When the poet Dennis Lee, an editor at House of Anansi Press, invited Northrop Frye in 1970 to collect for publication a selection of his Canadian writings, Frye happily accepted the invitation. He gathered together most of his articles, then he and Lee together made the final selection. In his introduction to what becameThe Bush Garden, Frye observed that the collection consisted of “episodes in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature … and yet has always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristics from there” (412).

Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Frye...

Mr. Nicolson is planning to write his autobiography as a series of biographies of the important people he has met.Helen’s Toweris thus partly a biography of his uncle Lord Dufferin and partly a scattered series of recollections of his own childhood, with special reference to a governess named Miss Plimsoll. This idea, it may be said at once, has very little to recommend it. Almost any fair-to-middling novelist could give us a good sketch of childish experiences and impressions, possibly sparing us the patronizing sneers at the wretched little governess. Nor is this really necessary to the book:...

The author of this volume of poems is a Canadian representative of the Amy Lowell school of imagism. Her work reflects the rather precious style of interior decorating and the affinity with vegetable life characteristic of this type of poetry. She is at her best when writing of quiet forests and the more whimsical aspects of fantasy:

There was overtone and undertone

of the tide’s low moan;

there were birds that called

in the wood at the end of the town;

in the tops of the trees there was sound

but none in the soft brown ground

of the wood...

The Canadian Exhibition at the Tate Gallery was opened by a somewhat puzzled Duke of Kent, who said, according to theTimes, that Canadian painting was very interesting, and that the really interesting thing about this exhibition was that it gave the English a chance to see this painting.¹ It consisted of five rooms of pictures, one a water-colour room, and a sculpture court. In the first there were British Columbia totems and a few French Canadian wood-carvings, good as far as they went but rather skimpy—the English can see better totems in the British Museum, and surely Jobin,...

The excuse for writing about a show in the Toronto Art Gallery in a nation-wide magazine is that this particular collection of water-colours comes from all over the dominion. But a water-colour show is its own justification in Canada. The only thing like a tradition in Canadian painting is that which attempts to portray the primitive grandeur of the Canadian scene in solemn and stentorian oil. The room of Thomson, MacDonald, and Harris in the National Gallery gives the impression that all Canadian art has been inspired byFinlandia. Many of the Group of Seven and their contemporaries began as...

At the Picture Loan Society there is a group of abstract paintings by Gordon Webber, a young Toronto artist who has fallen under the spell of Moholy-Nagy and the Chicago Bauhaus. They are stated to be the product of a railway journey and in some of them the derivation from the landscape is quite clear: others are arabesques on themes suggested by telegraph wires, signal posts, and gasometers. The artist is interested in the way the window keeps framing what one sees into orderly rectangles and in the possibility of bringing out something of the different emotional qualities behind vision,...

The countries men live in feed their minds as much as their bodies: the bodily food they provide is absorbed in farms and cities: the mental, in religion and arts. In all communities this process of material and imaginativedigestiongoes on. Thus a large tract of vacant land may well affect the people living near it as too much cake does a small boy: an unknown but quite possibly horrible Something stares at them in the dark: hide under the bedclothes as long as they will, sooner or later they must stare back. Explorers, tormented by a sense of...

The first volume of this new magazine of verse contains nine poems by eight poets, some well known, others newcomers. Negatively, no poem is flat or bad, and all show considerable literary experience. Negatively, again, the quatrains of Leo Kennedy’sCarol for Two Swansare very gracefully handled even if they hardly rise above facility: A.J.M. Smith’sThe Faceis sharply conceived even if somewhat metallic in sound: Earle Birney’sHandsis arrestingly beautiful in its imagery even if one or two prosaic construction lines have not been erased: Floris McLaren’sNo Lock, No Lightis poignant even if too...

These chapbooks are a real Canadian public service. They assume a large number of intelligent people writing occasional amateur verse for pleasure and expecting it to be read for pleasure, content with a restricted circulation confined largely to their friends. They assume also a large number of intelligent people ready to read poetry for pleasure, ready to pay fifty cents for a dozen poems even if they are not the greatest lyrics since Keats, and not consumed by a feverish itch to get published themselves. Every major poet is the apex of a pyramid of minor ones, and a contempt...

This little magazine comes out in mimeographed sheets, and, likePM,¹ which otherwise it does not resemble, it is stapled and carries no advertising. Brought out by five young Montreal people,² its editor says that, as Canadians pay very little attention to their literature, “a display of activity may symbolize a future, and plant a suggestion in someone’s mind.”³ The magazine is to remind us that even when we are apparently least concerned with poetry, the purely creative spirit still survives in Canada, producing the odd sprig of edelweiss among the snows. Their main concern, therefore, is with literature as...

This is a book for those interested in Canadian poetry to buy and for those interested in complaining that we haven’t got any to ignore. Anyone who follows Canadian verse at all closely will be very pleased to see Mr. Birney’s fugitive pieces gathered into one little volume, and anyone who read the title poem when it first appeared in theForumwill be keenly interested in finding it again in a published book as part of a larger collection.

The people who are familiar with the conventions of modern poetry, who can grasp its difficult language and place its...

