The confessions of a compulsive anthologist

The confessions of a compulsive anthologist A. J. M. SMITH As early as my first high school days I was everlastingly making lists - lists of favorite books, of favorite poems, which soon developed into lists of the 'best' books, the 'best' poems - or rather, what in my slowly diminishing ignorance I thought at the time were the 'best'. My parents accused me of always having my nose in a book, and it is true that I used to read one of our English texts, Poems of the Romantic Revival, under my desk at school during some of the duller classes such as Geography or Latin. At home I read the exciting adventure serials in Chums or The Boy's Own Annual, to be followed soon by Stevenson and even Scott. It wasn't hard to notice that the writing in Kidnapped or Treasure Island was lighter, swifter, and more vivid than in Ivanhoe or The Talisman. So was the action, and so, I think, though I could not have put a name to it then, was the quality of the imagination. Taste was developing (in poetry too), but any principles upon which it could be based were unknown, and unconsciously taken for granted. I saw nothing r i d i c u I o u s in Palgrave's astonishing attempt, as he confessed it in the Introduction to The Golden Treasury, "to include ... all the best original Lyrical pieces and Songs in our language ... by writers not living - and none beside the best." I liked many of the poems, especially those from the Elizabethan Age and the Seventeenth Century, and, of course Keats and Shelley. In Westmount High and at McGill in the twenties no modern poetry (except Kipling) was taught - and little Canadian poetry (except Carman). Indeed, one of my high school teachers seeing me with a copy of Masefield's Ballads and Poems said, 'That's rather strong stuff, isn't it?" I had to discover modern poetry for myself - more or less by chance. In the Westmount Public 4 Library I came upon The New Poetry edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson , published in 1917. And here I read with delight and fascination the 'new' poetry of Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Yeats in his middle period, Conrad Aiken, and H. D. This, I think is a complete list of the poets whom I deliberately began to imitate in the earliest apprentice verses I printed three or four years later in the Literary Supplement to the McGill Daily and the McGill Fortnightly Review. These mostly appeared under various romantic pseudonyms . Vincent Starr, Simeon Lamb and Michael Gard are some I remember. Brian Tuke and Bernard March were Frank Scott. At that time - 1923-24 - I had read no Canadian poetry except Carman's Pipes of Pan series and Sappho and was not encouraged to read any by what I found in Wilfred Campbell's Oxford Book of Canadian Verse of 1913 or Garvin's Canadian Poets (complete with photographs) of 1916. During the twenties when F.R.S. and I were at McGill there seemed to be no Canadian poetry that was new, intelligent and contemporary and no magazine or journal that would publish such poetry were it to appear. For myself, I determined to study and practice, and to test the value of any piece by submitting it to the best English or American literary magazines - and to the Canadian Forum, the one exception I should have noted above, a journal which from its inception in 1920 until today has championed the cause of modernism both in poetry and criticism . While still at the university I counted myself fortunate to have poems accepted by the Forum and by Mark Van Doren for the Nation and by Marianne Moore for The Dial. I was pleased to find in The Dial some poems by another Canadian, W.W. E. Ross, about whom I knew nothing; and in Ezra Pound's little magazine, Exile, and the Parisian avant garde magazine, This Quarter, stories by Morley Callaghan, of Toronto. At this time too Raymond Knister was publishing stories in the Iowa magazine The Midland and...