Editing Canadian Modernism

I. Modernist Editions and Archives

Modernist poetry in English Canada would not have a history without its editors. The history of modernism in Canada has largely been that of editors who were also poets and poets who were also editors. Given that so many American and British modernist authors were active in various capacities as editors, it follows that the conjuncture of poetic and editorial practice has long been recognized as a constitutive narrative of Anglo American modernism (see Bornstein). Although Canada does not really have its own version of Pound editing The Waste Land, the correlation of authors and editors holds true for scholarship on Canadian modernists. The once-dominant critical archive devoted to what Brian Trehearne calls the "two Modernisms" (Aestheticism 313) associated with successive generations of poets, editors, and literary magazines in Montreal in the 1920s and 1940s has, in recent years, undergone revision to include multiple modernisms and little-magazine groups located in cities extending from Halifax to Victoria.¹ Because only a handful of modernist poets in Canada published book collections before the 1940s, and because most relied on little magazines to serve as outlets for their poetry, histories of Canadian modernism have often been shaped by a dual focus on poets and magazine editors.² Other histories of Canadian modernism have been aligned with cognate editorial activities, namely the production of literary anthologies and the formation of small presses.³ These histories of English Canada's modernists have attended to the primary stages of editorial work connected to the production of magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and books, although without consideration of the later stages of editorial practice associated with the reproduction of Canadian modernist texts in collected and critical editions.

By the late 1950s, after three decades of publishing individual volumes of their poetry, the Canadian modernists returned to their editorial roots to select and sort their respective oeuvres in collected editions. Most of Canada's major modernist poets have issued collected editions; these retrospective editions have typically been selective and incomplete or brought out while the poet was still publishing and subsequently superseded by later collections. The publication of collected editions has more often than not entailed the omission of poems, by the poets themselves or by their editors. While the process of editorial and authorial selection has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages. Because the criteria for a collected edition are determined by the author's or editor's preferences at the time of selection, these criteria invariably lead to revisionist representations of a poet's work. Revisionist editions have certainly affected the ways in which the critical and literary-historical narratives of Canadian modernism have been written. The collected edition represents a second stage in the editing of modernist poetry in Canada, one that typically takes place during the lifetimes of the poets and marks definitive moments in their careers, occasionally at their height and, more often, near their end, or, in the case of careers cut short by premature deaths, posthumously.

The third stage of editing modernism involves the production of critical editions. Usually undertaken after the publication of collected editions, these editions have generally consisted of either supplemental volumes of fugitive poems or comprehensive volumes of complete poems. Canadian modernist critical editions date from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, when editorial and research committees were struck to publish two multivolume series, The Collected Works of E. J. Pratt and The Collected Works of A. M. Klein. These two series include critical editions that represent divergent editorial practices—the Pratt Complete Poems predicated on the principles derived from the Anglo-American tradition of intentionalist editions, the Klein Complete Poems on the continental European traditions of critique génétique and genetic editions. Editions in the Anglo-American tradition select a copy text on the basis of its proximity to the author's intentions, construct an eclectic text from multiple textual witnesses, and record textual variants from only authoritative versions. Based on principles originally outlined in W. W. Greg's 1949 essay "The Rationale of Copy-text," the intentionalist edition became the dominant mode of editing in...