Montreal Group
Encyclopedia
The Montreal Group was a circle of Canadian modernist writers
formed in the mid-1920s at McGill University
in Montreal, Quebec, which included Leon Edel
, John Glassco
, A.M. Klein
, Leo Kennedy
, F.R. Scott
, and A.J.M. Smith
. Most of the group's members attended McGill as undergraduates. Due to this connection, the group is also referred to as the McGill Group or McGill Movement. The group especially championed the theory and practice of modernist poetry
over the Victorian
-style versification, best exemplified by the Confederation Poets
, that predominated in Canadian poetry
at the time.
The Montreal Group is "defined by its ‘little magazines’, which catered to innovative prose and poetry influenced by contemporary movements in British and American modernism
," and "also by its belated inheritance of a fin-de-siècle poetics from the aesthetic and decadent movement
s in Europe." The Encyclopædia Britannica
credits the group and its members with having "precipitated a renaissance
of Canadian poetry during the 1920s and ’30s by advocating a break with the traditional picturesque landscape poetry that had dominated Canadian poetry since the late 19th century. They encouraged an emulation of the realistic themes, metaphysical complexity, and techniques of the U.S. and British poets Ezra Pound
, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden that resulted in an Expressionist, Modernist
, and often Imagist poetry reflective of the values of an urban and cosmopolitan civilization."
, Bliss Carman
, Archibald Lampman
and Duncan Campbell Scott
. This poetry, although striving for a certain Canadian quality, was very much the offspring of English Victorian verse. The majority of versifiers in Canada were to cling to this mode of expression until the beginning of the 1940's." While some Canadians were writing modernist poetry – W.W.E. Ross
, R.G. Everson, Raymond Knister
, and Dorothy Livesay
were all publishing Imagist poetry in free verse
– "Their activity was individual and unrelated; their poems appeared in American and English literary publications. In Canada, there was no focal point, no center of activity as of yet."
That changed with the coming of the Montreal Group. The little magazines they founded gave Canadian modernism a focal point. As Louis Dudek
and Michael Gnarowski were to write four decades later, in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967):
The Montreal Group was responsible for several different publications which for the firs time gave Canadian modernists the chance to publish in their own country.
." Fellow student F.R. Scott
has described those days: "He [Smith] was running the McGill Daily Literary Supplement and every Wednesday you opened it up and there was an insert with some bright poems, a few articles, and book reviews. This delighted me when I was a law student because the lectures were usually so dull that you had to read something during them."
When Scott submitted a translation of "an old French chanson", Smith printed it, and subsequently invited Scott to serve on the editorial board. "Then we heard that the students' society had decided not to give any money to publish the Literary Supplement because it contained no advertising." Smith and Scott decided to close the Supplement and "found a new independent student journal" instead.
, and [Leon] Edel
as editors of the McGill Fortnightly Review (MFR)," which was "the first journal to publish modernist poetry and critical opinion in Canada." The MFR, "the most important of the group's periodicals, ... announced itself in November 1925 as ‘an independent journal of literature, the arts and student affairs edited and published by a group of undergraduates at McGill University’." "Other writers associated with the journal were A.M. Klein and Leo Kennedy
." (However, "Klein never published in the Review; his one submission was rejected because he refused to change the word ‘soul’, which the editors considered insufficiently modern." ).
The name came from that bastion of Victorian
tradition, the Fortnightly Review
; and the first issue actually praised a talk Bliss Carman had given at McGill. But at least by issue three (when Smith was offering readers an analysis of The Waste Land
), there was no doubt where the new biweekly stood. It is fair to say that "The programmatic introduction of Modernism into Canadian poetry as well as the first stirrings of the tradition of the little magazine in Canada began on November 21, 1925 with the printing of the first issue of The McGill Fortnightly Review."
The program had two parts. First, "there was criticism to be leveled at the literary temper of the times, which the McGill group saw as embodied by the Canadian Authors' Association promoting the quasi-Victorian verse of the twenties. The McGill group took pot-shots at the C.A.A. throughout the duration of the publication of The McGill Fortnightly Review and The Canadian Mercury" which succeeded it. For example, the MFR's second issue attacked the C.A.A.'s promotion of a Canadian "Book Week" – "Publicity, advertising and the methods of big business are not what is required to foster the art and literature of a young country such as Canada, while the commercial boosting of mediocre Canadian books not only reduces the Authors' Association to the level of an advertising agency but does considerable harm to good literature" – while in 1927 "The last issue of the journal included F.R. Scott's much-anthologized satirical poem ‘The Canadian authors meet’, which pilloried the Association as representing amateurism in art."