The appearance of Mr. A.J.M. Smith’s new anthology is an important event in Canadian literature. For instead of confining his reading to previous compilations, as most anthologists do, he has made a first-hand study of the whole English field with unflagging industry and unfaltering taste. A straightforward research job is simple enough to do if one has the time: but Mr. Smith has done something far more difficult than research. He had to read through an enormous mass of poetry ranging from the lousy to the exquisite, the great bulk of which was that kind of placid mediocrity which is...

It is very difficult to say much about an anthology unless there is some statement in it about why it was made, for whom it was made, and what literary principles were involved in making it.¹ Failing this, one can only say that Mr. Gustafson has produced a kind of supplement to his Pelican anthology² (though a few poems overlap). It has most of the essential younger people except Margaret Avison, and Finch’sFlight That Failed, Anderson’sDrinker, and a couple of beautiful Kleins are the most remarkable of those poems which are not so easily accessible elsewhere.³...

This, like its predecessorsPreviewandFirst Statement, is a new literary magazine, beginning very unpretentiously with stapled mimeographed sheets (unfortunately often physically unreadable, and befouled with some amazingly crude cartoons), and produced on an RCAF station by a group of young soldiers. The chief figure in the group seems to be the young poet, Raymond Souster. The contributions are mainly poems, and the leading themes are the sexual loneliness of army life and the ironic contrast between the certain fact of war and the vague hope of a better world after it. The writers are too readily content with...

A water-colour show is usually worth looking at in itself, and is even more so when it appears along with another show in oils. The exhibition of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour at the Art Gallery of Toronto was accompanied by the Canadian Group of Painters (reviewed in the last issue ofCanadian Artby Mrs. Housser),¹ and the conjunction of the two illustrated not only the range and variety of Canadian water-colour, but its relation to Canadian painting as a whole.

It seems as though in oil painting there is a constant and inevitable tendency to...

This is a small collection of the work of five young (under thirty) Canadian poets: Louis Dudek, Ronald Hambleton, P.K. Page, Raymond Souster, and James Wreford. Three of these are in Smith’s anthology, though represented there by earlier and less interesting work, and all five of them should be familiar toCanadian Forumreaders. The title may mislead some into thinking that these poets all belong to one “school,” and all are saying much the same thing, which would be an unfortunate error, there being at least as much variety as unity in the collection.

Dudek and Hambleton are both...

One of the more undemocratic features of Canadian life is the censorship of current books and magazines according to an allegedly “moral” standard, the morality usually turning out to be the use by the author of one or more of half a dozen words which, though not in the dictionary, are well known to every Canadian citizen over the age of six. Canada does not suffer quite as much from this sort of thing as Boston, but runs Boston a close second.¹ Every once in a while a book that is being generally read in the United States disappears from...

Everyone knows Mr. F.R. Scott’s poem of this title, and for a long time meetings of Canadian authors have not altogether unjustly been associated with log-rolling, mutual admiration, clique-forming, claque-recruiting, lugubrious if somewhat inconsistent gripes about why there isn’t a Canadian literature and why it isn’t better known, and the like. But the twenty-fifth anniversary conference in Toronto, though of course it had all this, was a very different kind of meeting. Literature comes of age, not by improving its quality, but by adopting professional standards and ceasing to worry about its quality. Most Canadian literature is and always will...

This is the third of a series of books of Canadian poetry which began with Irving Layton’sHere and Nowand Patrick Anderson’sA Tent for April. Mrs. Waddington has a lyrical gift of great beauty and subtlety, and her work has a uniform level of excellence both in technique and expressive power. There are some peripheral poems:In the Big CityandWho Will Build Jerusalembelong respectively to a type of allegory and of political comment that are not her long suits, and such poems asBalletandCadenzaare decorative rather than evocative. But the volume as...

A celibate Anglican curate with a mild mother fixation attempts to run a church mission for Montreal’s poor during the Depression, and finds that a concrete approach to the social problems involved in essential if he is to do any good. His rector calls this “materialism,” his idea of spirituality being the putting of all the church’s eggs into a reactionary middle-class basket. To punish the curate, the rector sends him to conduct a retreat held in a girls’ school where four teenage girls are still left over from the end of the term. The curate runs foul of one...

The Canadian poet cannot write in a distinctively Canadian language; he is compelled to take the language he was brought up to speak, whether French, English, or Icelandic, and attempt to adjust that language to an environment which is foreign to it, if not foreign to himself. Once he accepts a language, however, he joins the line of poets in the tradition of that language, at the point nearest to his immediate predecessors. A nineteenth-century Canadian poet writing in English will be emulating Keats and Tennyson; writing in French, he will be emulating Victor Hugo or Baudelaire. It may be...

This book contains a biographical study by C.F. Klinck of Waterloo College, followed by an “interpretation” by H.W. Wells of Columbia University. Mr. Wells relates each of Pratt’s long poems to a classical model. ThusThe Titanic, because tragic, is compared withAgamemnon;The Witches’ Brew, because comic, withThe Frogs.The Song of Roland, Beowulf, Henry V, Reynard the Fox, Moby-Dick, and others follow in demure procession. The idea is evidently not to suggest a comparison in merit with any of these biggies, much less with all of them at once, but to try to indicate both the variety...

This excellent little collection of contemporary Canadian poems, stories, and essays has only recently become available in Canada, but it has been out in England for some time, and seems to have been well received there. Even those who follow Canadian writing with some attention will find many pleasant surprises in the book, and those who do not will find that it is possible (with the aid of a good deal of intelligent editorial work on Mr. Gustafson’s part) to obtain a book made up entirely of Canadian writing which is also a perfect weekend book in its own right....

