom Smith, as critic, has no trouble elevating above all other poets of his generation?³⁵ For the moment, it would appear, such questions must remain open.

Smith’s odd decisions gain in magnitude when one adds to their score the subtle betrayals of Scott’s memory in the revised edition of The Book of Canadian Poetry (1948). Some of the anomalies between the first and second editions, of course, might be explained (and even excused) as sound editorial decisions. Bearing in mind, for example, Scott’s sweet but rather ham-fisted forwardness regarding his wife’s "Ode," we note that the revised BCP—appearing the year after Scott’s death—swiftly removes that piece (along with many other poems that never again find themselves anthologized³⁶). The second edition also deletes a portion of the biography that precedes Scott’s selection of poems: specifically, the long passage of praise written by British poet John Masefield, which Scott himself had provided in Letter V in answer to Smith’s request for an excerpt from Masefield’s private letter. (To be fair, Smith’s revised Introduction adds the following sentence: "John Masefield has testified to the effectiveness of [Scott’s] long ballad, ‘The Piper of Arll’" [22].) Perhaps less easily explained, given the lengthy epistolary exchange about which of Scott’s poems would be anthologized in the first edition of the BCP, is the fact that the revised edition finds Smith disregarding Scott’s express wishes by including "The Sleeper"—a poem which the older poet did not like, had never republished, and felt was out of place with the others that Smith had chosen (Letter IX). Obviously Smith felt it to be a critically neglected piece; in a portion of his article in the Dalhousie Review in 1948 (subsequently reprinted in both of his essays on Scott) he argues for the fragility and eclectic originality of "The Sleeper," claiming that "[i]f the spirit of the youthful Tennyson is here, so is that of Hans Anderson. And so is that of Dr. Freud" ("The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott" 109-110). Stan Dragland notes that Smith’s "rediscovery" of poems like "The Sleeper" had the happy result of making the criticism of Scott’s poetry "much richer, both because the poems needed attention and because looking at them showed the possibility of moving in a new direction within Scott’s poetry" (Duncan Campbell Scott 103). Should we then consider Smith’s inclusion of "The Sleeper" in the revised BCP as being justified, on literary grounds, because the critic’s larger, objective responsibility to the creation of knowledge supercedes any promise made in a personal letter? On the other hand, is it at all reasonable to say that Smith, in his role as literary critic and knowledge maker, committed against Scott, on several counts, a moral injury for the sake of posterity?

I have done very little editorializing in the following letters; thus, the spelling mistakes, strike-throughs, underlinings, superscripts, idiosyncratic numberings and contractions, abbreviated words, and missing or improper punctuation in Scott’s letters are as they appear in the originals. Scott’s handwritten letters—VII, IX, XIII, and XV—are difficult, at times, to decipher; as such, question marks indicate my best guess at interpretation. To signal the emendations that Scott often made by hand to his typed letters, I use italics. Smith’s errors, which are few and tend toward the misspelling of certain proper names, are indicated by [sic] when they occur. Relevant background information, allusions that require explanation, and interesting trivia provide the basis of the notes that immediately follow each letter. For purposes of clarity, letters from the Elise Aylen/Duncan Campbell Scott fonds at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa are numbered using Arabic numerals and letters from the A.J.M. Smith Papers in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto are indicated by Roman numerals.

Notes to the Introduction

Many thanks to Catherine Hobbs, Literary Manuscripts Archivist, National Library of Canada, for her cheerful assistance on the phone and in person; to Anne Goddard, Archivist, Social and Cultural Archives, National Archives of Canada, for her astute and much-needed advice; and to librarian Edna Hajnal of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, for her timely help from a distance. Thanks, too, to Gerald Lynch and Seymour Mayne for their insightful comments and clarifications. A sincere thank-you to John Aylen of Ottawa and to William Toye of Toronto (Literary Executor of the estate of A.J.M. Smith) for their kind permission to use the unpublished materials of Scott and Smith, respectively, without which this project would not have been possible. Grateful thanks to Kat Evans, who did a superb job of formatting the Letters. Finally, a debt of gratitude to D.M.R. Bentley, who patiently awaited this article throughout its long gestation.

1. A first draft of this poem was published in the McGill Fortnightly in 1927. The poem was subsequently much anthologized, and appeared memorably in the satiric collection, The Blasted Pine: an Anthology of Satire, Invective and Disrespectful Verse Chiefly by Canadian Writers 93. [back]

2. Patricia Morley reminds us of the influence on the young McGill poets of the "iconoclastic style" of American critic H.L. Mencken, who was described by the publisher of The McGill Fortnightly Review in 1926 as "‘the creator of a new sort of writing  . . .  Americanese of a racy bumptiousness so vivacious and interesting that he is eagerly followed by a large number of people  . . .  Mencken is essentially a young man’s critic, violent and destructive.’" Given the Manckenesque style discernable in such pieces as Smith’s "Wanted—Canadian Criticism" (1928) and Kennedy’s "The Future of Canadian Literature" (1929), Morley claims the following:

   Literary criticism written by the Montreal group between 1925 and 1930 should be read as the work of young radicals who were reacting to a poetic establishment perceived as decadent and who were plotting a coup d’état against the Philistines under the banners of T.S. Eliot and modernity. . . . It is unfortunate that some of the wittier attacks on Canadian literature by Smith, Kennedy et al have been received, a generation and two generations later, for their content rather than their style" (Morley 67, 68 [emphasis added]). [back]

3. "Providing more room in the successive [BCP] anthologies for the earliest poetry," says Compton, "Smith came to see that the best of the earliest poetry was not the most imitative of the foreign but that which was engaged with the here and now" (38). The third edition of the BCP was published, with even greater revision, in 1957. [back]

4. The essay "Duncan Campbell Scott" originally began as a public lecture that Smith delivered at Carleton University in 1958. It was then published in the U of Toronto/ Carleton U series, Our Living Tradition, in 1959. From there, a revised, shorter version appeared in Canadian Literature as "Duncan Campbell Scott: a Reconsideration." Confusion sets in when Smith himself reprints the essay in Towards a View of Canadian Letters (1974) under the title "The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott"—the same title he had given to his 1948 essay on Scott’s work. [back]

5. Scott’s elegant Victorian home, built in 1887 to his specifications—and, by the time of his second marriage, in the 1930s, "fast becoming an Ottawa landmark"—was torn down in 1957 to make way for a non-descript office building. A photograph of the house is preserved in Sandra Gwyn’s The Private Capital: Ambition and Love in the Age of MacDonald and Laurier 456, 466. [back]

6. See Letter VII, nt 1, for the fuller context of this 1942 visit. [back]

7. Compton notes that Smith first approached Macmillan Canada about publishing the BCP but was told that the publication would have to be "put off until the end of the war (Letter to A.J.M. Smith, 3 Jan. 1942)" (32). [back]

8. See the "Stylistic Note" on page 101 regarding the manuscript insertions in this and other letters by Scott. [back]

9. Smith makes a small protest in favour of Phelps, but quickly acquiesces: "Phelps’ remark, I might say in defending him, is an attack not upon Canadian poets but upon their undeserved neglect. However, it might be better, as you suggest, to leave it out" (Letter 2). Scott, for his part, admits in his next letter that "I was unfair to Prof Phelps  . . .  It is obvious that Canadian Poetry is neglected" (Letter III). [back]

