I. Poetry

J.:!,tters in Canada: I950 Edited by J. R. MACGILLIVRAY THE QUARTERLY'S sixteenth annual survey of "Letters in Canada" follows the general plan of other years. It is intended that the check-lists be as complete as possible, within our chosen range; the critical surveys, because of the number of books and the strictly limited amount of space for comment, must be selective and as brief as possible. Once more it has been found necessary to hold over the essays on French-Canadian and New-Canadian letters until the July number. I would again express my thanks to the publishers of Canadian books for their co-operation in this enterprise; to the University of Toronto Library for assistance; to Miss Francess Halpenny, Assistant Editor of the University of Toronto Press, for searching out and collecting books and preparing all the check-lists, except President KirkconneIl's for "New-Canadian Letters"; and to all the contributors to the survey who have to do this extra reading and writing at the busiest season of tbe year for mnst of them. For the first time since "Letters in Canada" was inaugurated, E. K. Brown's name does not appear at the head of the first essay, on poetry. Last autumn he wrote me that he would have to drop out because he wanted to give all the time he could towards completing the book on which he was engaged. Very few of his friends knew, as he did, that there was not much time left. By his death, on April 23, the QUARTERLY lost a friend of long standing. He wrote an article for the first volume (1932), and frequently afterwards. He was Associate Editor for many years, and kept up a close connection with the QUARTERLY after heleft this university. He was a distinguished contributor to "Letters in Canada" and also, one need hardly add, to Canadian letters. I would, finally, express my thanks to Professor Northrop Frye for agreeing to take over the survey of poetry. PART I: ENGLISH-CANADIAN LETTERS I. POETRY NORTHROP FRYE Readers of Canadian poetry will often have seen the name of Mr. James Wreford, both in literary periodicals and in the fine little anthology of a few years back, Unit of Five. A collection of his verse, 257 258 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Of Time and the Lover, makes the fourth volume in McClelland and Stewart's "Indian File" series. Mr. Wreford lives in Ottawa, and has several qualities in common with his predecessor Lampman, notably a tendency to be much more at ease with the vegetable than with the human world. He has, however, worked harder to reconcile his love of nature and his vision of the city of the end of things. His imagery turns on the antithesis of winter and spring: he associates winter with the contemporary world and spring with the promise, not only of better times, but of deliverance from the winter world through the infinity of the moment of love and faith in the Resurrection . The central theme that love's not time's fool thus applies to patriotic and religious as well as sexual love. A conventional frame of ideas, certainly, but a solid one to build on. Mr. Wreford is a pensive and elegiac poet: his best phrases are usually embedded in long ruminating poems, and seem to need that kind of context. Sometimes, too, a sudden poignancy breaks out, as it were unawares, from a more commonplace setting: The little children of her hands run with the horses on the sands cry and are fastened into bands. Metaphysical poetry is not a good influence on him: the echoes of Donne and Hopkins in his religious poetry merely add discord: some of his puns are striking ("To part, it is to die in part"); his verbal conceits and satiric rhymes are often laboured. He is not a poet who can absorb either the prose statement or the prosaic world; his social comment is generally querulous and preoccupied, and he is ill at ease with commercial cliches and technological images. He is best in straight couplet and quatrain and in a Housman-like baldness of statement: no...