Letters in Canada: 1954

J:5tters In Canada: I9S4 Edited by A. s. P. WOODHOUSE I T is nineteen years since I planned and edited the first of this series, "Letters in Canada, 1935," and nine since I relinquished the burden to the competent hands of my successor, Professor J. R. MacGillivray . There is nothing sinister or ominous about my revisiting now the glimpses of the moon: I have been pressed into service, and next year the duty will be assumed by the QUARTERLYS new Editor, Professor Douglas Grant. As happens but infrequently, it has been found possible to print the whole survey in the April issue. I should add that I have reverted to my original plan of a composite essay with the unlovely, but descriptive title of "Remaining Material," partly in order to give the new Editor a free choice in arrangement next year. 1. POETRY NORTHROP FRYE The poetry of 1954 includes some reprinting of traditional poets as well as new work, and it may be simplest to deal with the serious verse in a roughly chronological order. The impact of Lampman, Carman, Roberts, and D. C. Scott on Canadian poetry was very like the impact of Thomson and Group of Seven painting two decades later. Contemporary readers felt that whatever entity the word Canada might represent, at least the environment it described was being looked at directly. Like the later painters, these poets were lyrical in tone and romantic in attitude; like the painters, they sought for the most part uninhabited landscape. The lyrical response to landscape is by itself, however, a kind of emotional photography, and like other forms of photography is occasional and epigrammatic. Its variety is provided essentially by its subject -matter. Hence the lyric poet, after he has run his gamut of impressions, must die young, develop a more intellectualized attitude, or start repeating himself. Carman's meeting of this challenge was only partly successful, and it has long been a commonplace that he badly needs a skilful and sympathetic selection. This is provided in The Selected Poems of Bliss Carman, edited by Lome Pierce (McClelland & Stewart, 119 pp., $3.00) . Carman should, of course, have edited himself. I have heard the late Pelham Edgar turn a poem of Carman's into a thing of unalloyed 247 ...