The Humanities

372 THE HUMANITIES mentally execution, whether it is the official killing of deserters, the launching of a hopeless attack against impossible odds, or the judicial execution of a poor, innocent soldier for political reasons. Modern warfare is the imprisonment of the human spirit in the prison of a cruel and soulless bureaucracy. Execution is a deeply moving book; it is also a courageous one. 1HE HUMANITIES After receiving Desmond Pacey's Ten Canadian Poets: A Group oj Biographical and Critical Essays (Ryerson, pp. x, 350, $5.50), I made the comparison the author seems to invite-with F. L. Lucas's Ten Victorian Poets. My first and last reaction to the very different tasks these two scholars had set themselves was, how could Mr. Lucas fail, and how could Professor Pacey succeed? Through the English critic's pages flow the ideas, the history, and the poetry of a great epoch, from Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold through Swinburne, Morris, and Hardy. As a critic he has merely to quote intelligently and a reader stirs with interest, and as a biographer his ouly problem is how much of those fruitful, often exciting, lives can he find space to tell of. Besides, his poets are all dead. Professor Pacey has chosen five living Canadian poets and five Canadian poets now dead, and with still greater weight and seriousness of attention than Mr. Lucas has subjected them to the same direct, full-scale biographical and critical approach the English poets receive. We should not be surprised if they barely sustain the onslaught. When a poet's work, because of its slightness either in quality or in quantity, is only a partial reflection or fulfilment of his life, there is no clear standard of relevance in biography and, with recent or living subjects in particular, no clear rules of decorum. For Mr. Lucas the criteria are fairly simple: is the fact a facet of an interesting "character"? is it significant historically? is it relevant to the understanding of an important poetic ceuvre? Professor Pacey's studies of the living or the dead do not answer to these tests: the term "Canadian" in the title has opened the way to new and less strict standards of relevance. Nevertheless , Ten Canadian Poets draws together a vast body of information of undeniable interest to students of Canadian literature, some of it based on previous studies (as in the chapter on D. C. Scott), a good deal consisting of new matter or new interpretations of the familiar (as in the LETTERS IN CANADA: 1958 373 chapters on Carman and Smith). The book is most useful when chronicling legendary phases in Canadian literary history (for instance, the Montreal "renaissance" in the 1920's involving Smith, Klein, and Scott) or reassessing conventional biography and drawing attention to neglected features (such as the personal morbidities of Carman underlying his role of professional optimist). There will be those who will dispute, however, the validity of the claim that A. J. M. Smith "almost single-handed ... effected a revolution in Canadian poetic theory and practice," "stemmed the tide of lush romantic verse and replaced it with a clear, cold, intense and complex classicism." The book is least effective when dwelling on the ordinariness of personal and intellectual histories--unless we except the chapter on Sangster, whose losing struggle to rise above mediocrity is a typical case-history to explain why no other poets emerged from pre-Confederation society to merit inclusion by Professor Pacey. In their critical aspect the essays do not always solve one of the common problems of Canadian literary criticism, that of inflation. No doubt it is true that the best Canadian poetry of nature description, such as Lampman's, is more complex than a first reading often suggests; but the pages devoted to the explication of "Heat" (pp. 130-3), for example, parody "new critical" delvings into a Marvell or a Donne, to the distortion of the poem's fundamental simplicity. Again, is it really fair to expose living poets to the dangers of this kind of solemnity? "Had The Great Feud," the author says of Pratt's allegorical extravaganza, "been read and analysed with the same care and frequency...