That period in Canada, between 1935 and 1955, which encompasses a pre-war depression, a world war, a post-war period of disillusionment, and the beginning of a time of affluence and intellectual expansion, has left an impressive fund of poetry recording the emotional response of Canadians to the turbulence of these years. At the beginning of this period, the poetry is asserting its independence from the derivative poetry of the earlier Canadian poets, and the end of the period, has already introduced the new mythopoeic mode which dominates the recent literary scene. The major themes of the poetry of this period are directly related to the historical events of the time. In Chapter I, the poetry of social protest is examined in detail. A group of exclusively critical poems, unexperimental in technique, is balanced by a group of more sympathetic ones, employing more of the characteristics of the new poetry. Many poems of social protest indicate an enduring hope for a better future, but those poems dominate this tradition, which incorporate a decidedly revolutionary program. The ultimate solution, however varying the degrees of action may be, is man's own responsibility. Chapter II presents poems inspired by World War II. The initial distrust of the war is replaced by despair. The loss of love, life, security, and meaning is explored in introspective, sensitive poems, as concerned with the emotions on the battlefield, as those in the empty home. The hope for a better future is found in love, courage, or endurance, and the final victory evokes both faith and distrust in its reality. The psychological interest in the individual in a postwar world has produced a number of poems examined in Chapter III. By this time, the poets are already employing new forms with comparative freedom, and this poetry reflects the flexibility demanded by an interest in the complexities of human psychology. The tensions between the need for people, and the need to be alone are as convincingly presented as those between the desire to be loved, and the desire to be independent. The tedium of daily existence creates its peculiar cyclic metaphor, manipulated by many of the poets in a variety of ways. The psychology of abnormality preoccupies a few poems, but a fairly general statement of faith in humanity is characteristic of all of this work. In this chapter, the psychological responses in several of Pratt's poems are examined, along with a brief discussion of his relationship to the rest of the Canadian poetry. Chapter IV examines the poetry which very definitely uses myth as structure, and discusses, very briefly, the mythopoeic poetry after 1955. The favourite structural myth, the fertility cycle, is accompanied by the various aspects of the quest myth. A curiously ironical inversion of the apocalyptic vision indicates that the Canadian mythopoeic poets cannot be expected to be conventional. This study leads to the ultimate conclusion that the Canadian poetry of this twenty year period is a related, but disunified group of fragments, directly connected with the chronological events of the period, but never merging into a clear stream of poetry which flows through these years. The chief reasons for this are explored in the conclusion. A. selective bibliography of the poetry published in Canada between 1935 and 1955 is appended. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Since World War II Canadian literary criticism has tended to be either historical or aesthetic in its emphasis. Little or no interest has been shown in the linguistic approach to criticism; no work has been done on Canadian poets comparable to the writing of Donald David and David Abercrombie on English poets, or of Chatman or Miles on American poets. It is the purpose of this thesis to make a preliminary survey of contemporary Canadian poets from Pratt to Newlove, with particular reference to their style and technique. Special attention will be given to rhythm, and sound, relating Canadian poets' experience to contemporary trends elsewhere. Central to this study is the concept of rhythm in poetry. For the older poets, Pratt and Klein, rhythm was contained in the traditional metres. Raymond Bolster, influenced by the Chicago poets, directed attention to the imagist conception of free verse; and this led, among the poets of the forties, to an increasing interest in the experiments of Pound and Williams. In the fifties, Olson, Duncan, Creeley and Ginsberg began to emphasize the oral and linguistic side of poetry-making. Their influence, first felt in Eastern Canada, has recently gained recognition on the West Coast. The Canadian poets dealt with in this study are those specifically concerned with new experiments in rhythm and sound, and for this reason such poets as Birney and Layton have been excluded. Their eclecticism and frequent changes in style would seem to deserve specialized. research. In this present work, Chapter I defines the terms used and summarizes various critical views on verse techniques, from the Russian Formalists up to the present. Chapter II deals with the forerunners of experimentation, Pratt and Klein. Of the two, Klein was the greater technician, a poet who played with many metrical forms. Both men, however, were deeply concerned with language and its relation to poetry, and this linguistic interest undoubtedly Influenced younger poets. Chapter III examines the imagist movement and in particular its effect on the poet of the thirties, Raymond Knister. Although he used metaphor and symbol, the emphasis which Knister put upon the object— "little things and great"— did great service to the growth of an indigenous, objective movement in Canadian poetry. This movement is the subject of chapters IV and V, in which the work of Souster and Dudek is examined. Chapter VI considers the poetry of Milton Acorn as it relates to the imagism and social commentary already present in the poetry of Souster