10. In the "Preface" to the 1943 edition, Smith openly admits, in the second paragraph, that "[e]very anthology is conditioned by a contemporary bias  . . .  This is inevitable and natural, and I have made no attempt to avoid it" (iii). [back]

11. Sandra Gwyn notes that The Green Cloister was Scott’s "own favourite among his collections, inspired by a trip he and [his second wife] Elise made to Florence in 1932" (467). [back]

12. Clarke’s poem was subsequently omitted in the revised BCP (1948), as were many others. See nt 36, below. [back]

13. Scott seems to have assumed that Smith did, in fact, try to contact MacDonald about using his poetry. Letter XIV reads: "I would have liked to see Wilson Macd [included in the BCP] but I suppose he was intractable." [back]

14. The full quotation, from a 1974 interview with Michael Heenan, is the following:

    It seems to me that evaluation is the raison d’être of criticism and that if you don’t evaluate Canadian works but simply deal with them because they’re Canadian you’re going to destroy the value of Canadian literature and make it impossible for excellence to be distinguished from mediocrity. (Heenan 76) [back]

15. As early as 1928, in "Wanted—Canadian Criticism," Smith had predicted that MacDonald was "likely to succumb to the blandishments of an unfortunate popularity" (168). [back]

16. This is a work dedicated—interestingly—"To Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott." [back]

17. Thirty-four of those same authors also appear in Campbell’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, 1913. [back]

18. Compton notes that as Smith comes to a greater appreciation of "backwoods poets" (Standish O’Grady, Alexander McLachlan, et cet.) in revised editions of the BCP, he also "tone[s] down" his praise of "literary poets, such as Charles Heavysege" (34). [back]

19. Scott’s 1922 sentiments are very close to the ideas that Smith himself would later articulate in "Wanted—Canadian Criticism" (1928) and the "Rejected Preface" to New Provinces (1936). [back]

20. A clipping of Sandwell’s review is included in the National Library’s Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds. [back]

21. In the "Preface" to the 1943 edition, Smith thanks Woodhouse, editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly, "for allowing me to reprint a part of the Introduction that appeared in that journal" in volume XII, 1942-43 (iv). [back]

22. In the reviews of the 1943 edition, Northrop Frye feels that Smith has under-represented his own poetry (". . . one or two poets have been rather unfairly treated— including, I should say, one A.J.M. Smith" 207), whereas William Arthur Deacon (in a very mixed and sometimes sarcastic review) claims the opposite: "A greater number of pages [than that devoted to the Confederation Poets] is accorded at the end to the poets of our surrealist school, including, prominently, A.J.M. Smith himself" (20). [back]

23. Back in 1928, when he was first contemplating the compiling of a Canadian anthology of poetry, Smith had written to Raymond Knister some "random and perhaps hasty suggestions" for content. Among these was the adamant proposal: "Let us keep out ‘In Flanders Field [sic]’" (Burke, 133). Smith’s BCP demonstrates that he thought better of this omission, since he did, of course, include McCrae’s poem in all three editions of the anthology. [back]

24. See draft Letter 9, nt 1, for a possible explanation as to why the comment was omitted. [back]

25. It is perhaps the following appraisal of "At the Lattice" that Scott felt was somewhat overstated: "The whole little poem trembles with a strange clairvoyance: the super-sensibility of the nineties has been made to evaluate an experience in terms of the poet’s own self-knowledge" (Smith, "Our Poets" 88). [back]

26. Though News of the Phoenix was to win the Governor-General’s award for poetry for 1943, it certainly had its detractors. Dorothy Livesay’s 1944 review would comment on the narrowness of Smith’s range, claiming that "the poetry is dated as of the twenties and early thirties  . . .  it is cosmopolitan, without a grain of native, salty flavour; and  . . .  it speaks to a coterie of Eliot and Yeats devotees. In the present mood of the world, such poetry will not give sustenance nor direction" (19). [back]

27. According to Burke, Raymond Knister’s 1932 letter to Lorne Pierce "on the difficulties of compiling a Canadian prose anthology," dated August 20, 1932, had "call[ed] for the re-issue of Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of Viger." Burke claims that A.J.M. Smith "had at hand a copy of Knister’s letter to Lorne Pierce" when he "began the exploratory stage of his Book of Canadian Prose," the first volume of which was published in 1965 (109). [back]

28. See Letter XV, nt 3, for a fuller context. [back]

29. See, for example, Leon Edel’s "The ‘I’ in A.J.M. Smith" (86-92). [back]

30. Asked in an interview in 1974 about the distinction between the Preview (or cosmopolitan) and First Statement (or native) poetic camps, Smith responded as follows:

    "[T]he general difference was that the First Statement group were poets of ‘social significance’ and I had no use for that. I wanted metaphysical poetry, intellectual poetry, and, perhaps, ‘pure’ poetry, and I think that poets like Patrick Anderson, P.K. Page and myself were poets of that sort in contrast to the First Statement people. Souster and Dudek and the early Layton, their hearts were in the right place all right but it seemed to me that their poetry was flat and prosaic—journalism rather than poetry." (Heenan 75) [back]

31. Instead, Knister is grouped in section five of the BCP, "Modern Poetry: the Native Tradition," where Smith "limits [his] contribution to ‘farm poems,’" briefly mentioning his novels and his "‘useful anthology’" of short stories (Burke 135). [back]

32. Trehearne cites Smith’s 1976 essay, "Confessions of a Compulsive Anthologist," as well as his 1974 interview with Michael Heenan, as proof for this comment. [back]

33. See, for example, Stan Dragland’s Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9. [back]

34. The full annotation, which serves as footnote 3 to Scott’s October 30, 1945 letter to E.K. Brown, reads as follows:

    Professor A.J.M. Smith, the Poet and Anthologist—the editor introduced him to Scott—Smith came to see me for the first time when he was preparing his "Book of Canadian Poetry" (1st edition) and I had a long and pleasant chat both about the "Book" and his own volume "News of the Phoenix," the ms of which he had with him. He said he would like to see Scott so the meeting was arranged. (Bourinot, More Letters 73) [back]

35. "I believe Duncan Campbell Scott stands first among the poets of his generation," says Smith in his 1959 essay. Later in the same piece he continues: "[Scott] is as sensitive and intense as Carman, and far more accurate; as accurate as Lampman or Roberts, and more truly passionate than either" ("Duncan Campbell Scott" 116, 131). [back]

36. Among the exclusions are works by the following thirteen men and nine women: George J. Mountain, C.D. Shanly, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, William Wye Smith, John E. Logan, Francis Sherman, J.E.H. MacDonald, George Herbert Clarke, Arthur Stringer, Lloyd Roberts, Leo Cox, Frederick E. Laight, Marcus Adenay, Pamelia Vining Yule, S. Frances Harrison, Helena Coleman, Annie Charlotte Dalton, Elise Aylen, Katherine Hale, Louise Morey Bowman, Mary Elizabeth Colman, and Carol Coates. [back]