The statement that this is a single narrative poem in blank verse sounds alarming. Actually, it is an account of a boy’s vacation with a fisherman on the Atlantic coast, and with its black and white illustrations by Winifred Fox it makes a very pleasant book, almost like a child’s book designed for adults....

The poets chiefly featured here are or have been associated withPreview, First Statement, and theNorthern Review, and include Patrick Anderson, Irving Layton, Kay Smith, and the “unit of five” (Dudek, Hambleton, Page, Souster, and Wreford). A good many of the poems first appeared in theCanadian Forum. Mr. Sutherland’s title is explained by his preface, in which he attacks the genteel tradition in Canada which is fostered by the “Oedipus complex” of a vociferous colonialism, and the nervous prudery which goes with that. He claims that A.J.M. Smith’s anthology has made this attitude intellectually respectable by interpreting Canadian...

The death of Duncan Campbell Scott ends one of the longest and most versatile careers in Canadian literature. Like most Canadian authors, he was a spare-time writer who never made enough money from writing to retire on it, though his real job, in the Civil Service at Ottawa, was done well enough to get him a CBE shortly after the last war. Nevertheless, he managed to make four considerable breaches into literature: as a biographer (of Simcoe), as an editor (of Lampman), as a short story writer, and as a poet. Critics rank him very near the Canadian top in...

The problem of how to create while living in the world is always difficult, and in painting two extreme solutions of it are currently fashionable, perhaps because they are extreme. One is that of the primitive or “naive” painter who remains isolated from the world until the time comes for him to be dug out and patronized. The other is that of the “engaged” painter who is preoccupied with schools and movements and trends and isms, and whose painting is full of quotations. David Milne’s solution is much nearer the mean that Aristotle would have recommended: he lives a very...

Frederick Philip Grove was certainly the most serious of Canadian prose writers, and may well have been the most important one also. His first book was published in 1922, when he was fifty. If he had understood the mechanics of preparing manuscripts for publication, he might have been in print thirty years earlier, in which case he would have pioneered in realistic fiction along with Dreiser. He is best known for his novels,The Yoke of Life, Settlers of the Marsh, Two Generations, Fruits of the Earth, and, above all,Our Daily Breadand the comparatively recentThe Master of...

TheCanadian Forumhas not for a long time issued a statement of editorial aims and policy to its readers, and it seems from some of the letters that have appeared recently in its columns that such a statement is timely.

The intelligent and critical reader has two main interests: the war of civilization and the peace of civilization. By the peace of civilization is meant the enjoyment of the best available cultural interests: books, movies, records, and the current trend of ideas. A Canadian reader will naturally have an additional interest in what is being done in Canada. So...

The death of Pelham Edgar removes from the scene the greatest public figure in Canadian literature. This seems the best title to give him, as he was so much more than a critic, even than the “dean of Canadian critics,” as Mr. A.J.M. Smith calls him.¹ He certainly was a critic, and a very good one, in his own right. Many years before the present uproar over Henry James began, he produced a pioneering study of James described recently by an English reviewer as “still unrivalled for clarity.”² But in Canada he was, besides a great teacher, a personal influence...

The word “anthology” meant originally a bouquet or nosegay of poems, a collection of lyric verse chosen solely on the basis of its immediate lyric appeal. Mr. Ralph Gustafson’s Pelican anthology of Canadian verse is a true anthology in this sense: it collects poems and gives the minimum of information about their authors.¹ Mr. Smith’s monumental work is of a very different kind, for which the word “chrestomathy” would be better, though it seems now a little obsolete. Though his standard admission is still literary merit, he presents his poems also as documents in the cultural history of Canada, relates...

This is a sort of intellectual guidebook to the University of Toronto, cast into the form of fiction. The warden of Hart House, a stranger from New Zealand named Tyndall, undertakes to find out just what it is that is distinctive about Toronto, and cruises about the campus interviewing professors and talking to students, getting the atmosphere and traditions of the various faculties and federated Arts colleges. His conclusion—possibly a more sardonic one than the author really intended—is that what is distinctive about Toronto is precisely a lack of interest in distinctiveness. Tyndall finds everywhere a self-deprecating anonymity...

Most painters choose a certain genre of painting, which in Canada is generally landscape, and commit themselves to the genius of that genre. Their growth as painters is thus a growth in sensitive receptivity. In comparing early and late work of a typical landscape painter, such as Arthur Lismer, one can see a steady increase in the power of articulating what he sees. The early work generalizes colour and abstracts form; the late work brings out every possible detail of colour contrast and formal relationship with an almost primitive intensity. Emily Carr seems to go in the opposite direction, from...

The speech from the throne contained the following paragraph:

It is the view of my ministers that there should be an examination of the activities of agencies of the federal government relating to radio, films, television, the encouragement of arts and sciences, research, the preservation of our national records, a national library, museums, exhibitions, relations in these fields with international organizations, and activities generally which are designed to enrich our national life, and to increase our own consciousness of our national heritage and knowledge of Canada abroad. For this purpose, the government intends at an early date to establish a...