and Dudek. An unusual aspect of Acorn's verse is its didactic note, expressed in resonant rhythms. Chapter VII examines the style of Alfred Purdy. Although he eschews rhyme, he uses the Iambic stance whenever it suits his purpose. Purdy's own personal rhythm dominates the content and structure of all his poetry. In conclusion Chapter VIII refers to the contemporary scene in British Columbia, attempting to show that the experimental trends from the western States and from eastern Canada have united in the work of Phyllis Webb, James Reid and John Newlove. Each one, though markedly individual, is profoundly conscious of the spoken word, the linguistic collecation of words, and the importance of syntax as a propeller of rhythm and sound. Newlove's poetry is especially singled out as being an 'oral' and 'aural' reflection of his place and time. An Appendix is attached which described the Trager and Smith approach to stress, intonation and juncture, with some critical notes on its application to the art of poetry. Throughout this thesis, the emphasis is on an examination of a poet's style rather than an evaluation of his content. Nonetheless it should be borne in mind that "Sound and meter...must be studied as elements of the totality of a work of art, not in isolation from meaning." An examination of Canadian poetry from Pratt to Purdy must recognize the intimate interplay that exists between thought and expression. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

While English First World War poetry moved from extolling the Victorian versions of chivalric values to the "debunking" realism of some of the soldier poets, Canadian First World War poetry failed to exhibit any such development. Canadian First World War poets write a colonial interpretation of what the English inspirational war poets produced, and they did not express any disillusionment with the military-religious dogma of the war. During the Second World War, some Canadian poets produced poetry of a similar type to that which they wrote celebrating the first. But the war years saw the development of a group of young "modernist" poets who followed up the first modernist movement of the Montreal group and New Provinces, and when these poets wrote about war, the idealization of the conflict was not among their aims. Thus in Canadian war poetry the split between idealization of war and its realistic appraisal does not occur until the Second World War. The realistic appraisal of war on the part of the new poets takes many directions, but their poetry holds in common a refusal to accept any idealized version of the conflict. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Modernism and Post-Modernism in Canadian poetry have been introduced and developed in the pages of non-commercial "little magazines", beginning with F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith's McGill Fortnightly Review in 1925. Subsequent generations and schools of poets have made their first appearances and they have developed their ideas by producing their own magazines. / The aim of this dissertation is threefold: to investigate the phenomenon of the little magazine, its role as an essential alternative to commercial publications, and the sociological and aesthetic necessity for its survival; to investigate the progress that has taken place in Canadian poetry in the pages of the little magazine, as well as the evolution of the little magazine itself; in light of the fact that literary Modernism and Post-Modernism have not developed in Canada in isolation, to investigate the influence of European, English, and American poetic development in the twentieth century on Canadian poetry.

This dissertation argues that, since at least the 1960s, there has been a distinguished tradition of Canadian poets who have turned to the novel as a result of their dissatisfaction with the limitations of the lyric and instead have built the lyric into a mode of narrative that contrasts sharply with the descriptive conventions of plot-driven novels. Citing the affinity between the lyric sequence and the visual series, the introduction maintains that the treatment of narrative as a series of frames, as well as the self-conscious dismantling of these framing devices, is a topos in Canadian literature. The term "(un)framing" expresses this double movement. The thesis asserts that Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Joy Kogawa, Daphne Marlatt, and Anne Carson (un)frame their novels according to formal precedents established in their long poems. Chapter 2 illustrates the relation of the visual series to the song cycle in Ondaatje's long poems the man with seven toes (1969) and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), as well as his first novel Coming Through Slaughter (1976). Chapter 3 traces the development of the "serial novel" from Bowering's early serial poems to his trilogy, Autobiology (1972), Curious (1973) , and A Short Sad Book (1977). Chapter 4 argues that Joy Kogawa structures her novel Ohasan (1981) on the concentric narrative model established in her long poem "Dear Euclid" (1974) . Chapter 5 shows how Daphne Marlatt performs a series of variations on the quest narrative that she finds in Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen (1844), and thereby develops a lesbian quest narrative in her long poem Frames of a Story (1968), her novella Zocalo (1977), and her novel Ana Historic (1988). Chapter 6 explores the combination of lyric, essay, and interview in Carson's long poem "Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings" (1995) and argues that the long poem forms the basis of her novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998). The final chapter assesses some of the strengths and limitations of lyrical fiction and concludes that a thorough grasp of the contemporary long poem is essential to an understanding of the development of the novel in Canada.