"Second, there was the new program of Modernism to be put forward; this was presented in articles and in the poems themselves." There were plenty of articles on the subject in the MFR's brief existence: "In various editorials, Smith argued that Canadian poets must go beyond the ‘maple-leaf school’ of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G.D. Roberts in favour of free verse, imagistic treatment, displacement, complexity, and a leaner diction free of Victorian mannerisms."
Iconoclastic American journalist H.L. Mencken was a major influence on the Group's prose style. "Publisher Louis Schwartz, in the only piece he contributed to The McGill Fortnightly Review, calls Mencken 'the creator of a new sort of writing ... Americanese of a racy bumptiousness so vivacious and interesting that he is eagerly followed by a large number of people.... Mencken is essentially a young man's critic, violent and destructive."
But what was more important was the example of the poetry. Just being a place for modernists to ply their craft, to learn from and teach each other, was enough to make the MFR important. Years later, Edel wrote that "The McGill Fortnightly drew to it other young writers — among them A.M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel — on whom, as well as on Scott, Smith had an enduring influence." "Its historic value is lodged in the fact that it brought a group of promising poets together, gave them editorial experience and finally pointed them in the right direction, thus starting a literary movement on its way. The McGill group, as it has come to be known, consisting of Scott, Smith and Leo Kennedy (Klein was to join them later in the pages of The Canadian Mercury), had its first practical experience within the pages of The McGill Fortnightly Review."
, "The Canadian Mercury was the first periodical produced by the Montreal Group without affiliation to McGill, financed by Montreal businessman [Louis] Schwartz." "Lou Schwartz, who had been the business manager for The McGill Fortnightly Review, served as The Canadian Mercury's 'sugar daddy'; he published it and paid its bills. As a result, The Canadian Mercury enjoyed considerable freedom as an independent journal of literature and opinion. Its editorial board consisted of Jean Burton, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy and Felix Walter."
Smith and Edel, doing graduate work in Edinburgh and Paris respectively, continued to contribute by mail. But there was an appeal to a wider base of writers. "Unlike the earlier two publications, the Mercury solicited contributions from a broader group of Canadian (and expatriate Canadian) writers and aimed at audiences beyond McGill and outside Montreal." The first issue, for instance, featured an essay on "The National Literature Problem in Canada" by Canadian institution Stephen Leacock
.
"Published between December 1928 and June 1929, the contents of The Canadian Mercury disclose the emergence of a modernist aesthetic
that was trying to counter a prevailing but lifeless strain of the Romantic tradition in Canada, and which would influence Canadian poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century.... Established at a crucial moment in the formation of the McGill group of poets, and thus of a significant strain of Canadian modernism, The Canadian Mercury documents a transition between poetic traditions. Canadian modernist poetry is not born in this magazine, but its head is emerging."
The Mercury continued the modernist program begun in the Review. Attacks on the C.A.A. continued, such as Leo Kennedy's polemic, "The Future of Canadian Literature," which opened double issue 5-6. "Kennedy sees the Association as fostering everything that is wrong with Canadian writing in the twenties; he sees the C.A.A. promoting archaic transplanted Victorianisms
isms which are then to be judged by purely parochial standards."
Along with that went the general dismissal of Canadian literature
. "Kennedy maintains that, at this time, 'the least attractive aspects of Victorianism still hold licensed Canadian creative writers firmly by the gullet. In poetry the Tennysonian and Wordsworthian
traditions still rule, and are bolstered by none of the genius and technical ability of those poets'.... Kennedy recognizes that the future of Canadian literature resides in the sceptical young writers [who] discuss Joyce
, Hemingway
, Shaw
, Pound and Aldous Huxley
rather than the Canadian poets of the Confederation.... Having begun to work their way clear of the dead philosophy and restrictions of the previous age, and having begun to comprehend the modern condition, it is these young writers who will be able to provide Canadian literature with a future."
In the Mercury's final issue, Scott reviewed Bliss Carman
's new book, Wild Garden (published posthumously; Carmen had died earlier in 1929
), finding not one decent poem in the book. "In 1913, F.S. Flint
(1885-1960) — and, behind him, Ezra Pound
(1885-1972) — had called, in a statement in Poetry, for a poetics that included a 'direct treatment of the thing,' an avoidance of words that do not 'contribute to the presentation,' and the rhythm of the musical phrase rather than that of the metronome (“Imagism” 199). Scott regards Carman’s poems as the antithesis of such poetry.... Taking up Smith’s programme, Scott criticizes Carmen’s use of precious diction; 'joyance, wondrous, beauteous, [and] lovesome' are, he argues, the kind of '"poetical words" so beloved of Victorian minor poets,' adding that 'there is not an idea, a metaphor, an adjective' in Carman’s volume 'that did not have the last drop of emotional content squeezed out of it before the beginning of this century.'"