Readers of Canadian poetry will often have seen the name of Mr. James Wreford, both in literary periodicals and in the fine little anthology of a few years back,Unit of Five. A collection of his verse,Of Time and the Lover(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart) makes the fourth volume in McClelland & Stewart’s “Indian File” series. Mr. Wreford lives in Ottawa,and has several qualities in common with his predecessor Lampman, notably a tendency to be much more at ease with the vegetable than with the human world. He has, however, worked harder to reconcile his love of nature and his vision...

During the last few years of his life, Dr. Pelham Edgar was engaged in preparing an autobiography of a somewhat unusual kind. In addition to the standard reminiscent and anecdotal material of the ordinary autobiography, he was anxious to cast his recollections of the people of public interest he had met into a series of informal essays, partly an impression of them as personalities and partly a critical estimate of their work. In a “Proem” to this autobiography he speaks of the interest shown in it by the publisher of the present volume, and remarks, “He is surely well aware...

Saturday Night, which recently changed its face, has now changed hands as well. It is a paper for which theCanadian Forumhas always had the greatest respect and affection, and some editorials in it encourage us to believe that these feelings are in some measure reciprocal. Of late years,Saturday Nighthas been increasingly preoccupied with the relation of private enterprise to individual freedom, and with the authoritarian dangers in all bureaucratic control. We, on the other hand, believe that any social tendency becomes pernicious whenever it is carried through to its logical conclusion without opposition. Private enterprise may,...

TheCanadian Forumregrets very much to go into a new year looking as though it had lost one of its best friends, but unfortunately that is precisely what has happened.

John D. Robins, Professor of English at Victoria College, Toronto, was one of the most active contributors both to theForumitself and to its predecessor theRebel, in the years immediately following the First World War. He wrote stories, sketches, and humorous parodies, but as he was modest about his own works to the point of self-deprecation, he made no attempt to publish them. Even when he edited,...

This is the first collection of Canadian folk songs which attempts to cover the whole country and is designed for the general public. To have produced such a book at all is a public service; to produce it with such competence is a feat that leaves a reviewer (unless he has the special knowledge of the field that the present one has not) little to say that is not better said in the two introductions.

To come at it from the outside, the book is an attractive physical object, illustrated with drawings and end papers by Elizabeth Wilkes Hoey which...

Canada is such a huge and sprawling country that only a tremendous effort of will has made and kept it a single environmental unit. It has a prodigious interior but almost no coast line, and hence has had nothing to correspond to the Atlantic seaboard culture of the United States. It has the handicap of two languages; it has an almost uninhabited wilderness in Northern Ontario separating the East from the West; and it exists in practically one dimension, like a bigger Chile. With all this, its primary problems of communication have long overshadowed the secondary ones connected with culture...

For several years the author of this book used to go, for his lunch, across the street to the Senior Common Room of Victoria College, the college of which he was a graduate, for which he had originally intended the museum, and which he was still serving as a member of the Board of Regents. It was in the Senior Common Room that I, along with many of my colleagues, first heard some of the reminiscences set down in the book that you are about to read. The remarks made afterward, in his absence, included two almost invariable points. First,...

Certain critical principles are essential for dealing with Canadian poetry which in the study of English literature as such are seldom raised. Unless the critic is aware of the importance of these principles, he may, in turning to Canadian poets, find himself unexpectedly incompetent, like a giraffe trying to eat off the ground. The first of these principles is the fact that the cultivated Canadian has the same kind of interest in Canadian poetry that he has in Canadian history or politics. Whatever its merits, it is the poetry of his own country, and it gives him an understanding of...

I am, of course, deeply appreciative of the honour that Carleton University has done me. It is particularly an honour to receive this degree in the company of Mr. A.Y. Jackson, as well as a great pleasure, because Mr. Jackson is an old friend. May I congratulate also those of you who are receiving your degrees, and who are leaving the real world of the university and going out to the confused illusions of the world outside. Here you are in contact with reality at every point: this is the engine room; this is where the great ideas and forces...

Literary dates coincide only approximately with political ones, and the date which marks the political appearance of the entity we know as “Canada,” 1867, precedes by several years the development of a poetry in which the sense of “Canada” as a genuine imaginative environment can be discerned. The new literary age is signalized by the appearance of Charles G.D. Roberts’Orion and Other Poemsin 1880, when the poet was twenty. Lampman’s first volume,Among the Millet, partly inspired by the example of Roberts, appeared in 1888; Carman’sLow Tide on Grand Préand Duncan Campbell Scott’sThe Magic House...

This second edition of theCollected Poemsof E.J. Pratt comprises all the poems that the author is willing to reprint, along withBehind the Log, Towards the Last Spike, and a group classified as “Later Poems,” which have been written since the appearance of the first edition in 1944. As compared with the first edition,CarloandA Dirge, fromNewfoundland Verse, Putting Winter to Bed from Many Moods, andThe MirageandThe Illusion(formerly calledThe Drowning) fromThe Fable of the Goats and Other Poemshave been added.A Reverie on a DogandThe Fable...

As soon as a certain type of middle class comes into social prominence, there arises the parable of the idle apprentice, along with that of his duller but inseparable partner, the industrious apprentice. Everybody, however restricted his reading otherwise, has read some kind of story about one or the other. The industrious apprentice works hard, attends to business, saves his money, never gets into debt, and does not attempt to reach any position in society above what he can afford. His moral principles are based on his social ones: he does not drink, gamble, or wench because those activities waste...

