Poetry

Poetry RONALD B. HATCH In the year 1800 Friedrich Schiller published his Uber Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung, which remains one of the finest accounts of the dilemma of the modern poet. In looking at the history of poetry from the time of the Greeks to his own day, Schiller observed that a massive shift had taken place in sensibility. The ancients, he believed, had existed in harmony with their natural world, and thus were able to write 'naive' verse, poetry celebrating the unity of man and his world. Modern writers, on the other hand, no longer felt part of their world, but in opposition to it, and therefore were constrained by their circumstances to explain and then rationalize their sense of separation. As Schiller saw the situation, the poet's isolation could be presented through two opposing modes of feeling. The first Schiller called the 'elegiac: in which the poet struggles to present the joy orsadness he feels in his perceived opposition to the ideal. The second mode, which Schiller described as the 'satiric: presents the everyday world in its comic or dark separation from the ideal. In discussing the poetry of '986, Schiller's categories of the elegiac and the satiric prove particularly helpful. The most obvious point ofdeparture is Al Purdy's Collected Poems (McClelland and Stewart, 396, $29.95). Purdy 's best poetry combines the purely local with a sense of the transcendent in what seems at first to be a wholly haphazard manner. 'Wilderness Gothic: one of his most famous poems, develops as a continual oscillation between a religiOUS and secular universe, capturing modern man's sense of the will to believe with his sceptical, historical orientation to the divine. In Schiller's terms, the poem combines man's elegiac desire to live in a religious dimension with his satiric awareness of the social and mundane determinants of everyday life. In an overview of Purdy's career, it becomes evident that Purdy's early poetry in the '940S was largely derivative; he never succeeded in mastering the late Victorian forms to which he first looked as models. Only in the late '950s, when he and his wife built a house on Roblin Lake in southern Ontario and Purdy began writing about this region in the speech rhythms of everyday life, did he find an expression adequate to his needs. In so doing, he taught younger poets in Canada that the centre need no longer be London or New York, and his famous 'running line' became one of the most important influences on younger poets. This influence has not, however, always been entirely positive, since there has been a tendency to take from Purdy his seemingly simple line and to overlook the way he uses his different 'tenors' to suggest modern man's various allegiances. In 'Wilf McKenzie' Purdy describes himself as 'literary plastic man,' an apt description for someone so endlessly inventive, so endlessly moving from one dimension to another. He delights in writing about his travels to exotic places, using travel itself to bring out the sense of 'edge.' He takes the reader to the Galapagos Islands, to Samarkand, to Mexico, and perhaps most tellingly of all, beyond the 'Hyperborean ocean' to Canada 's far north. Here as well, one discovers Purdy's delight in evoking the past. Finding a ring of rocks in the bare Arctic, all that remains of a tent village, he steps inside the magic circle to evoke the lost race of the Dorsets, 'what it was like to be alive I before the skin tents blew down.' The past for Purdy is never merely past or something passed over. While his poems begin in the present, whathe calls 'my fractional life in this skin tent: the present moment then expands into duration, with Purdy listening for something else, the fortuitous voice that will place 'a fulcrum under the universe.' Such moments are 'life's gifts I and in the loopholes and catacombs of time I travel,' we are enabled to 'pass thru' and establish connections with the past. Having slipped out of time, Purdy no longer remains a null point in a linear development, but holds within himself the past...