Continued as well was the program of creating a Canadian modernist poetry
, now on a wider base. However, "It is not the slight poems of ... other contributors to The Canadian Mercury that will birth the McGill movement’s new kind of poetry but those of Klein and Kennedy and, especially, of Smith and Scott. Seven poems by Smith and Scott in The Canadian Mercury exemplify the kind of struggle with which their strain of a vitalizing modernism emerges from the deadwood of late Canadian Romanticism
.... We hear uncertain voices in The Canadian Mercury, but we also hear a strain of modernism that, though undeveloped, is emerging." ".
The Canadian Mercury folded in the wake of the economic Crash of 1929.
(who would later lead Canada's socialist New Democratic Party
). The publication's name was an obvious pun on the classic epic The Iliad
– privately, Klein called it the "McGill Yid" (a pun on his and Lewis's Yiddish heritage).
Under Klein's editorship the McGilliad carried the first published poem by then high school student Irving Layton
.
Under Lewis the magazine became more political: "It published many of his anti-communist views, though the December 1930 issue included an article he wrote expressing his approval of the Russian Revolution and calling for a greater understanding of the Soviet Union
."
." in 1931. In 1934 they invited Toronto poets E.J. Pratt and Robert Finch
to participate. The result, published in May 1936, was "an anthology that has between its covers the most famous enactment of modernist values in Canada."
For a Preface, Smith wrote a modernist manifesto
that declared Canadian poetry to be dead: "The fundamental criticism that must be brought against Canadian poetry as a whole is that it ignores the intelligence. And as a result it is dead." The Preface was not used. (It was incorporated into the reprinted edition in 1976.) However, Leon Edel for one later thought it had not been needed: "The poems in New provinces had an impact on Canadian verse far beyond any prefatorial pronouncements: in its implicit call for new findings and new attitudes in Canadian writing, it might be likened to the effect of the Wordsworth
-Coleridge
Lyrical ballads
in 1798
on the Romantics
.... The effect of New provinces was that it established the ‘Montreal Group’ as the Canadian avant-garde
of its time."
Anderson and Scott founded Montreal literary magazine Preview; A.M. Klein and P.K. Page also became part of the editorial group.
Preview "adopted an editorial thrust similar to that espoused by the earlier McGill Fortnightly R, so that there was a continuation of the cosmopolitan
impetus that had begun in the previous decade." "Preview's orientation was cosmopolitan; its members looked largely towards the English poets of the 1930s for inspiration."
By then, though, that cosmopolitanism was itself under attack, chiefly from another Montreal magazine, First Statement
(also founded in 1942, by Montreal poet John Sutherland
), which criticized the Montreal Group as "too exclusive in their demand for cosmopolitan sophistication, too ready to denounce the provincial in favour of anything new from far away."
By its very presence, First Statement showed that there was no longer a need for a Montreal Group, because the conditions that gave rise to it had changed. First, there were now venues for Canadian modernists to place their work, and virtually anyone who could not get published in one of them could start his own. (In fact, Sutherland had done just that, founding First Statement when Preview had rejected some of his poetry). Second, there was now no dispute about modernism. Neither magazine qustioned its tenets: "a number of poets, including Klein, saw fit to contribute to both First Statement and Preview, because both magazines held to an awareness of the new modernist standards."
Modernism was now the orthodoxy.
For those reasons, the day in 1945 that Preview and First Statement merged to become Northern Review
can be taken arbitrarily as the end of the Montreal Group.
, T.S. Eliot, H.D.
, Wallace Stevens
, e.e. cummings and Marianne Moore
, to mention just a few. They wished to freshen the craft conventions of Canadian poetry and therefore committed themselves to a new realism of expression, to tonal wit and irony, as opposed to merely effusive lyricism, and to a view of the poet as a responsible and intelligent commentator on culture and society."
to the core. Ironically, as members of the Group sometimes criticized the "Maple Leaf school" of poets for being wholly dependent on an imported tradition, they were vulnerable to the same criticism (which would be made, later, by the First Statement group). "A number of detactors saw [the Montreal group] as gulled by a thin cosmopolitanism that was at odds with the traditions of nationalist Canadian writing
, and some critics see them still as (ironically) derivative in their enthusiasm for poetic credos from elsewhere."
"Symbolism in Poetry," argued "the necessity for the use of symbolism in modern writing and provided some theoretical and historical background for this idea. In the final paragraph of the article Smith quotes Yeats on the role of symbolism in relation to modern poetry ... This symbolism is meant to effect 'a casting out of descriptions of nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion ... and of that vehemence that would make us do or not do certain things.' This denunciation of the excesses of Victorianism can also be seen to apply to the Canadian poets of Confederation, who, too often, became caught up in descriptions of nature and in extended moralizing."
