MODERNISM
International
European movement inspired by the effects of World War I
Breakdown
of traditional society under the pressures of modernity: modernity as an
experience of loss (T.S. Eliots The Waste Land)
The
previous sustaining structures of human life had been either destroyed or shown
up as falsehoods or fantasies. Since art incorporated such a false order, it
had to be renovated
Quest
for coherence
Myths
as human constructions to create order our of meaningless flux: Christianity as
such a myth
Literature,
especially poetry, becomes vitally important for society: its the place where
the search for meaning is carried out
FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS
Its
construction out of fragments
Notable
for what it omits
Shifts
in perspective, voice and tone
Understated,
ironic rhetoric
Suggestive
rather than assertive by means of symbols and imagery
Reading
experience: challenging and difficult. The reader has to dig the structure out
The
search for meaning becomes meaningful in itself
Use of
all sorts of language, including the speech of the uneducated and the
inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. The traditional educated
literary voice, conveying truth and culture, lost its authority.
Directness,
compression, and vividness: Poems became shorter. The principles of unity and
organization were no longer available. Novels became shorter and the short
story acquires a new significance.
Subjective
point of view (often that of a naive or marginal person) to convey the reality
of confusion rather than the myth of certainty.
CONTENT
The subject matter often became the poem or the
literary work itself
Concrete sensory image or detail as the direct
conveyer of experience
Allusion to literary, historical, philosophical, or
religious details of the past, reminding readers of the old. Lost coherence
Authors private life experience:
Vignettes of contemporary life
Chunks of popular culture
Dream imagery
Symbolism
The work may move across time and space, shift from
the public to the personal and include material previously deemed unliterary.
Truth does not exist objectively but is the product of
a personal interaction with reality
CANADIAN MODERNIST MOVEMENT
Until the 1930s Canada saw little of the artistic
challenge and achievement of the modernist movement.
However: during the 1920s W.W.E. Ross and Raymond Knister were
conducting private experiments in poetic diction and rhythm
E.J. Pratt initiated the movement
with the publication of Newfoundland Verse (1923)
Montreal: McGill movement
A.J.M. Smith
F.R. Scott
A. M. Klein
Leo
Kennedy
Leon Edel
Toronto:
Robert Finch
Dorothy Livesay
E.J. PRATT
Born in Newfoundland
Son of a Methodist minister
Went to Toronto to study arts, philosophy, psychology,
and theology.
He was ordained, but instead of entering the ministry
he became a university teacher of English.
Spans both the 19th and 20th centuries and the
extremes of primitive-rural and sophisticated-urban living.
He dominates
Canadian poetry in the first half of the 20th century.
Transitional figure: Link between the Confederation
poets and the modernist principles, bridging the gap between the traditional
and the contemporary. However, he does not belong to any school or movement.
Northrop Frye considered him the epic bard of Canada,
transforming the history and scientific knowledge of a culture into a heroic
and mythic whole
More
concerned with evolution than with revolution.
Expanded
the romantic limits of natural description, peopling his Newfoundland Verse
(1923) with the sounds, characters and animals of the Newfoundland coast.
Unlike
his contemporaries, he worked in longer poetic forms:
Series
of long narrative poems that chart the worlds tragedies (The Titanic,
1935; Dunkirk (1941)
two
national epics (Brιbeuf and his Brethen, 1940; Towards the Last Spike, 1952)
poems about conflict and heroic action: between man and man, animal and
animal, man and natural forces...: force and energy.
Fascination
with detail, both scientific and verbal
He
celebrates the individual hero (strong, determined, and with a vision), but in
a social context.
Dominated
words--verbal precision: cannot be read without a
dictionary close at hand
Documentary
quality
Use of
Canadian subject-matter: Canadas mythologizer
MAIN WORKS
The Titanic (1935):
Journalistic
style
Extracts
of dramatic dialogue
Fragmented
form
Individuals
as part of a larger social unit: theres no unifying action around a single
hero
Brιbeuf and His Brethren (1940):
Epic
tragedy
It
retells the story of the Jesuit missionaries martyred by the Iroquois in 1649.
Unrhymed
verse
Towards the Last Spike (1952):
Epic
Comedy
About
the building of the transcontinental railway:
Unification
of the nation
Concentration
on technological development and on communications
Man
versus nature / words and rhetoric as weapons in Parliament
Similes
and metaphors drawn from grammar and speech
A.J.M. Smith (1902-1980)
As a student, involved with writing and editing poetry
at McGill:
founded and ran the Literary Supplement of the McGill
Daily and then the McGill Fortnightly Review.
In the
1930s Smith worked with Frank (F.R.) Scott on New Provinces, a
collection of poems by himself, Scott, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, E.J. Pratt and
Robert Finch.