This dissertation is a scholarly edition of the correspondence between the Canadian poet Irving Layton and the critic and historian of Canadian literature, Desmond Pacey; on November 3, 1954, Desmond Pacey wrote to Contact Press, inviting the poets Irving Layton, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster to submit their recent work for discussion in an article on Canadian literature for The International Year Book. Pacey and Layton met in Montreal a few months later, and so began a long friendship and a lengthy correspondence which continued until Pacey’s death on July 4, 1975. The correspondence is an extremely important document in the history of Canadian poetry and criticism in the decisive decades following World War II because it so directly and extensively explores the crucial issues of the times: the function of the poet and the critic in contemporary society; the debate over a “cosmopolitan” versus a “native” aesthetic; the debate over a “mythopoeic” versus a “realist” approach to the creation of, and criticism of, poetry; and the attempt to define a position for the Jewish writer in a gentile society. But aside from this prolonged and invaluable theoretical discourse, and aside from the countless useful insights into the life and work of practically every writer active in Canada between 1954-1975, the letters between the two men are important because the two men were so vitally important to the development of a viable Canadian literature. The basic principle of this project’s editorial philosophy is the decision to abjure the “editorial pedantries” of the diplomatic text which tend to exclude the non—specialist educated public, and to assume greater flexibility in the standardization and regularization of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation and matters of format——placement of addresses, closings, postscripts and marginalia. Headnotes contain all textual information about the letter; transcriptions are in the main literal, but in the interest of consistency some standardization has been imposed. Footnotes follow each letter; cross—references are by letter and, where applicable, note number; when the reference is to a letter with a single footnote, no number is cited. These almost three thousand annotations are employed to identify individuals referred to in the text, to provide publication information on the works of Layton, Pacey, and numerous other individuals referred to in the text, to document and frequently quote from the reviews, articles, radio and television programs they discuss, to elucidate references to current events, and to provide miscellaneous but necessary background information on matters ranging from the private lives of the two correspondents to majcir vnts and isuë in the history of Canadian li’áttñ.

This dissertation argues that, since at least the 1960s, there has been a distinguished tradition of Canadian poets who have turned to the novel as a result of their dissatisfaction with the limitations of the lyric and instead have built the lyric into a mode of narrative that contrasts sharply with the descriptive conventions of plot-driven novels. Citing the affinity between the lyric sequence and the visual series, the introduction maintains that the treatment of narrative as a series of frames, as well as the self-conscious dismantling of these framing devices, is a topos in Canadian literature. The term "(un)framing" expresses this double movement. The thesis asserts that Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Joy Kogawa, Daphne Marlatt, and Anne Carson (un)frame their novels according to formal precedents established in their long poems. Chapter 2 illustrates the relation of the visual series to the song cycle in Ondaatje's long poems the man with seven toes (1969) and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), as well as his first novel Coming Through Slaughter (1976). Chapter 3 traces the development of the "serial novel" from Bowering's early serial poems to his trilogy, Autobiology (1972), Curious (1973) , and A Short Sad Book (1977). Chapter 4 argues that Joy Kogawa structures her novel Ohasan (1981) on the concentric narrative model established in her long poem "Dear Euclid" (1974) . Chapter 5 shows how Daphne Marlatt performs a series of variations on the quest narrative that she finds in Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen (1844), and thereby develops a lesbian quest narrative in her long poem Frames of a Story (1968), her novella Zocalo (1977), and her novel Ana Historic (1988). Chapter 6 explores the combination of lyric, essay, and interview in Carson's long poem "Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings" (1995) and argues that the long poem forms the basis of her novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998). The final chapter assesses some of the strengths and limitations of lyrical fiction and concludes that a thorough grasp of the contemporary long poem is essential to an understanding of the development of the novel in Canada. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation is a scholarly edition of the correspondence between the Canadian poet Irving Layton and the critic and historian of Canadian literature, Desmond Pacey; on November 3, 1954, Desmond Pacey wrote to Contact Press, inviting the poets Irving Layton, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster to submit their recent work for discussion in an article on Canadian literature for The International Year Book. Pacey and Layton met in Montreal a few months later, and so began a long friendship and a lengthy correspondence which continued until Pacey’s death on July 4, 1975. The correspondence is an extremely important document in the history of Canadian poetry and criticism in the decisive decades following World War II because it so directly and extensively explores the crucial issues of the times: the function of the poet and the critic in contemporary society; the debate over a “cosmopolitan” versus a “native” aesthetic; the debate over a “mythopoeic” versus a “realist” approach to the creation of, and criticism of, poetry; and the attempt to define a position for the Jewish writer in a gentile society. But aside from this prolonged and invaluable theoretical discourse, and aside from the countless useful insights into the life and work of practically every writer active in Canada between 1954-1975, the letters between the two men are important because the two men were so vitally important to the development of a viable Canadian literature. The basic principle of this project’s editorial philosophy is the decision to abjure the “editorial pedantries” of the diplomatic text which tend to exclude the non—specialist educated public, and to assume greater flexibility in the standardization and regularization of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation and matters of format——placement of addresses, closings, postscripts and marginalia. Headnotes contain all textual information about the letter; transcriptions are in the main literal, but in the interest of consistency some standardization has been imposed. Footnotes follow each letter; cross—references are by letter and, where applicable, note number; when the reference is to a letter with a single footnote, no number is cited. These almost three thousand annotations are employed to identify individuals referred to in the text, to provide publication information on the works of Layton, Pacey, and numerous other individuals referred to in the text, to document and frequently quote from the reviews, articles, radio and television programs they discuss, to elucidate references to current events, and to provide miscellaneous but necessary background information on matters ranging from the private lives of the two correspondents to majcir vnts and isuë in the history of Canadian li’áttñ. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.