. Theoretically,their views were no different from the Imagists they took them from. In his Rejected Preface to New Provinces, for example, Smith talked about the poets' attempt to "get rid of the facile word, the stereotyped phrase and the mechanical rhythm..." and "to combine colloquialism and rhetoric...." (all ideas straight from F.S. Flint's 1913 manifesto). Smith went on to give a notable definition of imagism: "The imagist seeks with perfect objectivity and impersonality to recreate a thing or arrest an experience as precisely and vividly and simply as possible."
Smith wrote a number of "Imagist poems" to illustrate the theory, "the most anthologised and famous of" which is "The Lonely Land." Some later critics deny "that these poems are merely derivative of Imagism or, indeed, that they are successful, even in theoretical terms, as imagist poems. On the contrary, many of them violate imagist theory as expressed by Pound, Hulme, and others, adapting imagist ideas and practices in ways that are fascinating and significant ... [showing the] reciprocal relations between imported poetics and their Canadian environments and contents"
Even modernist Canadian writers, though sometimes published in the group's magazines, were never saluted or even acknowledged in its poetics. "One gains the impression that the modern idiom in Canada '"sprang full-blown" from the editorial brow of A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott.' Smith has been credited with promoting the view that literary developments in Canada were a generation behind those of the international literary centres.... It was not until the 'forties that he acknowledged the efforts of his contemporaries like W.W.E. Ross
and Dorothy Livesay
."
Smith himself later repudiated this knee-jerk anti-Canadianism, and blamed it on youthful ignorance: "The atmosphere was a sort of diluted romanticism, a diluted transcendentalism. Bliss Carman
was the only Canadian poet that we had heard of and what we heard, we didn't care for much. It was only later, when I began to compile books on Canadian poetry, that I found that Lampman, Roberts and Carman had written some very fine poetry."
and American literature
, and there is little doubt that it would have come to Canada with or without the Montreal Group. Still, the Group can be seen to have made a unique contribution in two ways: first, through the individual writings of its members; second, through the influence of its particular poetics on writing in general.
As to the first: "The Montreal Group is recognized chiefly for the early writings of its poets who later established themselves among the major Canadian modernists of the 20th century." Members of the group have gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize
(Edel), five Governor General's Awards (Scott [2], Glassco, Klein, and Smith), three Lorne Pierce Medal
s (Klein, Scott, and Smith), and a National Book Award
(Edel).
As to the second: "In the end," says the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, "the McGill group changed the standard for writing poetry in Canada, and its sense of the function of the poet and the demands of poetic craft continued to influence the writing of poetry in Canada until the end of the 20th century."
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
formed in the mid-1920s at McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
in Montreal, Quebec, which included Leon Edel
Leon Edel
Joseph Leon Edel was a North American literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel....
, John Glassco
John Glassco
John Glassco was a Canadian poet, memoirist and novelist. "Glassco will be remembered for his brilliant autobiography, his elegant, classical poems, and for his translations." He is also remembered by some for his pornography.-Life:Born in Montreal to a well-off merchant family, John Glassco was...
, A.M. Klein
A. M. Klein
Abraham Moses Klein was a Canadian poet, journalist, novelist, short story writer, and lawyer. He has been called "One of Canada's greatest poets and a leading figure in Jewish-Canadian culture."...
, Leo Kennedy
Leo Kennedy
John Leo Kennedy was a Canadian poet and critic, who in the 1920s and 1930s was a member of the Montreal Group of modernist poets...
, F.R. Scott
F. R. Scott
Francis Reginald Scott, CC commonly known as Frank Scott or F.R. Scott, was a Canadian poet, intellectual and constitutional expert. He helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and its successor, the New Democratic Party...
, and A.J.M. Smith
A. J. M. Smith
Arthur James Marshall Smith was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" -- the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, and F.R...
. Most of the group's members attended McGill as undergraduates. Due to this connection, the group is also referred to as the McGill Group or McGill Movement. The group especially championed the theory and practice of modernist poetry
Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
over the Victorian
Victorian literature
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria . It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century....
-style versification, best exemplified by the Confederation Poets
Confederation Poets
"Confederation Poets" is the name given to a group of Canadian poets born in the decade of Canada's Confederation who rose to prominence in Canada in the late 1880s and 1890s. The term was coined by Canadian professor and literary critic Malcolm Ross, who applied it to four poets Charles G.D...
, that predominated in Canadian poetry
Canadian poetry
- Beginnings:The earliest works of poetry, mainly written by visitors, described the new territories in optimistic terms, mainly targeted at a European audience...
at the time.