The Letters

Letter I                   D.C. Scott to A.J.M. Smith
[typed letter]

Oct 2I ’4I

I am sending you under seperate [sic] cover, The Green Cloister,¹ and copies of my wife’s Ode² and poems of Miss Brown.³ I was very glad to see you the other day and to have had the opportunity of looking at the outline of your Anthology and of hearing you read the Introduction.⁴ I was more than pleased to know of your admiration for Lampman. I remember that in response to your request I made a few remarks about the Introduction; if I had been able to read it one or two other points might have occurred to me. It sticks in my mind that I would like to suggest a revision of the first paragraphs. As I remember them they bring up the oft debated question as to whether there is any Canadian literature, and you quote a disparaging remark of Prof. Phelps.⁵ As you are introducing a body of verse or poetry some of which you admire and of which you know the historical background, I would like very much to have you open with a confident note and not discount the value of the work at the outset. A remark of Prof. Phelps will in a few years have even less value than it has now. You might ^like to consider this. I think that Wilson MacDonald⁶ has right to a little more room on your pages and I would suggest that you look at, ‘In a Wood clearing,’ and ‘In the far Years,’ these are in his book ‘Out of the Wilderness.’⁷ I think I mentioned Geo. Herbert Clarke’s sonnets.⁸ I hope you will look us up in the Spring if you come here again_: My wife joins in best wishes.

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter I

Duncan Campbell Scott correspondence in A.J.M. Smith Papers
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Ms Coll 15, Box 2, folder 66
1941-46

1. Scott’s eighth book of poetry, The Green Cloister: Later Poems, was published by McClelland and Stewart in 1935. [back]

2. Scott refers here to his second wife, Elise Aylen, whom he married in 1931. (His first wife, American-born Belle Botsford, died in 1929.) Sandra Gwyn notes that Scott "astonished everyone" by taking as a second wife a woman forty-two years his junior "—young enough, Ottawa whispered, to be his granddaughter." Nevertheless, notes Gwyn, "[a]gainst all reason, this was the most blissful of unions" (466). [back]

3. Audrey Alexandra Brown, born in 1904 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, produced five volumes of poetry between 1931 and 1948. A member of the Canadian Authors’ Association, she was awarded the Royal Society’s Lorne Pierce Medal in 1944 "‘for distinguished contributions to Canadian literature’" (Staines 153). Between 1932 and 1944 she wrote some half dozen admiring letters to "Dr. Scott" and "Mrs. Scott." (See MSS MG 30, D 100, reel M-5473, National Library of Canada.) Smith uses the following unflattering sentence in the 1943 and 1948 editions of The Book of Canadian Poetry to encapsulate Brown’s poetic contribution: "In the often moving though slighter work of Marjorie Pickthall, Francis Sherman, and, more recently, Audrey Alexandra Brown, the tradition of romantic nature poetry became brittle and glazed, and its imagery, which in the older poets [Roberts, Carman, Lampman] had been genuinely local, tended to harden into convention" ("Introduction" [1943] 24, [1948] 26). [back]

4. Scott is of course referring to Smith’s Introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry, which would be published in 1943. [back]

5. Arthur Phelps (1887-1969?) was born in Columbus, Ontario. He was educated at Victoria College in Toronto and went on to become a professor of English at McGill University, from which institution he retired in 1953. Following his retirement, he was a special lecturer in English at the University of British Columbia (1954-55) and the University of Toronto (1956-58). His publications include Poems (1921), This Canada and These United States (1941) and Canadian Writers (1951). Phelps also served as moderator for several television programs, including "It’s Debatable," "Canadian Question Bee," and "Students Themselves." He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1949 (Tunnell, "Arthur L. Phelps" 873). [back]

6. Wilson Pugsley MacDonald (1880-1967) produced nine volumes of verse between 1918 and 1952. He is described by Donald Stephens as "a minor poet who satisfied the public taste with his ‘romantic sensibility’" and whose "strongly religious and Anglo-oriented background  . . .  influenced much of his early work" (695). MacDonald’s poetry, like Audrey Alexandra Brown’s, reproduced nineteenth-century romantic characteristics such as an "abundance of colour" and "musical quality" (Stephens 695). [back]

7. MacDonald’s Out of the Wilderness was published in 1926 by Graphic of Ottawa. [back]

8. George Herbert Clarke (1873-1951?) was born in Gravesend, Kent, England. After emigrating to Canada in 1880, he completed his post-secondary education at McMaster University (B.A., M.A.), the institution that later awarded him an Honorary D.Litt. (1923). Other honourary degrees followed from Bishop’s and Queen’s universities (both in 1943). He served as Professor of English at Queen’s University from 1925-43. A member of the editorial committee of Queen’s Quarterly from 1925 on, he became its Editor in 1944. Clarke authored four collections of poetry between 1914 and 1947, edited four scholarly collections of essays and poems (by Bacon, Shelley, Sidney Lanier, and Robert Browning), and brought out two collections of war poetry, the second of which included pieces by D.C. Scott and Elise Aylen. (See Letter XIV, nt 9). He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal in 1943 (Tunnell, "George Herbert Clarke" 186). [back]

Additional Note:

In the draft version of this letter, held in the National Library (Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds), Scott indicates the pagination for the MacDonald poems he here recommends to Smith. The citing of the pagination is slightly incorrect: "In a Wood Clearing" appears on p. 51, rather than p. 61 as Scott claims; "In the Far Years" does, in fact, appear on p. 64, as Scott indicates. Also in the draft, Scott omits mention of Clarke’s sonnets in the letter itself, but beneath the letter scrawls "I think I mentioned G.H. Clemens [?] sonnets." Given that Scott’s handwriting is challenging to read, "Clemens" is likely "Clarke." Written vertically, along the left-hand margin of the letter, is "AJM Smith."

314 Metcalfe Avenue
Westmount, P.Q.
October 25, 1941

I hope to be able to include in the anthology the Ode, All Fool’s Day, and The Island. The Continuing City is a very fine poem, but I shall have to know more definitely than I can now what space is available before I can decide definitely about it.¹ I shall try, however, to include five or six of Miss Brown’s pieces.²

The poems you have checked in The Green Cloister added to seven or eight of the older classics will give you the prominent representation that your work demands.³ At Gull Lake might perhaps replace The Forsaken, as it is an equally fine illustration of your dramatic power in dealing with Indian themes.⁴ I think, too, I would choose Compline or A Blackbird Rhapsody (preferably the former)—in the interest of greater variety.⁵ Would it be possible to have the little dedicatory poem, "The fluttering charm, the pliant grace?" It is an exquisite thing.⁶

Your remarks on the essay I read you are much appreciated. You are quite right about the need for a more enthusiastic tone at the beginning. Phelps’s remark, I might say in defending him, is an attack not upon Canadian poets but upon their undeserved neglect. However, it might be better, as you suggest, to leave it out. As to Wilson Macdonald [sic], I have always felt that his verse was for the most part sentimental and glib, while M’s exaggerated sense of his own worth has called for some sort of corrective criticism. I will look up the poems you mention, as I certainly do want to make the book as genuinely representative as possible and to keep it free from any narrow prejudice.⁷

I leave Monday for New York where I shall stay for two or three months trying to bring my MS. as near completion as possible. My address there is 471 West End Avenue.