The Prime Minister of Canada is, as most of you know, a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan, and holds the earned degrees of Master of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from that university. His career began in law, when he was called to the Bar of Saskatchewan in 1919, after his service in the First World War. His political activity, which has been mainly associated with the constituency of Prince Albert, began in 1925 and in 1940 moved from the provincial to the federal area. In December, 1956, he was chosen federal leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, and...

Haliburton would never have called himself a Canadian. He was a Nova Scotian, a Bluenose, and died two years before Confederation. He was born and brought up in Windsor, and represented Annapolis in the legislature. There he did good work in fighting the Family Compact, and became the friend of an even more brilliant man than himself, Joseph Howe. It was in Howe’s paper that he began the series of sketches later known asThe Clockmaker: the sayings and doings of Sam Slick of Slickville, Onion County, Connecticut. The Sam Slick books extend from 1835 to 1860, there are eight...

The Governor-General’s Committee is delighted to add its congratulations and best wishes to the winners of the 1962 awards. This is their night, and my chief duty is simply to point to them. If I refer to ourselves on the judging committee also, it is only because the question has occurred to many, and may occur to you: what kind of motivation could drive seven very busy people to read so many books for such a purpose? All of us must consider ourselves to have some critical ability, but is trying to pick the best books in six different categories...

The primary reason for this dinner is to honour the four winners of the awards, to congratulate them, and to thank them for the distinction they have brought to Canadian letters. All the awards this year are won by men, and in front of the successful male writer there is usually a wife, keeping, if not the wolf from the door, at any rate the magazine salesman, the milkman, the census taker, the questionnaire filler, the Girl Guide cookies, the cancer society subscriptions, and other interruptions of the flowing rhythms of verse and prose. So the wives are to be...

Ned Pratt is the only figure in Canadian literature, so far, who was great enough to establish a personal legend. The legend was simpler than the man, or, more accurately, it was cruder, because the man himself had the genuine simplicity that is so rare and so difficult. Poets and professors are supposed to be absent-minded, and people delighted in telling stories of Ned’s absent-mindedness. They are also supposed to be unpractical, and the fact that he was easily baffled by mechanical contrivances also pleased them. But Ned always remembered a great deal more than he forgot. He carried for...

It is hardly possible for anyone who knew him to write impersonally of Ned Pratt. I remember a struggling little magazine of poetry, many years ago, which he had helped by contributing a poem to its first issue. Under Notes on Contributors it said, “E.J. Pratt is the best poet and the kindest man in Canada.” It is difficult to improve on the economy of that statement, and few men can have left behind them a more uniform impression of good will. Like other great men, he created a legend, and the legend, as legends are so apt to be,...

It is, of course, difficult to know what to select in speaking of Ned Pratt. There is so much to say about him, and it is easy to take great pride in him as a product of the college. But I would prefer to think of the college as, in some degree, a product of him and as reflecting, in a permanent way, the impress of his personality. When we built our library, it would have been very easy to call it the Pratt Library, but a building, however beautiful and functional, always has something monolithic about it and there...

It is now several years since the group of editors listed on the title-page met, under Carl Klinck’s leadership, to draw up the first tentative plans for this book. What we then dreamed of is substantially what we have got, changed very little in essentials. I expressed at the time the hope that such a book would help to broaden the inductive basis on which some writers on Canadian literature were making generalizations that bordered on guesswork. By “some writers” I meant primarily myself. I find, however, that this book tends to confirm me in most of my intuitions on...

This book comes at a strategic time, when Canadians, like everyone else, are faced with immanent and unescapable changes in the habits of their lives. These changes are so revolutionary that they force us into re-examining the assumptions underlying those habits, or, as I tend to say, being a literary critic, to re-examine the myths which make up our customary vision of life. In such a world it is irresponsible to call oneselfaconservative oraliberal—that is, a person devoted to a specific aspect of life—for every responsible citizen has to be both at once. He...

Everybody who knew Ned Pratt misses him greatly now he is gone, and it is natural to feel that his passing is the end of an era. But there was no era: there was only Ned: a kind of force of nature that could have existed at any time, though it can only exist once. Everybody knew, or thought he knew, who Ned was: a genial, rather simple soul who loved giving parties, who was incompetent at all practical affairs, from car-driving to committee-sitting, who was as absent-minded as poets and professors are supposed to be, who never failed to...

Edwin John Pratt, C.M.G., M.A., B.D., Ph.D., LL.D., D.C.L., D.Litt., F.R.S.C., Professor Emeritus of English at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, and distinguished poet, died after a protracted illness on April 26, 1964.

Pratt was born at Western Bay, Newfoundland, on February 4, 1882 (this is the correct date, although on his authority it was often given as 1883). His preparatory education was obtained in St. John’s, and after a few years of teaching he entered Victoria College in the Class of 1911, as a church student. After he was graduated, he was ordained in the Methodist Church...

It is a genuine pleasure, and of course a great privilege, to inaugurate this series of annual lectures in honour of E.J. Pratt. As I understand that it is intended to devote the series to modern poetry in general, it seems logical to speak in this opening lecture about Pratt, but about Pratt in the context of modern poetry, and in the further context of the relation of modern poetry to modern civilization.

Pratt’s life, like an ellipse, revolved around two centres. One centre was where I am, in Victoria College in the University and city of Toronto. The other...