The Montreal Group is "defined by its ‘little magazines’, which catered to innovative prose and poetry influenced by contemporary movements in British and American modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
," and "also by its belated inheritance of a fin-de-siècle poetics from the aesthetic and decadent movement
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
s in Europe." The Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
credits the group and its members with having "precipitated a renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
of Canadian poetry during the 1920s and ’30s by advocating a break with the traditional picturesque landscape poetry that had dominated Canadian poetry since the late 19th century. They encouraged an emulation of the realistic themes, metaphysical complexity, and techniques of the U.S. and British poets Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden that resulted in an Expressionist, Modernist
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, and often Imagist poetry reflective of the values of an urban and cosmopolitan civilization."
History
In the 1920s, the prevailing tradition in Canadian poetry was still the "one that had been established by the poets of the Confederation: Charles G.D. RobertsCharles G.D. Roberts
Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts, was a Canadian poet and prose writer who is known as the Father of Canadian Poetry. He was "almost the first Canadian author to obtain worldwide reputation and influence; he was also a tireless promoter and encourager of Canadian literature......
, Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years....
, Archibald Lampman
Archibald Lampman
Archibald Lampman, was a Canadian poet. "He has been described as 'the Canadian Keats;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that he is "generally considered the finest of Canada's late 19th-century poets in...
and Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott was a Canadian poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets....
. This poetry, although striving for a certain Canadian quality, was very much the offspring of English Victorian verse. The majority of versifiers in Canada were to cling to this mode of expression until the beginning of the 1940's." While some Canadians were writing modernist poetry – W.W.E. Ross
W.W.E. Ross
William Wrightson Eustace Ross was a Canadian geophysicist and poet. He was the first published poet in Canada to write Imagist poetry, and later the first to write surrealist verse, both of which have led some to call him "the first modern Canadian poet."-Life:Ross was born in Peterborough,...
, R.G. Everson, Raymond Knister
Raymond Knister
John Raymond Knister was a Canadian poet, novelist, story writer, columnist, and reviewer, "known primarily for his realistic narratives set in rural Canada .....
, and Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Kathleen May Livesay, was a Canadian poet who twice won the Governor General`s Award in the 1940s, and was "senior woman writer in Canada" during the 1970s and 1980s.-Life:...
were all publishing Imagist poetry in free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
– "Their activity was individual and unrelated; their poems appeared in American and English literary publications. In Canada, there was no focal point, no center of activity as of yet."
That changed with the coming of the Montreal Group. The little magazines they founded gave Canadian modernism a focal point. As Louis Dudek
Louis Dudek
Louis Dudek, OC was a Canadian poet, academic, and publisher known for his role in defining Modernism in poetry, and for his literary criticism. He was the author of over two dozen books...
and Michael Gnarowski were to write four decades later, in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967):
- The little magazine in Canada has been the most important single factor behind the rise and continued progress of modernism in Canadian poetry. The history of the little magazine covers a period of some forty years and closely parallels the development of modern poetry itself from the mid-1920's to the present time. All the important events in poetry and most of the initiating manifestoes and examples of change are to be found in the little magazines."
The Montreal Group was responsible for several different publications which for the firs time gave Canadian modernists the chance to publish in their own country.
McGill Daily Literary Supplement
This first publication began modestly enough, "as a weekly supplemental section of the McGill undergraduate society's newspaper, the McGill Daily." It "was edited by Allan Latham, A.P.R. Coulborn, and A.J.M. SmithA. J. M. Smith
Arthur James Marshall Smith was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" -- the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, and F.R...
." Fellow student F.R. Scott
F. R. Scott
Francis Reginald Scott, CC commonly known as Frank Scott or F.R. Scott, was a Canadian poet, intellectual and constitutional expert. He helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and its successor, the New Democratic Party...
has described those days: "He [Smith] was running the McGill Daily Literary Supplement and every Wednesday you opened it up and there was an insert with some bright poems, a few articles, and book reviews. This delighted me when I was a law student because the lectures were usually so dull that you had to read something during them."
When Scott submitted a translation of "an old French chanson", Smith printed it, and subsequently invited Scott to serve on the editorial board. "Then we heard that the students' society had decided not to give any money to publish the Literary Supplement because it contained no advertising." Smith and Scott decided to close the Supplement and "found a new independent student journal" instead.
McGill Fortnightly Review
Smith was "joined by Scott, [John] GlasscoJohn Glassco
John Glassco was a Canadian poet, memoirist and novelist. "Glassco will be remembered for his brilliant autobiography, his elegant, classical poems, and for his translations." He is also remembered by some for his pornography.-Life:Born in Montreal to a well-off merchant family, John Glassco was...