I do hope that McLelland [sic] and Stewart won’t stand in the way of your being represented as generously as the other poets of commensurate significance—Lampman and, perhaps, George Frederick Cameron.⁸

Again, with many thanks for your kind interest and with best regards to Mrs. Scott,

AJM Smith

Notes to Letter 2

Literary Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Canada
LMS-0204
Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds
Box 12, folder 14
1941-43

1. Brown’s poem "All Fool’s Day (1940)" appeared in her 1948 collection All Fool’s Day. "The Island" and "The Continuing City" appeared in her 1943 war-preoccupied collection, Challenge to Time and Death, which is dedicated "To the Immortal Glory of the People of Poland." [back]

2. Contrary to this remark, Audrey Alexandra Brown’s representation in both the 1943 and 1948 editions of the BCP is limited to three selections: "The Reed," "King Philip’s Men," and "The Island." [back]

3. The 1943 edition of the BCP contains only five poems by Scott. The revised 1948 edition adds two more selections, for a total of seven poems. [back]

4. "At Gull Lake: August 1810" originally appeared in The Green Cloister (1935). "The Forsaken" was first published in The Outlook (New York), on April 25, 1903. It was then included in five of Scott’s collections, beginning with New World Lyrics and Ballads (1905) (Groening 498). [back]

5. "Compline" and "A Blackbird Rhapsody" first appeared in The Green Cloister (1935). [back]

6. The Green Cloister is dedicated "To Elise," Scott’s second wife, and the poem to which Smith here refers, which appears opposite the "Contents" page, is part of Scott’s dedication to her (see Letter III). The poem reads as follows:

   The fluttering charm, the pliant grace,
   The fragile form and spirit face
   Are instinct with essential bliss,
   Supported in its trembling line,
   As melody in music is,
   By a harmony divine:
   Enough of Love the absolute
   To give her heart the perfect fruit
   Of love; enough of Wisdom’s power
   To give her mind an earthy strength;
   Enough of Beauty’s secret dower
   Of lovely thought, to give her soul
   The fragrance of a flower. [back]

7. Smith did not, in fact, include Wilson MacDonald in either edition of the BCP. In a letter to Raymond Knister written in 1927, Smith had this to say of MacDonald, in the context of the need to lay a new critical "foundation" for Canadian literature: "I am not praising Wilson Macdonald’s [sic] The Song of the Rebel: how the great poet who writes probably the most beautiful poem that has ever come out of Canada—In a Wood Clearing—could lack the discrimination to print in the same volume a Kiplingesque He-man jingle is a question that should be looked into by the critic" (Burke 122). Though there are interesting moments of social criticism in MacDonald’s "The Song of the Rebel," there are also abominable stanzas like the following, which readily account for Smith’s use of the descriptive "He-man":

   I am weary of these females with the chatter of the ape,
   With the wisdom of the gander in their gossip and their gape,
   Turning virgins into harlots
   Youths of beauty into varlets
   With the brimstone of their slander and their tongue’s unpunished rape.                                                                      (Out of the Wilderness 167) [back]

8. In the 1943 edition, Cameron and Lampman merit eight poems, whereas Scott is represented by five. The revised 1948 edition does not change Cameron’s representation, but adds one poem to Lampman’s list ("The Woodcutter’s Hut") and two poems to Scott’s ("The Sleeper" and "Memory"). [back]

Additional Note:

An envelope included with this letter is postmarked Montreal, Oct 26, 17 p.m., 1941, PQ. The address on the envelope is:

          Duncan Campbell Scott, Esq.,
          108 Lisgar St.,
          Ottawa, Ont.

Scott has written "AJM Smith" slantwise in pencil across the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. At the top of the letter, just above the salutation, appears, in blue ink (as opposed to the black ink of Smith’s handwriting), "A[sw?]d 11.11.41"—which is likely Scott’s numerical recording of the date on which he replied with Letter III.

Letter III               D.C. Scott to A.J.M. Smith
[typed letter, handwritten date]

11 Novr. 41

I have your good letter of Oct 25^th and must reply with the hope that you will put up with my typing. The poems marked in The Green Cloister were xxx so marked by my wife who wished to draw your attention to them, I think she would like to see ‘Compline’ in the final choice but the markings were intended as alternatives to ‘The Nightwatchman’¹ which you, at first sight seemed to like. I think it might be well to take ‘At Gull Lake’ instead of ‘The Forsaken,’ which has been quite often pudlished [sic]. And the lines in Dedication I would like to see reprinted; but in making these remarks I do not for a moment desire to influence you in the selection of my peices [sic]. I would like to say that we are both keen to see your ^work properly and adaquately [sic] represented. You must get some competent friend to make a selection, and do not be too modest in restricting the alloted space. Of the things in New Provinces² my wife likes particularly The Lonely Land and there are several ^others I admire; you must get your poems together soon and under one cover. I was unfair to Prof Phelps, but I caught that meaning attached to his phrase. It is obvious that Canadian Poetry is neglected; I understand that in Aldington’s Anthology³ we are represented by In Flander’s [sic] Fields⁴ and one poem of Wilson MacD’s⁵; I have not seen the book but I saw the review in The Nation which quite properly xxxxxxxxx mentioned your name⁶; considering the size of the Anthology⁷ and the amount of rubbish there must be in it, Aldington might have spared a few pages for ours; No, I don’t mean for our rubbish! I am glad you speak well of my wife’s Ode, I would indeed sacrifice all my space to have it printed. I do not think you will have any great difficulty with my publisher; of course you are taking from his other authors and he has an Anthology wh. still sells, I presume, and he may have a way of looking at things in bulk or ^{in the} aggregate; but I dont think you will have much trouble. We are leaving for Vancouver and Victoria on the 23d inst and we shall not be here again until First of May. If for any reason you need to reach me please use this home address and the letter will be forwarded, and of course I should be glad to hear from you at any time.