As a rule, when associations are formed by youthful artists, they break up as the styles of the artists composing them become more individual. But the Group of Seven, who did so much to revitalize Canadian painting in the ‘20s and later of this century, still retain some of the characteristics of a group. Seven is a sacred number, and the identity of the seventh, like the light of the seventh star of the Pleiades, has fluctuated somewhat, attached to different painters at different times. But the permanent six, of whom four are still with us, have many qualities in...

I gather that one theme of this book is the perpetual identity crisis that Canadians, especially English-speaking Canadians of British origin, find themselves in. I myself am, for example, a Wasp: white and Anglo-Saxon by the accident of birth, and though born a Protestant too, I have remained one by conviction. But it seems a strange conviction if it separates me, as it does, from others who call themselves Protestant, like the Rev. Dr. Paisley and the Prime Minister of South Africa, much more widely than it does from others who would care nothing for my views. And I do...

In the course of this fascinating dialogue Mr. Scott quotes Robert Frosts a saying that “the poetry” is what is lost in translation, adding that he does not think this the whole truth [55]. As a result of reading what follows, I have become convinced that it is the opposite of the truth, and that “the poetry” is precisely what, given exceptionably favourable conditions like these, can be translated. What cannot be translated are the linguistic accidents, such as the sound patterns that a language makes or the nuances of meaning peculiar to it, like the difference betweenrêveand...

I have no interest in what is alleged to be the world of fifty years hence. I shall not be around to see it, and therefore, according to the only philosophical principle I ever thought I understood, it will not exist. But I have seen fifty years of future turn into fifty years of past, and have been reading theCanadian Forumfor nearly forty of those years. Marshall McLuhan has a phrase about reactionaries who don’t get with it as people driving by a rear-view mirror.¹ This assumes the monumental fallacy that we move forward in time as well...

What follows is a retrospective collection of some of my writings on Canadian culture, mainly literature, extending over a period of nearly thirty years. It will perhaps be easiest to introduce them personally, as episodes in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public, and yet has always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristics from there.

The famous Canadian problem of identity may seem a rationalized, self-pitying, or made-up problem to those who have never had to meet it, or have never understood that it was...

Naturally, many of the developments in Canadian painting reflect similar developments in the United States. But an exhibition like this is very far from being merely a provincial aspect of American painting. Canada’s experience in both time and space has been very different from that of its neighbour, and the visual imaginations of Canadian painters are bound to show the differences.

In time, the United States had a revolutionary war first, a struggle against European domination, and a civil war afterwards, a purely domestic affair. Canada had its civil war first, a struggle of two European powers on its soil,...

A college has very few graduates whose names are well known to all its other graduates, and Lester Pearson may be the only graduate of Victoria of whom that is true. He arrived on the Victoria campus in the fall of 1913: Burwash Hall had just been opened, and he was one of the first residents of Gate House. The Dean of Residence was Vincent Massey, recently back from Oxford, and trying valiantly, if not very successfully, to bring Burwash nearer to the ideal represented by Balliol College. Mr. Pearson’s ancestral roots were deeply Victorian. In those days the senior...

It is a genuine pleasure to introduce the work of Irving Layton to the Italian reading public. Layton’s output has been impressive in quantity as well as quality, and shows a size and range, as well as an intensity, that make him perhaps the most outstanding poetic personality in contemporary Canada. He is not easily anthologized: the present collection is representative of his best work, but does not include all of his best work by any means. But if not easily anthologized he seems to me to be eminently translatable. He is not an obscure poet; his meaning is always...

The opening page of Evelyn Waugh’sThe Loved Oneintroduces an Englishman, exiled in California, who is trying to make sense of an article inHorizonon Scottie Wilson. Scottie Wilson was, of course, one of that very large group of painters whose careers owed much of their success to a friendly push from Douglas Duncan at a crucial stage. TheHorizonarticle speaks of Douglas as “a refined and charming man.” The author of the article obviously did not know him, and the phrase is oddly out of keeping with the general tone of the article. It looks as...

This conference, as I understand it, is concerned mainly with practical, even with administrative, problems, and an introduction like this can hardly do more than suggest some perspective on those problems. Canada, with four million square miles and only four centuries of documented history, has naturally been a country more preoccupied with space than with time, with environment rather than tradition. The older generation, to which I have finally become assigned, was brought up to think of Canada as a land of unlimited natural resources, an unloving but rich earth-mother bulging with endless supplies of nickel and asbestos, or, in...

It is difficult to know what to say, as a general conclusion, to this part of theLiterary Historythat is not already said or implied in my previous conclusion. Ten or twelve years is not a generation, much less, even in these future shock days, a historical period. The logical starting point, I think, has to be the reason for producing a volume of this size so few years after the original one, and the reason is not difficult to grasp. Mr. Cross, writing on history, says that five hundred books in that field were produced during five of...

There have been many fables about people who made long journeys to find some precious object. The moral is often that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is in their own backyard. But this is not the Canadian moral. The Canadian identity is bound up with the feeling that the end of the rainbow never falls on Canada.

I spent the first five years of my life in Sherbrooke, close to the Vermont border, and all my childish constructs of the world grew up there. Some people say that they don’t know where heaven is …...

Very few historical and cultural statements can be made about Canada that do not have obvious counterparts in the United States. At the same time, social developments in a country which has amassed a huge population and has become a great imperial power may have a quite different imaginative resonance in a country with a sparse population and a minor world influence. For example, railways were built across the United States to the Pacific, and the romance of railway building, along with the accompanying scandals and exploitations, have been factors of unquestionable importance in American culture. But in Canada the...