, and [Leon] Edel
Leon Edel
Joseph Leon Edel was a North American literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel....
as editors of the McGill Fortnightly Review (MFR)," which was "the first journal to publish modernist poetry and critical opinion in Canada." The MFR, "the most important of the group's periodicals, ... announced itself in November 1925 as ‘an independent journal of literature, the arts and student affairs edited and published by a group of undergraduates at McGill University’." "Other writers associated with the journal were A.M. Klein and Leo Kennedy
Leo Kennedy
John Leo Kennedy was a Canadian poet and critic, who in the 1920s and 1930s was a member of the Montreal Group of modernist poets...
." (However, "Klein never published in the Review; his one submission was rejected because he refused to change the word ‘soul’, which the editors considered insufficiently modern." ).
The name came from that bastion of Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
tradition, the Fortnightly Review
Fortnightly Review
Fortnightly Review was one of the most important and influential magazines in nineteenth-century England. It was founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, and six others with an investment of £9,000; the first edition appeared on 15 May 1865...
; and the first issue actually praised a talk Bliss Carman had given at McGill. But at least by issue three (when Smith was offering readers an analysis of The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
), there was no doubt where the new biweekly stood. It is fair to say that "The programmatic introduction of Modernism into Canadian poetry as well as the first stirrings of the tradition of the little magazine in Canada began on November 21, 1925 with the printing of the first issue of The McGill Fortnightly Review."
The program had two parts. First, "there was criticism to be leveled at the literary temper of the times, which the McGill group saw as embodied by the Canadian Authors' Association promoting the quasi-Victorian verse of the twenties. The McGill group took pot-shots at the C.A.A. throughout the duration of the publication of The McGill Fortnightly Review and The Canadian Mercury" which succeeded it. For example, the MFR's second issue attacked the C.A.A.'s promotion of a Canadian "Book Week" – "Publicity, advertising and the methods of big business are not what is required to foster the art and literature of a young country such as Canada, while the commercial boosting of mediocre Canadian books not only reduces the Authors' Association to the level of an advertising agency but does considerable harm to good literature" – while in 1927 "The last issue of the journal included F.R. Scott's much-anthologized satirical poem ‘The Canadian authors meet’, which pilloried the Association as representing amateurism in art."
"Second, there was the new program of Modernism to be put forward; this was presented in articles and in the poems themselves." There were plenty of articles on the subject in the MFR's brief existence: "In various editorials, Smith argued that Canadian poets must go beyond the ‘maple-leaf school’ of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G.D. Roberts in favour of free verse, imagistic treatment, displacement, complexity, and a leaner diction free of Victorian mannerisms."
Iconoclastic American journalist H.L. Mencken was a major influence on the Group's prose style. "Publisher Louis Schwartz, in the only piece he contributed to The McGill Fortnightly Review, calls Mencken 'the creator of a new sort of writing ... Americanese of a racy bumptiousness so vivacious and interesting that he is eagerly followed by a large number of people.... Mencken is essentially a young man's critic, violent and destructive."
But what was more important was the example of the poetry. Just being a place for modernists to ply their craft, to learn from and teach each other, was enough to make the MFR important. Years later, Edel wrote that "The McGill Fortnightly drew to it other young writers — among them A.M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel — on whom, as well as on Scott, Smith had an enduring influence." "Its historic value is lodged in the fact that it brought a group of promising poets together, gave them editorial experience and finally pointed them in the right direction, thus starting a literary movement on its way. The McGill group, as it has come to be known, consisting of Scott, Smith and Leo Kennedy (Klein was to join them later in the pages of The Canadian Mercury), had its first practical experience within the pages of The McGill Fortnightly Review."
Canadian Mercury
Founded in 19281928 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Russian poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky found OBERIU , an avant-garde grouping of Russian post-Futurist poets in the 1920s-1930s* American poets Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Louis...
, "The Canadian Mercury was the first periodical produced by the Montreal Group without affiliation to McGill, financed by Montreal businessman [Louis] Schwartz." "Lou Schwartz, who had been the business manager for The McGill Fortnightly Review, served as The Canadian Mercury's 'sugar daddy'; he published it and paid its bills. As a result, The Canadian Mercury enjoyed considerable freedom as an independent journal of literature and opinion. Its editorial board consisted of Jean Burton, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy and Felix Walter."
Smith and Edel, doing graduate work in Edinburgh and Paris respectively, continued to contribute by mail. But there was an appeal to a wider base of writers. "Unlike the earlier two publications, the Mercury solicited contributions from a broader group of Canadian (and expatriate Canadian) writers and aimed at audiences beyond McGill and outside Montreal." The first issue, for instance, featured an essay on "The National Literature Problem in Canada" by Canadian institution Stephen Leacock
Stephen Leacock
Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC was an English-born Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist...
.