Notes to Letter III

Duncan Campbell Scott correspondence in the A.J.M. Smith Papers
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Ms Coll 15, Box 2, folder 66
1941-46

1. "The Nightwatchman," which appears in The Green Cloister (1935), was never reprinted by Scott. [back]

2. New Provinces, which appeared in 1936, featured the poetry of Robert Finch, Leo Kennedy, A.M.Klein, E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith. Smith’s dozen poems in the anthology include the following: "Shadows There Are," "Like an Old Proud King in a Parable," "In the Wilderness," "The Two Sides of a Drum," "Prothalamium," "Epitaph," "The Creek," "The Lonely Land," "To a Young Poet," "A Soldier’s Ghost," "News of the Phoenix," and "The Offices of the First and the Second Hour." [back]

3. The reference here is to Richard Aldington’s Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World (1941). [back]

4. The famous war poem by John McCrae was first published anonymously in Punch, December 8, 1915. [back]

5. Scott appears to be mistaken here. There is no evidence, in the "review" that he subsequently mentions, that Wilson MacDonald’s poetry is included in Aldington’s anthology. [back]

6. The review appeared in The Nation on Saturday October 11, 1941. In taking what he calls "a swift and stabbing glance at the index," reviewer Rolfe Humphries wryly observes the following: "These [contemporary poets represented in the anthology] include . . . one token Canadian, McCrae—In Flanders Fields, of course, must go in a ‘general’ anthology; there might have been room, on the ‘personal’ side, for a token of the more interesting work of A.J.M. Smith" (337). [back]

7. Humphries begins his review of the tome as follows: "What, another poetry anthology? Yes, sir: complete with a twenty-five-page introduction by the editor, table of contents, over a thousand poems, 1,206 pages from Beowulf to Delmore Schwartz, a bibliography, indices of poets, first lines and titles, acknowledgements—1, 272 pages in all. Well, says the reviewer, rolling up his sleeves and spitting on his hands, this had better be good!" (337). [back]

August 12, 1942
[Magog, Que.]¹

Dear Dr. Scott,²

Via Borealis³ has just been forwarded to me here at Lake Memphramagog.⁴ I am delighted to have it and am deeply grateful for your kindness in inscribing it and sending it. I notice it is dedicated to Pelham Edgar.⁵ Dr. Edgar told me something about the trip into the wilderness he took with you,⁶ during which he said you composed Night Burial in the Forest. I am very glad to have the poem in a first edition.

I have been re-reading your first memoir of Lampman in the large collected edition,⁷ and have been deeply touched by it. If you will permit me saying so, I think it is worthy to stand beside the Lives of Walton.⁸ I wish it could be reprinted in some compact and convenient form, or best of all, perhaps, accompanied by a selection of 30 or 40 of Lampman’s best poems.

AJM Smith

Notes to Letter 4

Literary Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Canada
LMS-0204
Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds
Box 12, folder 14
1941-43

1. Magog and Lake Memphramagog are located in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Leon Edel notes that although Smith "became a naturalized American . . . [he] spent all his summers in his country place near Magog, Quebec" (1076). Frank Scott, in the 1976 address "A.J.M. Smith: A Personal Memoir," is more specific about the location of Smith’s summer residence: "His cottage is on Lake Memphramagog . . . a long and cold lake running from Newport, Vermont and looking up to Mount Orford in Quebec; my cottage is on Lake Massawippi, fifteen miles away, a calmer and softer lake surrounded by low hills and gentle pastures. I often think there is a tone, a note in his verse, ‘a difficult, lonely music,’ which is more his lake than mine" (78). Frank Scott’s quotation, "difficult, lonely music," comes from Smith’s poem "Like an Old Proud King in a Parable." [back]

2. The change from "Mr." to "Dr." is notable here, and continues to be Smith’s chosen salutation in the letters that follow. Scott had received an honourary doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1922 and was presented with an LL.D. from Queen’s University in 1939 (Wicken 1043). [back]

3. Via Borealis, Scott’s fourth volume of poetry, was published in 1906. [back]

4. A possible explanation here is that within a day or so of their Ottawa visit on August 3 or 4, 1942 (see Letters VII and 8), Scott mailed Via Borealis to Smith’s university address in East Lansing, Michigan, from which location it was then forwarded to Smith at Magog, Quebec. This would mean, of course, that the entire process took approximately eight days—a length of time unreasonably short, it would seem, given the circumstances. A more likely explanation is that Scott mailed the book sometime prior to the August meeting (perhaps in the early spring, either before or shortly after he and his wife returned from British Columbia [see Letter III] and before he knew of Smith’s impending visit to Ottawa), and that it didn’t arrive at the forwarded address in Magog until a week after that August visit. [back]

5. Pelham Edgar (1871-1948) was a literary critic and professor of English at Toronto’s Victoria College from 1909 to 1938. The Pelham Edgar Collection, held in the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria College (U of Toronto) contains nearly two hundred letters from D.C. Scott to Edgar "written between 1890 and 1946" (Groening 491), attesting to the fact that the two men were friends for over fifty years. Sandra Campbell’s "A Fortunate Friendship: Duncan Campbell Scott and Pelham Edgar" provides a full and interesting study of the relationship between the two men, including their rather unsuccessful editing of the muti-volume "Makers of Canada" historical series—a venture that "smacked occasionally of dilettantism" (118). The two were better suited to literary pursuits. Edgar published "no less than eight perceptive articles on Scott’s poetry, more than any other critic" (Campbell 113), and The Duncan Campbell Scott Papers in the National Library of Canada contain "a small booklet of poetry inscribed ‘With Compliments of Pelham Edgar’" (Groening 488), which would indicate that the men shared a writerly, as well as a scholarly, interest in poetry. As Campbell informs us, however, "Edgar’s many letters to Scott and his annotated manuscripts of Scott’s poems have vanished"; thus, "[t]he full literary significance of the friendship may never be known" (113). [back]

6. Edgar accompanied Scott to James Bay in 1906, where Scott completed the signing of the James Bay Treaty (Treaty 9). Contrary to an article titled "Extracts from D.C. Scott’s Own Journal of 1905 & 1906" which appeared in the Temagami, Ontario publication Copperfield in 1974, "[t]he 1906 journal was not kept by Scott" (Groening 511). Rather, concurring with Kathy Mezei, Groening believes that Pelham Edgar wrote it. "Edgar," says Groening, "was the secretary for the 1906 trip. In the journal he actually describes things that Scott did. For example, he refers to Scott’s taking photographs. Furthermore, the handwriting is quite different from Scott’s" (Groening 511). Stan Dragland’s fascinating study of Scott’s life and poetry in the context of his 1905-06 treaty work, Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9 (1994), takes for granted that Edgar was the secretary/recorder for the 1906 trip. [back]

7. Scott was tireless in his promotion of the poetry of Archibald Lampman, his friend and fellow-poet. Acting as literary executor after Lampman’s death in 1899, Scott edited The Poems of Archibald Lampman (1900, rpt. 1974), a book intended primarily to raise money for Lampman’s widow and children. Scott’s introduction to the collection is a personal memoir of Lampman. [back]

8. Izaak Walton (1593-1683) produced five eminent biographies, known as the Lives—of John Donne (1640), Sir Henry Wotton (1651), Richard Hooker (1665), Richard Herbert (1670), and George Sanderson (1678). (See Chamber’s Biographical Dictionary [1993] 1530.) Scott’s memoir of Lampman quotes from Walton’s life of Donne:

   Solitude [Lampman] loved, and society, and he was always warm towards any scheme for a union of men, or men and women of intelligence, where a free discussion of all topics could be had. His manner with his acquaintances and friends, old and new, had the charm that Isaac Walton reports of the behaviour of that admirable poet Dr. John Donne, that winning behaviour ‘which when it would entice had a strange kind of elegant, irresistible art.’ (Scott, "Memoir" xxiii) [back]

Additional Note:

Scott has written "A[sw?]d 18.8.42" in pencil on the letter, again possibly indicating the date of his reply, though Letter V itself is dated one day later (19.8.42).

