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Letters in Canada EDITED BY NORTHROP FRYE I 1958 This issue of "Letters in Canada" closely follows the model set last year, with the present editor serving as a stand-in for Mr. Douglas Grant, who is on leave of absence. His inexperience makes him all the more dependent on, as well as grateful for, the expert advice of Miss Ruth Charlesworth, who has prepared the large, complicated, and bilingual manuscript for publication, and the efficiency of Miss Paula Armstrong, who has been responsible for collecting and distributing the books. As usual, the contributors, who include two university presidents, have all taken time from very heavy schedules to make "Letters in Canada" the indispensable public service it is. POETRY Northrop Frye James Reaney's A Suit of Nettles (Macmillan, pp. x, 54, $3.00) is a series of twelve pastoral eclogues, one for each month of the year, modelled on Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. The speakers are geese, and the tone is that of satire: there is a prelude addressed to the muse of satire. The themes are also reminiscent of Spenser: we have love songs (February), elegies (June and October), singing-matches (April and August), dialogues (January and July), fables (March), fabliaux (May), and a danse macabre (December). We begin in January with a Yeatsian dialogue between two geese, Mopsus and Branwell, in which the former, after making a fine caricature of the contrast between sacred and profane love, advocates forsaking both Elijah and Jezebel and adopting a calm rational view of the world, as white and sterile as the winter landscape. Branwell however protests that he wants "offspring summerson autumnman wintersage," and so the theme of fertility and sterility, the main theme of the poem, is announced. Sterility is sym- ...

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