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LETTERS IN CANADA; 1937 service to French-Canadian letters. I.e Mauricien is a more orthodox publication, a monthly magazine with short stories, poems, articles, and excellent illustrations, devoted mainly hut by no means exclusively to the valley of the St. Maurice and the Three Rivers district. Its young editors have shown that there is still room in a highly competitive field for a Hpopular" magazine that does not insult its readers' intelligence {even the intelligence of its intelligent readers}. And its appearance is yet another indication of the growing i,mportance of Three Rivers as a cultural centre. M Duplessis is not that city's only gift to French Canada. For the last few years an increasing number of publications of every kind have had th~ir oTlgin there. Thre~ Rivers has be" en particularly active in fostering a distinctive regionalist literature and in chronicling the past glories of La Mauricie. Montreal, Quebec, and Ottawa had better look to their laurels. VI. NEW-CANADIAN LETTERS VVATSON ~RKCONNELL Side by side with literatures in English and French, there have grown up in Canada during the last fifty years at least a d07.en lesser literatures in such languages as Icelandic, German, and Ukrainian. Their chief medium of publication has been the vernacular press. Since the utter inadequacy of six million Anglo-Canadians to support native book-publication in English is so widely admitted) it is easy to envisage the plight of, for example, the Icelandic-Canadian author, when there are only twenty thousand Icelanders in all Canada as a prospective market for his work. The average financial status of the "New-Canadian," moreover, because "he is closer to the pioneer stage) is much lower than that of the average AngloCanadian ; and there are no book-publishers in Canada in his own language to further the publication of his books. For all these reasons) while the literary"activity of many of these n" ewer groups has been prodigious in extent and often authentic in value, the vast bulk of it has appeared only in foreign-language weeklies and annuals. As a result, newspapers like Heim,slcringla and Logberg of Winnipeg possess a quality in the field of lullu-IeJ/reJ that is rarely approached by our: Anglo-Canadian newspapers. Book-publication is usually an accidental job-print venture at the author's expense, and has become relatively rarer in the lean financial years slnce 1929. 567 , THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Among the poets who have achieved such book-publication during the past three years, the Rev. Ivan Kmeta of Saskatoon stands easily first with his Lyra Emigranta, a collection of two 'hundred and forty-three Ukrainian lyrics, sonnets, and elegies, reflecting his experiences both in the Ukraine and in Canada. To an extent rarely approached by other Ukrainian-Canadians, he combines fecundity of inspiration with an artistic consciousness of the resources of language. While his predominant theme is religious . faith suffused with evangelical emotion, his religious poems are not hymns but rather lyrics of religious experience. In other words, he is closer to Christina Rossetti than to Isaac Watts. A typical sonnet, "The Lily of Sharon," may be rendered thus: I am a wise white Lily of the Valley, Fronting the world each day with prophet eyes, Bathing in !lilver dews and azure skies,For you I bloom and with me you may dally. The stream of Time roaTS by hysterically; My quiet Sharon weaves you tapestries Of roses, ev'" (or those who agoni ze By day and night, and grieving, cannot rally. I am a Lily and a Rose of Sharon, Living for you: and would you wholly perish? Pluck me. and in your hand, a rod of Aaron, I shilol1 work miracles, your soul [0 cherish. 1 am your Saviour: let my love be law, Whether in Sharon or Siberial . Much more positively in the tradition of Christian hymnody are the two solid volumes of religious verse, 1m Dienste des Mcisters, published in German by the Rev. Isaac P. Friesen of Rosthern. In a large number of Mr. Friesen's hymns, there is a heavy preponderance of piety over literary value, but many of them display unusual vigour...

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