One disadvantage of living in Canada is that one is continually called upon to make statements about the Canadian identity, and Canadian identity is an eminently exhaustible subject. I have written a dozen or so articles about it, which I warmly commend to your attention if you feel that what follows is too full of dry and sucking noises indicating that the straw has reached the bottom of the glass. Several aspects of the question are constants in any case. A year or two ago I was present at a public hearing of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission [CRTC], when leaders...

I have been called upon to make a fair number of speeches about Canadian culture, mainly to Canadian audiences. The subject itself no doubt is inexhaustible, but my comprehension of it is not; and I find that each time I speak many of the same points insist on being repeated. I assume that this is mainly a different audience, but those of you who have heard or read me on these themes may feel that you have been here before. On the other hand, whatever I repeat I believe to be substantially true.

Practically all Canadians have friends or relatives...

As long as I have been a literary critic, I have been interested in the relations between a culture and the social conditions under which it is produced. It has always puzzled me why so little seems to be known about this, when so much work, even so much first-rate work, has been done in what seem to be all the relevant areas. I have also been watching the Canadian cultural scene for about forty years, and I feel that Canada is perhaps as interesting and valuable a place as any to study such a question. What follows is a...

I could hardly have realized, when I accepted this assignment, how far outside the area of my scholarly competence many of the papers at this conference are. I am not even cheered by Marcel Rioux’s remark that in a social crisis academics serve as the translators of esoteric texts. However, a certain impartiality in quoting other people’s opinions may be one possible virtue of ignorance, and in any case the buck now stops with M. Castonguay and not with me.

The foreground of our discussion has been what may be called an exercise in hypothetical futurology, speculations beginning with the...

In my first term as an undergraduate in Victoria College in the fall of 1929,I took a course in English literature from John D. Robins. In those days any references to contemporary culture had to be bootlegged into lectures by digressions, and in one such digression Robins told us that there was an Art Gallery in Toronto, that a very lively movement in Canadian painting was being displayed there, and that it was an important part of our education, coming as most of us did from small towns outside Toronto, to get in touch with it. The response, as I...

I first met Roy when I was a graduate student and he, also a graduate student though a much more advanced one, sat at the circulating desk in the University of Toronto Library. We fell into conversation about Spengler, as I remember, and about theories of cultural history. In the university at that time, the words “medieval” and “Renaissance” were accepted, but using the words “Baroque” and “Rococo,” to describe the next two centuries, was new and regarded with some suspicion as chichi, if not downright mystical. Roy’s main interests in English literature revolved around Milton then, as they did...

The first issue of theUniversity of Toronto Quarterlyappeared in 1931. Its appearance was not exactly a breathtaking novelty:Queen’s Quarterlyand theDalhousie Reviewwere already in existence, and there had even been an earlier version of theQuarterlyitself. But it was an important historical event none the less. The opening editorial statement attached the journal’s traditions firmly to those of the “gentleman’s magazine” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It wasnotto be a specialized learned journal: there were already enough of those, the editor implied, perhaps meaning that there were too many. Nor was...

I was always a devourer of books. I’d gone through the Victorian writers Thackeray and George Eliot and the Scott novels by the time I was fifteen. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. My mother taught me to play the piano very early, and to some degree that was my refuge. I was never well coordinated and always myopic, so I wasn’t very good at games and sports. I was given the nickname “professor” because of my glasses.

Under Mother’s influence I acquired a knowledge of the Bible quite early. My mother had an intensely strong and...

It seemed to me that I could contribute most usefully to this conference by speaking out of my experience as a resident of Canada. An American hardly needs to concern himself much with problems of adjoining cultures in the ordinary sense, unless he has a special interest in them: if he does have such an interest, Mexico will provide him with far more dramatic examples than Canada will. But in Canada the cultural situation represented by the word “adjoining” is present and continuous, and there are many elements in the Canadian situation that are of great interest and relevance to...

It seems only a short while ago that André Martin and Rodrigue Chiasson of the CRTC’s Research Branch went, along with myself, to call on the late Mary Quayle Innis to obtain permission to edit the great block of unfinished manuscripts of Harold Innis’s projected history of communications, which had been left in that state by his death. Our aim was eventual publication, so our next stop was the University of Toronto Press, which of course at that stage could do nothing but express general interest. On the way André remarked that he felt like a Renaissance humanist salvaging Classical...

It is a bit of a shock to find oneself observing the centenary of someone who has been a teacher, friend, and colleague over so large a part of one’s own lifetime. But then Ned was never in a hurry: his life had the leisurely rhythm of the scholar who takes a long time to mature, rather than the hectic rhythm more typical of the poet, who so often produces his best work early in life. Pratt was forty whenNewfoundland Verseappeared, and had already soaked up several academic disciplines: psychology, theology, English literature. Very little of this was...

I might begin, perhaps, with a picture which hangs in our dining room and which is a portrait of Ned Pratt by Barker Fairley. It is a very early portrait of Barker’s, done around the 1940s. It presents Ned in middle life, and it is a rather sombre and even a grim face, and you would never recognize it as the same person that you have a photograph of in theCollected Poemswith that genial, welcoming, and perhaps rather wistful face. Somebody said to Barker once, “that picture doesn’t look very much like Ned.” Barker said, “No. It doesn’t...