19.8.42

I would like very much to have a view of Lake Memphramagog; I have not seen that region for many years but when I lived at Stanstead¹ I was familiar with it. Those mountains were the first I had seen and the district gave me the ^my first impression of romantic scenery. I think it would still affect me, although since then I have seen the Rockies, the Alps, the Seierres [sic] in Spain. ^&c But there is something charming about that Eastern Township scenery and I think the charm would still hold for me. I like your remark about the first A.L. Memoir. I dont think we could get any publisher adventurous enough to embark on the scheme you suggest. As for Via Borealis, nearly all the poems in the booklet were written on that trip, but not Night Burial. Spring on M.² was altogether written then[,] most of it the ⁱⁿ our canoe. I have just finished a short article for and Art Mag. on my fried [sic] Clarence Gagnon the artist who died last winter.³ I was writing about his illustrations to ‘Maria Chapdelaine’⁴ and I remembered that you made a reference to ‘In the Village of Viger’ in that connection.⁵ That book is so rare now and I wondered if you had been able to get a copy. Now for the Masefield reference,—I cannot bring myself to agree that a quotation of the letter would be possible,⁶ I know you willn understand my feeling. I am sending a quotation from ‘IN THE MILL’ which is as public as can be so that there could be no objection from any person and no personal feeling that I was printing a private letter.⁷ But you would have to get the permission of the Macmillan firm as there is a note in the book to that effect. My final feeling is that a mere reference to IN THE MILL would be all that is necessary.⁸ [What follows is handwritten.] I have inflicted a long ltr [letter] in very bad typing but the latter was to be expected.

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter V

Duncan Campbell Scott correspondence in A.J.M. Smith Papers
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Ms Coll 15, Box 2, folder 66
1941-46

1. Scott attended college in Stanstead, Quebec (Wicken 1042). [back]

2. "Spring on Mattagami" first appeared in Via Borealis and was subsequently republished in five Scott collections, beginning with Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems (1916) (Groening 478 ff). [back]

3. Scott’s article, "Clarence A. Gagnon: Recollection and Record," appeared in Maritime Art: A Canadian Art Magazine 3.1 (October-November 1942) 5-8. It was later collected in The Circle of Affection and Other Pieces in Prose and Verse, 1947 (Groening 511). Scott’s poem, "A Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Gagnon," appeared in his collection Beauty and Life (1921). [back]

4. In 1928 Clarence Gagnon was approached by Les Editions Mornay, a Paris publishing house, to illustrate Louis Hemon’s Maria Chapdelaine, a classic of French-Canadian literature about a young girl in rural Quebec. In a variety of media, Gagnon created fifty-four illustrations "[d]epicting the landscape and architecture of the Quebec countryside at the beginning of the [twentieth] century . . . These paintings reflect vistas, rolling hills, quaint country villages and Quebec pioneers in dramatic and stunning compositions" ("Maria Chapdelaine," http://www.mcmichael.com/maria/ index.html). Today, Gagnon’s illustrations of Maria Chapdelaine form part of the permanent collection of the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario. They can also be accessed on the gallery’s website. [back]

5. This reference was likely made during Smith’s visit to Scott in Ottawa earlier that month, August 1942. (See Letter VII, nt 1.) [back]

6. Again, it may well have been during the course of his visit with Scott in August 1942 that Smith requested permission to use a quotation from the Masefield letter. [back]

7. In the Mill, a memoir by British poet John Masefield, was published by Macmillan of New York in 1941. The "quotation" to which Scott here refers (and which his handwriting indicates as having appearing on page 58 of In the Mill) accompanies this letter in the A.J.M. Smith collection in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. The quotation reads as follows:

   In the usual way, I bought the Christmas number of this American ‘Truth’ and read it through. It had in it, with some illustrations of phantasy, a longish narrative poem by Duncan Campbell Scott, called The Piper of Arll. This was the first poem by a living writer to touch me to the quick. It was narrative; it was delicate phantasy; it was about the sea and singing and a romantic end. I did not know it at the time, but it was a choice example of the work of the romantic poets of that decade. Its longing, its wistfulness and the perfection of some if its images made deep impressions on me. I read it till I knew it by heart; even now, I often repeat it to myself. Years later I came upon the writing of a critic who mentions it as a poem ‘the symbolism of which escapes me.’ Well, let it escape. The romantic mood and the dream may be of deep personal significance and joy, even if the author’s thought elude us. I used to repeat the poem mentally as I stood at the sides of setts [sic], looking along the lines of tiny tin tubes. I could see Arll, the cove, the pines upon the hill; and the strange ship coming in and presently sinking down. In that mood, she could have done no other than sink, and all my years with sailors failed to make me call for a Court of Enquiry into her sinking. [back]

8. Smith, in fact, in writing Scott’s biography for the first edition of the BCP, quotes almost the entire passage from Masefield. [back]

Magog, Que.
August 31 [1942]

Thank you for your good letter enclosing the passage from Masefield. I hope I shall be able to use it in a note on The Piper of Arll. I agree with you that that is more appropriate than an extract from a private letter.¹

I was interested in your remarks about the beauty of the scenery of Lake Memphramagog, and I am sending you a few postcard photographs, which, although I am afraid they are not very good, may revive pleasant memories.² When I get back to Michigan I will see if I can hunt up any snapshots that we have taken of the country down here, which may be better than these cards. If I find any good ones I will send them on to you.

I admire In the Village of Viger very much, but have never been able to find a copy. I don’t know why our Canadian publishers should let our classics get out of print and stay out!³

My wife and I start back to East Lansing tomorrow, and then after turning over the notes and bibliographies to a typist, I will send the anthology off to the publishers. I hope the Canadian publishing houses will be cooperative.

AJM Smith

Notes to Letter 6

Literary Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Canada
LMS-0204
Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds
Box 12, folder 14
1941-43

1. Smith removes all mention of Masefield in his revised 1948 BCP biographical note on Scott (BCP 208). [back]

2. The postcard photographs are not preserved either in the National Library’s Elise Aylen/ D.C. Scott fonds or in the Fisher Library’s collection of Scott’s letters to Smith. [back]

3. Scott’s In the Village of Viger was published by Copeland and Day of Boston in 1896. The Ryerson Press published the first Canadian edition almost fifty years later, in 1945 (Dragland, "Introduction" to In the Village of Viger and Other Stories 11). As such, a Canadian edition was still three years ahead of this letter. [back]

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter VII

AJM Smith

Notes to Letter 8

1. During 1931 to 1933, Smith held a two-year replacement position at Michigan State College, East Lansing. After serving temporary teaching appointments in Nebraska and South Dakota during 1934-36, Smith formally joined the English Department at Michigan State University in 1936, and remained there until his retirement in 1972. [back]

2. "The Sleeper" was originally published in The Independent (New York) on June 15, 1893. It was then collected in The Magic House in 1893 (Groening 496). [back]

3. In both the 1943 and 1948 editions of the BCP, Bliss Carman is represented by the following works: "Low Tide on Grand Pre," "A Northern Vigil," "Daphne," "In the House of Idiedaily," and "Lord of My Heart’s Elation." Marjorie Pickthall, in the 1943 edition, is represented by "The Bridegroom of Cana," "Père Lalement," "Resurgam," and "Quiet"; the 1948 edition adds to this list "How Looked She When She Breathed Good-Bye?" [back]