Smiths first anthology of Canadian poetry, The
Book of Canadian Poetry, was published in 1943. This volume was what gave
Canadians the first clear sense of themselves, poetically:
"All prior anthologies of Canadian poetry werent
critical. They were perhaps patriotic or sentimental - all were published at a
popular level. This was the first critical intelligence in Canadian poetry that
said there were poems of value out there. He used standards of excellence in
selecting the poems"
Did not want Canadian poets to imitate Eliot and the
moderns but to attain an equivalent standard and importance
Precise
diction
Respect
for poetic craftmanship: Emphasis on art and artifice (allusions to other
writers, focus on the making of poetry as well as on its content)
Fusion
of thought and feeling
Critical
intelligence
Protested
against puritanism, provincialism and colonialism
Idiom
of past centuries
Assumes
a cultivated audience well versed in the history and achievements of Western
culture
F.R. Scott (1899-1985)
Complementary opposite to
Smith
Campainer for a moderate and
orderly socialism
Public poetry (no ivory tower)
Consciously nationalistic
Two strands:
-
Satirical commentary on
current affairs
-
Introspective poetry (promises to wear better than the
former)
He sees beyond
the superficialities of natural landscape and human behavior
to larger patterns: visionary (words like see, Sight, vision are central
to his work
Dorothy Livesay
(1909-1996)
Biography
Dorothy Livesay
was born in Winnipeg, Manitoa.
A teacher, she worked in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) from 1959 to 1963. She
then taught as a writer-in-residence at a number of universities.
Besides being a professor, she also worked as a journalist, and editor.
The B.C. book prize for poetry is named in her honour.
She won the Governor General's Literary Award in the poetry
category in 1944 for Day And Night, and again in 1947 for Poems for
People.
www.ucalgary.ca/.../
canada/poet/d_livesay.htm
Characteristics of her work
Unifying center: Blend of
intensely private experience and energetic responses to external events. Untouched by the modernist craving
for impersonality:
I live in what I feel and
hear
And see
Her first book, Green Pitcher (1928):
Persistent use of refrain
Rhetorical and syntactical repetitions taking the
place of rhyme and regular metre: influenced by the conventions of ballad and
song
During the Depression she became engaged in social
work and left-wing politics: political verse, propagandistic in subject and too
strident in tone
1930s: series of short poems combined into a larger
unity: documentaries based on topical data but held together by descriptive,
lyrical, and didactic elements
After the 1930s: her active political commitment
lessened (wife and mother); stronger rapport between reader and poet
1960s: after her husbands death her poems become
poignantly direct and nakedly confessional (=D.H. Lawrences sexual tenderness)
Independent and honest
1920s: MODERNISM
Ψ
E.J.
Pratt, narrative poet par excellence; first of the moderns or last of
the Victorians.
Ψ
Montreal:
F.R.Scott, A.M. Klein, A.J.M. Smith
1930s: Depression Difficult to publish;
Ψ
Dorothy
Livesay
1940s: Many poets who wrote in the 1930s got published in the 1940s: Proliferation of poets but not of readers: poet
as lonely voice with no hearer
Ψ
Dudek and Raymond Souster
championed poetry creating magazines and little presses, compiling anthologies,
etc. (like Scott and Smith 20 years earlier). However, they saw the early
modernist as too European: need to express a distinctive North American
consciousness--U.S. as model.
Ψ
Irving
Layton joins them in the creation of Contact Press
Continuist poets:
Klein
P.K. Page
Earle Birney
They emphasized:
human responses
and traditional humanistic values in an age of political trauma
poetic craft
and texture, stylistic polish, intellectual vigour
A.M. Klein, Biography(1909-1972)
1909: born to Kalman and Yetta
Klein, orthodox Jews, in Ratno, a small town in the
Ukraine, and brought to Montreal with his family probably the following year
(officially claimed to have been born in Montreal, 14 February 1909).
1926: attended McGill University, majoring in classics and political
science and economics. Associated with 'Montreal Group' of
poets and writers, including A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel.
1940: first volume of poems, Hath Not a Jew ..., published by Behrman's in New York.
1942: associated with the Preview group of poets--F.R. Scott,
Patrick Anderson, P.K. Page, and others--and with the First Statement group,
in particular Irving Layton.
1944: The Hitleriad published by New
Directions in New York.
1948: The Rocking Chair and Other Poems published by Ryerson in
Toronto.
1949: Awarded the Governor-General's Medal for The Rocking Chair.
Journeyed to Israel, Europe, and North Africa in July and August, sponsored by
the Canadian Jewish Congress, and published his 'Notebook of a Journey' in the
Canadian Jewish Chronicle.
travelled widely in Canada and the
United States, addressing Jewish audiences, principally concerning the State of
Israel.
1951: The Second Scroll published by Knopf in New York.
1952: increasing signs of mental illness. Hospitalized
for several weeks in the summer of 1954 after a thwarted suicide attempt.