"Published between December 1928 and June 1929, the contents of The Canadian Mercury disclose the emergence of a modernist aesthetic
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
that was trying to counter a prevailing but lifeless strain of the Romantic tradition in Canada, and which would influence Canadian poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century.... Established at a crucial moment in the formation of the McGill group of poets, and thus of a significant strain of Canadian modernism, The Canadian Mercury documents a transition between poetic traditions. Canadian modernist poetry is not born in this magazine, but its head is emerging."
The Mercury continued the modernist program begun in the Review. Attacks on the C.A.A. continued, such as Leo Kennedy's polemic, "The Future of Canadian Literature," which opened double issue 5-6. "Kennedy sees the Association as fostering everything that is wrong with Canadian writing in the twenties; he sees the C.A.A. promoting archaic transplanted Victorianisms
Victorianism
Victorianism is the name given to the attitudes, art, and culture of the later two-thirds of the 19th century. This usage is strong within social history and the study of literature, less so in philosophy. Many disciplines do not use the term, but instead prefer Victorian Era, or simply "Late 19th...
isms which are then to be judged by purely parochial standards."
Along with that went the general dismissal of Canadian literature
Canadian literature
Canadian literature is literature originating from Canada. Collectively it is often called CanLit. Some criticism of Canadian literature has focused on nationalistic and regional themes, although this is only a small portion of Canadian Literary criticism...
. "Kennedy maintains that, at this time, 'the least attractive aspects of Victorianism still hold licensed Canadian creative writers firmly by the gullet. In poetry the Tennysonian and Wordsworthian
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
traditions still rule, and are bolstered by none of the genius and technical ability of those poets'.... Kennedy recognizes that the future of Canadian literature resides in the sceptical young writers [who] discuss Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
, Pound and Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
rather than the Canadian poets of the Confederation.... Having begun to work their way clear of the dead philosophy and restrictions of the previous age, and having begun to comprehend the modern condition, it is these young writers who will be able to provide Canadian literature with a future."
In the Mercury's final issue, Scott reviewed Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years....
's new book, Wild Garden (published posthumously; Carmen had died earlier in 1929
1929 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Little Review, edited by Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap, ceases publication* The Dial ceases publication...
), finding not one decent poem in the book. "In 1913, F.S. Flint
F. S. Flint
Frank Stuart Flint was an English poet and translator who was a prominent member of the Imagist group. Ford Madox Ford called him "one of the greatest men and one of the beautiful spirits of the country"....
(1885-1960) — and, behind him, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
(1885-1972) — had called, in a statement in Poetry, for a poetics that included a 'direct treatment of the thing,' an avoidance of words that do not 'contribute to the presentation,' and the rhythm of the musical phrase rather than that of the metronome (“Imagism” 199). Scott regards Carman’s poems as the antithesis of such poetry.... Taking up Smith’s programme, Scott criticizes Carmen’s use of precious diction; 'joyance, wondrous, beauteous, [and] lovesome' are, he argues, the kind of '"poetical words" so beloved of Victorian minor poets,' adding that 'there is not an idea, a metaphor, an adjective' in Carman’s volume 'that did not have the last drop of emotional content squeezed out of it before the beginning of this century.'"
Continued as well was the program of creating a Canadian modernist poetry
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...
, now on a wider base. However, "It is not the slight poems of ... other contributors to The Canadian Mercury that will birth the McGill movement’s new kind of poetry but those of Klein and Kennedy and, especially, of Smith and Scott. Seven poems by Smith and Scott in The Canadian Mercury exemplify the kind of struggle with which their strain of a vitalizing modernism emerges from the deadwood of late Canadian Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
.... We hear uncertain voices in The Canadian Mercury, but we also hear a strain of modernism that, though undeveloped, is emerging." ".
The Canadian Mercury folded in the wake of the economic Crash of 1929.
The McGilliad
This little-known successor McGill publication was founded in 1930 and ran until 1931. It was edited first by co-founder Klein, and then by Klein's friend, co-founder David LewisDavid Lewis (politician)
David Lewis, CC was a Russian-born Canadian labour lawyer and social democratic politician. He was national secretary of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation from 1936 to 1950, and one of the key architects of the New Democratic Party in 1961...
(who would later lead Canada's socialist New Democratic Party
New Democratic Party
The New Democratic Party , commonly referred to as the NDP, is a federal social-democratic political party in Canada. The interim leader of the NDP is Nycole Turmel who was appointed to the position due to the illness of Jack Layton, who died on August 22, 2011. The provincial wings of the NDP in...
). The publication's name was an obvious pun on the classic epic The Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
– privately, Klein called it the "McGill Yid" (a pun on his and Lewis's Yiddish heritage).
