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0 CANADIAF=l N Ä! Winter, S7U.UT6 TO . J. PR21TT Articles BY PAUL WEST, FRED COG SWELL, VINCENT SHARMAN, ETHEL WILSON, MICHAEL TAIT Reviews BY ROBERT HARLOW, GILLES ARCHAMBAULT, MARGARET PRANG, ROBERT MCCORMACK, JOAN SELBY, JAN DE BRU YN , DAVID BROMIGE AN D O T H E R S Annual Supplement CANADIAN LITERATURE CHECKLIST, 1963 A QUARTERLY OF CRITICISM AND R€VI€W TITANIC BUT NOT OLYMPIAN THIS ISSUE OF Canadian Literature is devoted largely to new studies of E. J. Pratt, the poet who over a generation has become the dean of Canadian letters. There has not yet been a satisfactory and complete critical study of Pratt, and we may have to wait some time before his individual achieve ment and his position in the tradition of Canadian literature are adequately assessed. Appearing at a time when writing in this country was emerging from colonial dependence, he seemed something of a giant in isolation, and still, like that other figure of imperfect grandeur, Frederick Philip Grove, he stands apart from the rest of Canadian writers, distinguished by his largeness of texture as well as by his talent for giving new life to traditional forms, as Spenser and Keats variously did in their own times and places. When one reviews his career, the subject and title of what is perhaps his finest poem does not seem accidental; he is a titanic rather than an olympian figure. It is hoped that the studies we publish in this issue will contribute to a more complete and genuinely critical understand ing of his achievement. The visual arts lie outside our field and within the province of our distinguished contemporary, Canadian Art. We cannot, however, pass without mention a volume which reveals the scope and excellence of our most comprehensive art collection — that of the Royal Ontario Museum. Art Treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum is prepared and edited by Theodore A. Heinrich, the Museum's director. It is published by McClelland & Stewart and is technically one of the EDITORIAL best art books that has ever appeared from a Canadian house; it is significant of the limitations of our book-producing industry that the forty-one excellent colour plates were printed in Holland, and the rest of the book, including the hundred and twenty odd monochrome illustrations, was produced in England. The illus- trations demonstrate the comprehensive nature of the Royal Ontario Museum, dedicated as it is to "The Arts of Man through all the Years". Ancient Greece and Peru and Mexico are admirably represented; so are the primitive arts of Africa and the Pacific. At the same time, the desire to be comprehensive has resulted in an inadequate representation of the R.O.M's chief glory, its great collection of Chinese ceramic art. One may also deplore the scantiness of the accompanying commentary. Yet, when all is said, this volume leaves little doubt that Toronto contains one of the best North American art museums outside the financially charmed circle of New York. We hear a great deal about Canadian anthologies of Canadian poetry. Other anthologies produced in this country are often less well-known outside their parti- cular field of reference. Yet there is at least one excellent production in this field which has been going through revisions and reprintings for the last thirty years, and now appears in a completely revised third edition. This is Representative Poetry, published in three volumes by the University of Toronto Press (Volumes I and III cost $6.00 each and Volume II, $9.50). Representative Poetry is in fact a college textbook, designed to cover three years at the University of Toronto; it is prepared by the people who actually teach English there and who prefer their own selection to those which emanate from the College Divisions of New York publishers. The 1,500-odd pages contain an ample and well-balanced intro- ductory selection of Modern English verse from Wyatt to Swinburne. The notes and critical apparatus are reduced to a minimum, so that both professor and student, not to mention the general reader who may profitably use such a volume as a basic introduction, are virtually left without that elaborate mediation, be- loved of American scholarly publishing, which so often in college texts turns into a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. The lazy temptation to create a course of isolated "greats" is avoided; Representative Poetry finds room for the curious and the little-read, and for a surprising amount of work by those pleasing minor figures who give a literary age its own flavour. Of course, every teacher of English should dream of making his own anthology, containing the works which he can most fervently expound; in défaut of that unattainable ideal, one wishes EDITORIAL that more