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  • E.D. Blodgett, Poet and Scholar:An Introduction
  • Annika Rosanowski, Evelyne Gagnon, and Manijeh Mannani

The dedication of this special issue to the memory and works of E.D. Blodgett is most befitting following his demise in 2018. A thorough and chronological survey of the multiple collections of Blodgett's poetry, his translations, and his vast scholarly contributions to the fields of literary studies, in general, and Canadian literature and comparative literature, in particular, warrants another dedicated volume. The current issue is a response to the call to bring together scholarship that is either entirely based on Blodgett's creative and scholarly works, or else on works that reference his contributions to Canadian and world literatures.

Blodgett's scholarship spans more than four decades.1 His publications, comprising more than 65 reviews, journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and translations, with only a few co-authored/edited/translated, reveal a wide range of interest in literary topics. Globally, from Dante's Purgatorio, Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, The Love Songs of the Carmina Burana, the mystical poetry of Rumi, the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath, and the poetry of Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, to list but a few, all the way to the poetry and fiction of Canadians D.G. Jones, Dennis Lee, Robert Kroetsch, Alice Munro, Frederick [End Page 5] Philip Grove, Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, Marie-Claire Blais, and Leonard Cohen, again to list just a few, Blodgett's critical work and translations reflect the working of a shrewd, curious, and passionate scholar of literary studies indiscriminate of geography and chronology.

Blodgett, of course, read in multiple languages, including Latin and Greek. His vast knowledge of other languages and his solid command of issues pertaining to the global literary scene not only enhanced his scholarship, but also made his critical responses to texts more authentic, regardless of the motifs they were tackling or the concepts they were problematizing. Without a doubt, what enriched Blodgett's analytical encounters with literary texts, from Dante's Purgatorio to Emily Dickinson's poetry and Alice Munro's fiction, was his training as a comparatist, which enabled him to see literatures of different cultures and periods drawing upon and in dialogue with one another about life and the human nature as reflected in art.

Taking a look at one of his earliest pieces of scholarship, "Dante's Purgatorio as Elegy," we encounter his deep engagement with the text for its elegiac characteristics-most notably, Vergil's departure (163). As he points out, purgatory is a place of transience (161), and while it responds "to the process of loss," it also presents us with various forms of absence "so that we learn to distinguish their values" (164). He then proceeds to demonstrate the elegiac character of several encounters that the pilgrim makes. Dante thus fools the reader into "enjoy[ing] the wrong thing," just like the pilgrim who mourns the departure of Vergil "rather than the loss of Eden," and the reader's experience might thus mimic that of the pilgrim as he approaches "the poet's wisdom" (172). Blodgett concludes his reading by offering ways in which "the didactic element of the Purgatorio not only recalls the early Greek elegy, but also […] the later elegy of lament" and thereby "unifies ethics and poetry" (175-76).

Similarly, in his critical examination of Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Blodgett argues that the central importance of the work lies in its representation of how "a great artist […] displays both his art and his awareness of himself as an artist" (322). The problem with fully grasping the meaning of the poem is that the form is a mere façade; the precepts put forth are often only weakly connected to the episodes that follow, and shifts in perspective regularly disrupt any assumptions about their formal purpose (323). What Blodgett's reading of the Minos and Ariadne episode reveals, however, is that the shifts in tone of the narrator and in perspective allow readers to form their own opinions, possibly even in direct contrast to those of the narrator (324). These and further readings, such as of Icarus and the Trojan material, bring...

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