The Stream and the Masters

REVIEWS ON CANADIAN POETRY I. THE STREAM AND THE MASTERS'* W. ·E. CoLLIN The Ryerson Press are to be complimented on their beautiful presentation of Dr E. K. Brown's book On Canadian Poetry. Dr Brown is one of our most promising scholars. He has .had the advantage of the best training in this country and in France. He has already given us critical studies of English and American authors. For the time being he is at Cornell living with Americans but he has always been a student of the literature of his native land.· As critic in charge of the annual survey of poetry for the UNIVERSITY OF ToRONTO QuARTERLY he is fully acquainted with the poetry appearing during recent years in the Dominion. On Canadian Poetry is the fruit of much study and rigorous intellectual discipline. It is without a doubt the best work that Brown has dorie. It comprises three chapters: "The Problem of.a Canadian Literature," "The Development of Poetry in Canada," and 44 The Masters," in which he studies the poetry of Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott and Edwin John, Pratt. In the first chapter he deals with a subject he has at heart. He expands what he said in Canadian Literature Today, 1938, and what he said to the America.ns in the Canadian issue of Poetry, 1941. It is a brilliant analysi's of the economic and social difficulties writers have to contend .with in Canada, a complete and exact picture of the colonial spirit, the disguised frontier standards and the puritanism which prevail in our society and which have crushed some of our writers and led others to court an outside public. The second chapter sketches the development of Canadian poetry from Sangster and Heavysege to Anne Marriott and Earle Birney; that is, it covers· the whol~ range of our poetic history. Since it is plainly an .historical as well as a critical outline we wonder why author and publisher alike were at pains to inform us that On Canadian Poetry "is not an historical enquiry." The mind that planned this book, that wrote the ~pening paragraphs of the study of Pratt,'_that *On Canadian Poetry, by E. K. BROWN. Toro~to, Ryerson, 1943, $2.25. At the Long Sault and Other N.ew Poems, by ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN. Foreword by DuNCAN CAMPBELL ScoTT and Introduction by E. K. BROWN. Toronto, Ryerson, 1943, ~2.00. 221 222 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY adopted the social idea which determines some of the judgments brought down in the book is an historical as well as a critical mind. The first chapter might well be a preface to the sound history of Canadian literature which the author knows we have not got. But Mr Brown's real gift is not his historical sense, nor his scholarly curiosity) but rather his ability to scrutinize his material. He collates and examines texts; he searches into a poet's struggles with words and images; he studies influences) traditions, developments, the progress of a poet's art or attitude. The essay on Lampman is· a scholar's work. Sometimes we feel that he is a French type of critic working with an idea of the dominant characteristic of a poet's art; the essay on D. C. Scott is such a critic's work. Often we picture him as a disciple already expert in the use of the intellectual instruments of his masters. During his critical, research and editorial labours Mr Brown has come under the spell of several ' master minds, particularly Arnold and Eliot. The shade of his humanism is defined in the terms: "a literature develops in close association with society" and "a great literature is the flowering of a great society." The :first chapter of his book is a product of his humanism. The critical .instruments he makes most skilful use of in his treatment of "the masters" are those of the perfect and pure critic as·T. S. Eliot understands him. · Arnold and Eliot taught us to look "solely and steadfastly at the object." Eliot, more austere, reacting solidly against romanticism, against the impressionism which characterized English critical writing a quarter of a century ago) taught...