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A.M. Klein and His Montreal This issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies, dedicated to A.M. Klein and his Montreal, marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Klein's birth. Coincidentally, it also marks the tenth anniversary of two of the most significant events in the development of Klein scholarship. The first was the appearance, two years after Klein's death in 1972, of Miriam Waddington's edition of the Collected Poems, which brought together most of the previously published poems and for the first time made it possible to get some sense of the larger outlines of Klein's poetic career. The second was the A.M. Klein Symposium at the University of Ottawa, which was important for a number of reasons. Symbolically, it marked the beginning of a resurgence of interest in Klein's life and work, an interest which, while never entirely dormant, had been discouraged during Klein's lifetime by the tragic withdrawal of his final years. It was also at the Symposium that Usher Caplan gave the first public account of the wealth of material deposited in the Public Archives by Klein's family after his death, an account supplemented in the published proceedings of the Symposium by Caplan's invaluable bibliography of Klein's works. Finally, and, in the long run, perhaps most importantly, it was as a result of the Symposium that the A.M. Klein Research and Publication Committee was established to prepare a scholarly edition of Klein's Collected Works for publication by the University of Toronto Press (the two first volumes of which have appeared and are reviewed in this issue). How have Klein studies and our understanding of Klein developed over the last ten years? The articles gathered together in this issue provide an excellent opportunity for an assessment. Good writing on Klein is not a recent phenomenon; one need only turn to T.A. Marshall's collection of essays on Klein in the Critical Views on Canadian Writers series, published in 1970, for evidence of this. From the beginning, Klein attracted the intelligent and thoughtful commentary of his contemporaries. The judgments of critics and fellow-poets such as A.J.M. Smith, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, John Sutherland, and E.K. Brown, often in the form of reviews, and sometimes quite critical of certain aspects of the poet's art and world-view, remain fresh and thought-provoking. However, it is perhaps fair to say that, with a number of exceptions - Marshall himself and Miriam Waddington immediately come to mind - much of the later work on Klein lacks the sense of engagement and authority so evident in the earlier criticism. On the one hand, critics writing from the late fifties to the early seventies no longer had the same immediate experience of the issues - social, cultural, political that inspired Klein and his contemporaries; .on the other, the material for a genuinely scholarly assessment of Klein's achievement was simply not available. This was at least partly a result of Klein's almost complete refusal in his later years to co-operate with interested scholars, which made it impossible to arrive at a clear picture .of his work (much of it either unpublished or hidden away in relatively inaccessible journals), or of his life. Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 19, No. 2 (Ete 1984 Summer) 3 After Klein's death, the barriers that had made serious research almost impossible began to disappear. Caplan's biographical-bibliographical dissertation in 1976 and his book, Like One That Dreamed (1982), which grew out of the dissertation, provided a much fuller sense of Klein's total oeuvre, and the life experiences behind it, than had been available to previous scholars. Recent students of Klein and his milieu, including most of those represented in this issue, have drawn widely on Caplan's work. The publication of the first volumes of the Collected Works and the availability of the Klein papers have further enriched the context in which Klein's achievement is coming to be seen. This, too, is reflected .in our issue; it is also reflected in a number of articles, theses, and dissertations on Klein which have appeared in recent years or which...

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