Only peripherally associated with the McGill Movement
Independent, solitary man
Jewish poet, supporter of Zioninst causes
Concerned with the possibility that North American Jews might lose both
their language and their heritage through assimmilation
Interpreter of Jewish experience both to his own people and to others
Characteristics of his poetry:
Archaisms, recreations of earlier styles
Allusions to the classic English poets
Punster: combination of seriousness and humor
Difficult
Main influences:
Romanticism (Byron, Keats)
King James version of the Old Testament
Hebrew Psalms and the Song of Songs
Joyce (Ulysses became his secular Talmud)
Traditionalist: he needed the rhythms of poetic
convention: no verse could be free
Not influenced by previous Canadian poets
P.K. Page
Ψ born in England on
November 23, 1916, and came to Canada in 1919.
Ψ Educated in
England, Calgary, and Winnipeg, and studied art in Brazil and New York.
Ψ A woman whose work
spans six decades, P.K. Page has published more than 20 books in the genres of
poetry, fiction, memoir, childrens literature and translation.
Ψ She is also a
visual artist, under the name of P.K. Irwin, and has produced an impressive
body of work that is represented in many major Canadian galleries.
Ψ As scriptwriter for
the National Film Board, her script for the animated film, Teeth Are To Keep, won an award at Cannes.
Ψ Found her voice in
the company of the Montreal group (A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott)
Ψ More subtle version
of the didactic and often declamatory style
Ψ Fusion of social observation
and romantic love, at once political and intensely erotic
As Ten, as Twenty
For we can live
now, love:
Millions in us
breathe,
moving as we would move
and qualifying death
Ψ Monosyllabics: heartbeat
accelerated by passion; long vowels: exhalations of breath
Ψ Rhetoric echoes of
the biblical book of Acts, Shakespeare, and C. Day Lewis
Ψ Later: Turn from
what we perceive to how we perceive it
Earle Birney (1904-1985)
Earle Birney was born in
1904 in Calgary when it was still in the Northwest Territories.
His family moved to Vancouver, where he went to U. B.
C. in 1922, enrolling in science.
In 1926 he went to Toronto to go to graduate school. When
he left the following year, he had a master's degree and had become a Marxist
Leninist
In the following years he lived and worked in San
Francisco, Utah, London... He went to Norway to meet with Trotsky and to Berlin
where he was arrested by the Gestapo for failing to salute a Nazi parade. In
1936 he came back to Canada and finished his PhD at the University of Toronto. He
brought with him Esther Bull, a fellow Marxist whom he would later marry. Their son Bill
was born in 1941.
In 1965, Earle left the University of British Columbia
and became the first Writer in Residence at the University of Toronto.
Due to
the great variety (tone, subject, treatment, quality) of his poetry, its
difficult to classify
Extremes:
from the stoic pessimist persona anticipating the imminent destruction of
humankind to the irripressible buffoon, playful,
punning, ebullient
Emphasis
on the poem rather than on the poet
He
spans the time between Pratt and the younger experimentalists of the 1960s
The
first poet to embody the western experience in his verse (David is a classic
of the Rockies)
1950S
East Coast:
Ψ Irving LaytonVigour of imagery,
sexuality unprecedented in Canadian poetry: reputation for controversy; he
attacks English professors, critics, reviewers,and
fellow poets for elitism, and the general public for their insensitivity and
lack of concern for matters of art and intellectgeneralized contempt for
humankind
The poet has a public
function as a prophet
He sees the universe as
An indifferent sea in which we
swim or drown
Active hostile, a consumer of
life
Ψ
Toronto: The mythopoeic
poets
Influenced by Fryes
belief in a mythic structure of the imagination: universal patters of imagery
and modes of symbolic thought which serve as creative release
James Reaney
Jay Macpherson
Others: Leonard
Cohen, Anne Wilkinson, Eli Mandel
1960s: Cultural Renaissance --Nationalism
Poetry became the predominant literary form
Linguistic experimentation
West
Coast: Tish poets
Teacher: Warren Tallman
George Bowering
Frank Davey
Daphne Marlatt
They
tried to strip poetry of conventional rhetoric and to get down to the real
image
acknowledged the influence of
William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Creely
and Charles Olson, especially the latter's theory of projective verse.
Ontario experimentalists:
Bp Nichol, Joe Rosenblatt,
David McFadden, Victor Coleman
Al Purdy
Born in Wooler, Ontario.
One of a group of important Canadian poets (Milton
Acorn, Alden Nowlan, Patrick Lane are others) who
have little formal education & whose roots are in Canada's working-class
culture.
He worked in factories until 1955.
As a teenager, he rode the freights west for three
years and spent six years in the RCAF.
He has written plays (radio) for the CBC, and has
travelled to many world countries.
He has earned a living by writing since about 1962-63.
George Bowering