4. "The Piper of Arll" appeared originally in "Truth" (New York), on December 14, 1895. It was subsequently republished in five Scott collections, the first being Labour and the Angel in 1898 (Groening 497). "At the Cedars" first appeared in The Magic House and Other Poems (1893), "Night Burial in the Forest" in Via Borealis (1906), and "At Gull Lake, August 1810" in The Green Cloister (1935). [back]

5. This article, titled "Our Poets," appeared in the University of Toronto Quarterly 12 (1942-43) 75-94. [back]

6. This comment seems to suggest that during his visit to Ottawa in August 1942 Smith again showed Scott his Introduction to the BCP (a revised version, likely, as distinguished from that which Scott had seen the previous October and mentions in Letter I). [back]

7. Arthur Stanley Bourinot (1893-1969) was a lawyer, poet, editor, and "close friend and mentor" of Duncan Campbell Scott (Gerson 135). Scott’s second wife, Elise Aylen, was Bourinot’s niece (McDougall 128). Of Bourinot’s many volumes of poetry, the seventh, Under the Sun, won a Governor-General’s award in 1939. The post-war period saw him publish two books of war poetry (1942 and 1945) and begin a prodigious period of editing: Canadian Poetry Magazine (1948-54 and 1966-68), Canadian Author and Bookman (1953-54, 1957-60), the letters of Edward William Thomson (also Thomson’s letters to and from Lampman), selections from At the Mermaid Inn, and two volumes of letters written by Duncan Campbell Scott, Lampman, and other writers (Gerson 135). Bourinot’s limited-edition publication, Five Canadian Poets (1954)— which contains brief essays on Scott, Lampman, Sangster, George Frederick Cameron and William E. Marshall—is dedicated "To the Memory of Duncan Campbell Scott, Great Man, Great Poet, Great Friend" (n.p.). The first essay, titled "The Ever-Eager Heart (Some personal recollections of Duncan Campbell Scott), Being a portion of an address delivered at the Commemoration Meeting at Carleton College, Ottawa, February 9, 1949," is a moving account of Bourinot’s life-long friendship with Scott. [back]

Draft Letter 9       D.C. Scott to A.J.M. Smith
[typed letter, handwritten date]

After I received yours of the I3^th inst. I wrote at once to McClelland & Stewart asking them to give you permission to use the poems you listed and speaking cordially for your engerprise [sic]. I am glad to note that the University of Chicago has decided to publish the Anthology. I do not want you to use The Sleeper, sorry, but I do not like it and as you know I did not republish it; and may I say that I do not think it goes well with the others you have chosen. I wish you could find something in The Magic House Vol. or ⁱⁿ the other books which would serve your purpose. Consider it please and write me again. I enclose my wife’s permission to use her "Ode." Many thanks for the reprint of the article in The Quarterly. I can say that I do approve of much of it, all that I had to say about it in demurrage, (is this a word ever used in this sense? NO, I find by the Dictionary that it is only used in a Commercial sense x that I was well acquainted with when I used to examine shipments of Indian supp;ies [sic], invoices), but it will serve. I do not say anything more here and now except that I dont like your comparison of Malzah to the creations of The Master of All of Us.¹ I think you have extended somewhat the remarks about my own work.² [Here is a handwritten arrow extending back up the page to "the article in The Quarterly".] I am an admirer of yours when I can understand you, and that is often but I wish you had a body of your poems that one could take up and enjoy as a whole; when will we have that? You young writers must swing into ^[the] flood of tradition and add something to it; I see by a late lecture of T.S. Eliot that he has about come to that conclusion.³

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Draft Letter 9

Literary Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Canada
LMS-0204
Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds
Box 12, folder 14
1941-43

1. "The Master of All of Us" is, in this case, Shakespeare, and the context is Smith’s description of a character in Charles Heaveysege’s drama, Saul (1857): "In personifying the spirit of Saul’s affliction as the vacillating agent of evil, the fallen angel Malzah, Heaveysege has created a character as strange and vivid as Ariel or Caliban" ("Our Poets" 80). If, as Scott indicates in Letter XIV, he had already told Smith of his dislike for Heavysege’s poetry during an earlier visit (i.e., their discussion of the BCP Introduction in August of 1942), there would be little reason for him to reiterate this position in the present letter as regards the "Our Poets" essay. Perhaps this is why Scott cuts this comment from the final copy of his letter, saying instead "I think you already know of the points on w^h. we don’t concur" (see Letter IX, below). [back]

2. See my Introduction for an account of the additions Smith made to the Scott portion of his "Our Poets" essay as compared to the final version of the 1943 BCP Introduction. [back]

3. Scott’s reference here is likely to the Page-Barbour Lectures that Eliot gave at the University of Virginia in 1933 and published the following year as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1934). The lectures expand upon Eliot’s 1917 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," by adding the concept of "orthodoxy" to the idea of "tradition." [back]

Additional Note:

The final sentence in the body of the letter—ie., beginning "You young writers . . ."— has eight vertical slashes through it, as though it were meant to be deleted. But it is quite legible.

Letter IX                D.C. Scott to A.J.M. Smith
[handwritten letter]

21.11.42

After I recd yrs of the 13^th inst I wrote at once to McC & S. asking them to give you permission to use the poems you listed and speaking cordially of y^r enterprise. I am glad the U of C has decided to publish the anthology. I do not want you to use ‘The Sleeper’—sorry, but I do not like it & as you know I did not republish it & I think it does not go well with the others you have chosen.¹ I wish you could find something else in ‘The Magic House’or in the other books w^h. would serve. Consider it please & write me again. Many thanks for the reprint, I do approve of much of it & read it all with pleasure. I think you already know of the points on w^h. we dont concur.² I am an admirer of yours & I wish we had your poems in book form so we cld take them up & enjoy them as a whole; when shall we have that book? I send my wifes permission to publish the "Ode"

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter IX

Duncan Campbell Scott correspondence in A.J.M. Smith Papers
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Ms Coll 15, Box 2, folder 66
1941-46

1. Though Smith does not print "The Sleeper" in the 1943 edition of the BCP, the revised 1948 edition, published a year after Scott’s death, disregards Scott’s wishes and includes "The Sleeper." See Part III of my Introduction. [back]

2. See draft Letter 9, nt 1. [back]

Department of English
December 2 [1942]

Thank you for your great kindness in writing to McL. [sic] & S. in my behalf. They have responded very generously, and have agreed to cut their usual permission fee of $25 per poem in half. I am greatly indebted both to you and to them. Lorne Pierce also has been generous and helpful.¹

          "The Forsaken"
          "The Half-Breed Girl"
          "Off Rivière du Loup"
          "A Memory of the ‘Inferno"²

^{The Board of Publications of the Chicago University Press has notified me of its acceptance of the anthology. The final details of publication cannot be settled until the total cost of permissions is known and the probable sale of the book estimated. However I fancy it will come out next fall, if not next spring.}