Departments of English would follow the University of Toronto in preparing their own anthologies to give scope for variation of preference and at the same time express the collective taste of a group of practising teachers. At the very least it would save professors of English from many tedious committees designed to select the poor best of a group of unsatisfactory texts produced by hack scholars in another land for the benefit of that profitable branch of big American business, commercial college text production. Ε. J. PRATT' S LITERARY REPUTATION Fred Cogswell DURiNG THE NINETEEN FORTIES and fifties, E. J. Pratt was given a position of pre eminence in Canadian literary circles similar to that which Bliss Carman enjoyed among poets in still earlier decades of this century. Whether Pratt's poetic reputation will prove more durable than Carman's is a question to which most Canadian literary critics would today deliver a ringing affirmative. "Carman," they say, "is an interesting minor poet possessed of a thin vein of talent and during his lifetime he was very much over rated. Pratt, how ever, is Canada's leading poet, the most original and the greatest in theme and execution that this country has ever had. All his work, it is true, is not of equal merit, but his best poems represent an original contribution to the poetry of the English speaking world. He ought to be better known outside of Canada." And yet, there are curious analogies between the work of Carman and Pratt which lead me to speculate on whether Pratt's conjectured final position in the world of letters will ultimately be radically different from that of Bliss Carman after all. Both Carman and Pratt acquired their reputation, for the most part, by creat ing a large bulk of work of a high degree of technical competence upon a limited range of themes which were meaningful to their immediate contemporaries. Carman's idealism — a non rigorous paradise into which a whole generation beleaguered by Darwinism was glad to escape — was parallelled by Pratt's out door world of elemental conflict on a physical level — a world of uninhibited Ε. J. PRATT S LITERARY REPUTATION violence into which a whole generation of frustrated academics were equally glad to escape. Today the academics yawn over "Vestigia" and "Lord of my Heart's Elation", but is there any guarantee that future academics will not also yawn over the even longer and more pointlessly involved "The Great Feud", "The Witches' Brew", and "Towards the Last Spike"? Technical competence in general, and the mastery of haunting phrase and delicate rhythm in particular, have not saved Carman from the stigma of "minor poet", although even his most severe critics admit his mastery over these attri butes. More than any other quality, form in verse is subject to the vagaries of fashion. Today the academic critic finds the colloquial rhythms and hard hitting bluntness of an Irving Layton or a Raymond Souster more exciting than Car man's most suggestive nuance of sound and image. Such a critic's reaction is honest and natural, but it should not be mistaken for universal critical judgment. There was in England for almost a century a period when the forms, the rhythms, and the narrative techniques employed by E. J. Pratt flourished, but after Words worth and his contemporaries launched the "new" poetry of romanticism, where then were Pope and Dryden and Butler and Swift and the techniques which they had devised and used so brilliantly? If James Reaney, for instance, were to suc ceed within the next two decades in imposing a mythopoeic surrealism as the language of Canadian poets, where then will be the excitement and the glamour of the language of scientific description and the techniques of narrative verse displayed in Pratt's metrical lines? Carman was a shy, sensitive, harmless man whom most people liked and few wished to hurt. Canadian literary criticism is the kindest in the world — kindest perhaps because Canadian critics are also writers and would be done by as they do. An attractive personality softened the force of the fall of Carman's reputation and possibly postponed it until after his death. Pratt has been gifted with an even more attractive personal character than Carman, and he has for at least thirty years had intimate and influential contact with those who have the greatest means and prestige at their disposal for the raising of a literary reputation. Few critics in Canada today, even if they felt like doing so, would directly attack the poetry of E. J. Pratt. In the first place, such an attack would impugn the judg ment of Canada's leading critics, men who have acclaimed Pratt as our one major poet; at the same time, such an attack might cause pain to a man whose integrity and warmth of character have made him a living legend.