It is now some years since a reporter referred to Margaret Atwood as the reigning queen of Canadian letters, and there is no question yet of abdication. Born in Ottawa and growing up in Toronto, in an academic family, she took her first degree here, at Victoria College. Principal Johnston, on my right, was a classmate.¹ She then went to Harvard for graduate work, and began a thesis on nineteenth-century Romantic fiction, under the supervision of Professor Jerome Buckley, an earlier graduate of Victoria. I imagine that by now doctoral theses are more likely to be written on her than...

Most of the cultural factors that exist in Canada as a whole also exist in Ontario in a reduced but identical form. Geographical displacement is the most obvious. The entire province is half as large again as Texas, but most of its people are huddled near the American border, in a territory no larger than Michigan. The hinterland in the North has been explored by painters, but in this paper I have time and space only for the literary aspect of Ontario culture, and northern Ontario does not seem as yet to have found a Rudy Wiebe to interpret it....

I first got to know Robert Zend through a CBC program I was in and he was producing. As Samuel Johnson said of Edmund Burke, if you were caught in a shower under a doorway with him you’d still know you’d been with a remarkable man,¹ but I don’t recall much that got said except such things as his impassioned defence of Velikovski, where he was ready to take on all comers.

I don’t know when I’ve been more bowled over than when I began seeing the OĀB material. One can call it anything: concrete poetry, shape poetry, or just...

When creative artists form groups and issue manifestos and rely on the support of each other for encouragement, it is usually a sign that they have not achieved full recognition or maturity. In proportion as their authority increases, they tend to pull away from one another and make their public impressions as individuals. It is very remarkable how firmly the name “Group of Seven” has stuck, although the painters it refers to diverged in very different directions, and had increasingly less in common as they went on.

Lawren Harris, for example, began by searching for the simplifying aspects of the...

It seems to me very typical of Barker Fairley that his first appearance on this campus should have been in the role of a professor of German during the First World War. Not many of us are old enough to remember the hysterical anti-German frenzies of that time, but it has always taken some courage and a good deal of faith in one’s subject to remain a Germanist in this century through so much prejudice and so many periods of dropping enrolments.

Barker was, in any case, an unusual Germanist for those times, one who had clearly read a book...

My memories of Don Harron as a student are so vivid partly because he stood out so prominently in a quite extraordinary year—Vic ’48, full of stellar characters with a great variety of talents and interests. Don’s interests were obviously connected with drama and entertainment generally, and he naturally took a leading part in such things as an undergraduate. He was an excellent student, but I felt that success in his studies came rather too easily to him: that is, his studies weren’t giving him the right kind of stimulus. I told him he had unusual gifts as a...

I suppose that nowhere in the world is there a relationship between two countries even remotely like that of Canada and the United States. The full awareness of this relationship is largely confined to Canada, where it has churned up a good deal of speculation about “the Canadian identity,” the extent to which Canadians may be said to be different from non-Canadians, meaning, ninety per cent of the time, Americans. I am not concerned with this approach to the question, which seems to me futile and unreal. A nation’s identity is (not “is in”) its culture, and culture is a...

Ethel Wilson’s work is mainly in the form of what Henry James called “the beautiful and blest novella,” the short novel with a streamlined narrative aimed from the beginning at a specific resolution.¹The Innocent Travelleris longer and less shapely, doubtless because its scatterbrained gabbling heroine lasts for a hundred years. This book, however, began as Ethel Wilson’s first sustained effort, and gave her an unusual amount of trouble. ButHetty Dorval, the two stories inThe Equations of Love, Swamp Angel, andLove and Salt Waterare exquisite examples of the novella form. The dénouement ofHetty Dorval,...

Everyone who knew Vi Pratt, as well as a great many who did not, will be most grateful to Claire Pratt for editing this diary for publication. For a woman of her generation even the most able and articulate had to work without adequate recognition, and I hope that this book will bring her extraordinary range of interests and her eloquent style into focus and public attention....

“Italy in Canada” is an overwhelming display of Italian culture in all its variety, an enlarged and expanded version of the highly successful “Italy on Stage” of 1987, and the further result of an agreement on cultural cooperation between Canada and Italy that goes back to 1984. Its variety and quality speak wholly for themselves in the following pages: all an introduction can do is to suggest what its significance is to the country.

The most positive event in Canadian history was the Confederation of 1867, which formed a nation of the immense and sparsely populated mass of land in...

My friendship with Don and Pauline goes back for sixty years, when we were classmates in the same year at Victoria College—1932 for Don, 1933 for Pauline. To explain how that got to be the same year would take another half-hour. I have just been sitting at a table with seven members from that year at it, and others are scattered through the room. It is a year that has stayed together more closely than perhaps any other graduating year at Victoria, and you will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the hospitality of the McGibbons, in holding...

Canada has had a far less bloody and violent history than most countries, but Canadians have lived through as much history as any other nation, and the pattern of that history is closely related to events everywhere else in the world. The pivot around which our history turns is, of course, the Confederation of 1867, which was a romantic and imperialistic idea, consolidating into a nation a group of British-controlled colonies and territories. In many respects it was by no means an ignoble idea, and the documents leading up to it, such as the Quebec Act and the Durham Report,¹...