^{With kindest regards}

^{AJM Smith}

Notes to Letter 10

Literary Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Canada
LMS-0204
Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds
Box 12, folder 14
1941-43

1. In his "A.J.M. Smith: A Personal Memoir," Frank Scott refers to "Dr. Lorne Pierce who was an early friend of Canadian poets" (83). Pierce and Scott maintained an extended correspondence, as demonstrated by "letters to or from Scott, written between 1922-36 and 1938-40," held among the Lorne Pierce Papers in the Queen’s University Archives (Groening 490). [back]

2. "The Half-Breed Girl" debuted in The Smart Set: a Magazine of Cleverness (New York) in December 1906. It was subsequently reprinted in six Scott collections, beginning with Via Borealis (1906). "Off Rivière du Loup" originally appeared in Poets of the Younger Generation, ed. William Archer (1902). It was reprinted March 4, 1905, in the Globe’s Saturday Magazine. The poem was subsequently included in three Scott collections, the first of which was The Magic House and Other Poems (1893). "A Memory of the ‘Inferno’" appeared for the first and only time in Magic House (Groening 477, 498). [back]

10. Decr 42

Replying to yours of the 2nd inst. If we chose one of the three poems you mention you would have to go back to Mc C & S for permission to print and I dont think that would be advisable. Moreover two are Indian poems and I think that phase has been well covered in your first selections. ‘A memory of the Inferno’ I would not like to see in print again. Perhaps you will find one oft the enclosed to your liking;¹ if so you may have it without royalty. I would like you to give my wife ten dollars for her ODE, I should have mentioned that when I wrote; I am as, [sic] you know keen, to have that in the Anthology. I hope all will go smoothly with your plan. Up to the present we are having an ideal winter; plenty of sunshine, a good deal of snow and not any low temperatures so far. Will you kindly let me know what you decide to use of these three poems.

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter XI

Duncan Campbell Scott correspondence in A.J.M. Smith Papers
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Ms Coll 15, Box 2, folder 66
1941-46

1. The following two poems are enclosed with Scott’s letter: "Intermezzo," which shows the handwritten date "1941" in the lower left corner (it would be published in Queen’s Quarterly in the summer of 1943 and later collected [Groening 501], and "A Song" (originally published in Canadian Poetry Magazine in October 1937 and later included in several collections [Groening 500]). Smith did not print either of these poems in the BCP. No doubt the third enclosure in Scott’s letter was "At Delos," which Smith did use, and which he mentions in his reply (Letter 12). [back]

The anthology seems slated for publication in the Spring,¹ and is going to be a very handsome volume. I am glad to have the poems you sent me as substitutes for "The Sleeper," and shall use "At Delos"² certainly and the two others if I am not compelled to refrain from adding at all to the bulk of the book. Thank you for your kindness and generosity in letting me have them. Mrs. Scott will receive a cheque for her splendid poem when the book is published.

AJM Smith

Notes to Letter 12

Literary Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Canada
LMS-0204
Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds
Box 12, folder 14
1941-43

1. In fact, the anthology was not published until September 14, 1943 (Darling 11). [back]

2. "At Delos" originally appeared in Queen’s Quarterly in 1939. It was reprinted in The Circle of Affection and Other Pieces in Prose and Verse (1947) and in Duncan Campbell Scott: Selected Poetry (1974) (Groening 500). [back]

Letter XIII            D.C. Scott to A.J.M. Smith
[handwritten letter]

7 ocbr. ’43

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter XIII

Duncan Campbell Scott correspondence in A.J.M. Smith Papers
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
MS Coll 15, Box 2, folder 66
1941-46

A word of praise for The Anthology which has well stood the test of closer reading. I was favoured with a look at the Introduction when you were here,⁷ it has been a good deal expanded I think but it must be about the same. I told you at the time that I could not read Heavyseage [sic]⁸ and I still cant but I let you have your way with him and I hope readers will look him up and agree with you. I have a real admiration for those poets who braved the cold of those early days; it is not much warmer now, but we have a wider outlook. Cameron did not hold up his head so high with me as I expected and I was sorry for that as Lampman had given me a feeling for him; not that it has completely disappeared but I hoped that for me he would measure up to your estimate.⁹ The Introduction and the mass of verse that follows make up the most impressive presentation of our claims that has been, and a new generation, or many new generations must arise before it is superceded and even then it will always have its place. The selection of Poets and poems is a responsibility of the Anthologist and he must be thought supreme. Then along comes the reader and it becomes a matter of personal preference; in the large I am pretty well satisfied and I met a number of new names and new work I would have laiked another poem in place of Audrey Brown’s The Reed, and I would have liked to see Wilson Macd¹⁰ but suppose he was intractable. Some of your contemporaries would do well to follow your example of clearness with xxx like standards of beauty. But as I say these are a matter of preference and not of taste. I hope you are getteing good notices and proper recognition for a peice [sic] of work done with the right spirit and with fine critical equipment. We were pleased to be of your company, we are together again in Clarke’s Anthology of War Poetry.¹¹

I am feeling a little better now and we are having what they call an Open Fall, something like your favorite Lampman Novr.¹² My wife joins in very kindeat [sic] regards and congratulations on both your books but particularly on News of The Phoenix, the sort of news that doesn’t grow old.

Yours sincerely

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter XIV

2 Jan 46

Many thanks for y^r card¹ & the good wishes w^h. I reciprocate for you and yours. When you were here² I had left my phone no. with the clerk at ‘V’ [?] hotel My wife & I hoped to meet you & Mrs Smith & we had planned something pleasant during y^r stay but you had to leave & I never knew that you got any message. I hope your boy is quite well again³ & that you face this year in good health and hope.

Duncan C Scott

Notes to Letter XV

Duncan Campbell Scott correspondence in A.J.M. Smith Papers
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Ms Coll 15, Box 2, folder 66
1941-46

1. Scott’s reference here is likely to a Christmas card sent by Smith. No such card has been preserved in either the National Library’s Elise Aylen/D.C. Scott fonds or in the A.J.M. Smith Papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. [back]

2. Smith appears to have visited Ottawa in the final week of October 1945. [back]

3. Scott’s letter to E.K. Brown, written October 30, 1945, reads as follows: "Smith was here the other day and came in to see me with Pelham [Edgar]; I thought I might do something for him and his wife whom he expected to come from Montreal but their child fell ill and he went to M[ontreal] and that was the last of it" (Bourinot, More Letters 72). While it may be possible to argue that this meeting never actually transpired (i.e., by interpreting the letter to mean "Smith was here [in Ottawa] the other day and came in [from Montreal] to see me . . . " but then left before actually seeing Scott), the more likely explanation would seem to be the following: Smith and Pelham Edgar met with Scott prior to expected arrival of Smith’s wife; Scott forgot to invite Smith and his wife to the "something pleasant" he and his own wife had planned and so subsequently left his phone number with the hotel clerk; later he learned (from Edgar?) that Smith had to leave suddenly to return to his ill child in Montreal. [back]

Works Cited in Notes to Letters

Wicken, George. "Duncan Campbell Scott." The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. 2^nd ed. Don Mills: Oxford UP Canada, 1997. 1042-45.