Under Klein's editorship the McGilliad carried the first published poem by then high school student Irving Layton
Irving Layton
Irving Peter Layton, OC was a Romanian-born Canadian poet. He was known for his "tell it like it is" style which won him a wide following but also made enemies. As T...
.
Under Lewis the magazine became more political: "It published many of his anti-communist views, though the December 1930 issue included an article he wrote expressing his approval of the Russian Revolution and calling for a greater understanding of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
."
New Provinces
"After the departure of key figures such as Smith, Glassco, Edel, and Kennedy from Montreal in the late 1920s, four of the poets from the Montreal Group (Smith, Kennedy, Klein, and Scott) reunited for the publication of the anthology New Provinces: Poems by Several AuthorsNew Provinces (poetry anthology)
New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors was an anthology of Canadian poetry published in the 1930s, anonymously edited by F.R. Scott assisted by Leo Kennedy and A.J.M. Smith. The first anthology of Canadian modernist poetry, it has been hailed as a "landmark anthology" and a "milestone selection...
." in 1931. In 1934 they invited Toronto poets E.J. Pratt and Robert Finch
Robert Finch (poet)
Robert Duer Claydon Finch was a Canadian poet and academic. He twice won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, for his poetry.-Life:...
to participate. The result, published in May 1936, was "an anthology that has between its covers the most famous enactment of modernist values in Canada."
For a Preface, Smith wrote a modernist manifesto
Manifesto
A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. Manifestos may also be life stance-related.-Etymology:...
that declared Canadian poetry to be dead: "The fundamental criticism that must be brought against Canadian poetry as a whole is that it ignores the intelligence. And as a result it is dead." The Preface was not used. (It was incorporated into the reprinted edition in 1976.) However, Leon Edel for one later thought it had not been needed: "The poems in New provinces had an impact on Canadian verse far beyond any prefatorial pronouncements: in its implicit call for new findings and new attitudes in Canadian writing, it might be likened to the effect of the Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
-Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
Lyrical ballads
Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...
in 1798
1798 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* William Wordsworth begins writing the first version of The Prelude, finishing it in two parts in 1799. This version describes the growth of his understanding up to age 17, when he departed for...
on the Romantics
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
.... The effect of New provinces was that it established the ‘Montreal Group’ as the Canadian avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
of its time."
Preview
Scott "was one of the organizers of Preview"; the other was Montreal poet Patrick Anderson. In March 19421942 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* George Oppen forces his induction into the U.S. Army....
Anderson and Scott founded Montreal literary magazine Preview; A.M. Klein and P.K. Page also became part of the editorial group.
Preview "adopted an editorial thrust similar to that espoused by the earlier McGill Fortnightly R, so that there was a continuation of the cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
impetus that had begun in the previous decade." "Preview's orientation was cosmopolitan; its members looked largely towards the English poets of the 1930s for inspiration."
By then, though, that cosmopolitanism was itself under attack, chiefly from another Montreal magazine, First Statement
First Statement
First Statement was a Canadian literary magazine published in Montreal, Quebec from 1942 to 1945. During its short life the magazine, along with its rival publication Preview with which it often shared contributors, provided one of the few publication avenues for modernist Canadian poetry at a time...
(also founded in 1942, by Montreal poet John Sutherland
John Sutherland (Canadian writer)
John Sutherland was a Canadian poet, literary critic, and magazine editor based in Montreal, Quebec. Although he published numerous poems of his own, he was perhaps better known as the founder and editor of two important Canadian literary magazines, First Statement and Northern Review...
), which criticized the Montreal Group as "too exclusive in their demand for cosmopolitan sophistication, too ready to denounce the provincial in favour of anything new from far away."
By its very presence, First Statement showed that there was no longer a need for a Montreal Group, because the conditions that gave rise to it had changed. First, there were now venues for Canadian modernists to place their work, and virtually anyone who could not get published in one of them could start his own. (In fact, Sutherland had done just that, founding First Statement when Preview had rejected some of his poetry). Second, there was now no dispute about modernism. Neither magazine qustioned its tenets: "a number of poets, including Klein, saw fit to contribute to both First Statement and Preview, because both magazines held to an awareness of the new modernist standards."
Modernism was now the orthodoxy.
For those reasons, the day in 1945 that Preview and First Statement merged to become Northern Review
Northern Review
Northern Review was a Montreal-based literary magazine published in Canada between 1945 and 1956. It resulted from the merger between two earlier magazines, Preview and First Statement, both of which were also Montreal-based. Poet and literary critic John Sutherland, who founded First Statement,...
can be taken arbitrarily as the end of the Montreal Group.
Theory
"The McGill Group sought to modernize Canadian poetry writing, and its members drew eclectically on the influences of imagism and symbolism as manifested in the works of poets such as William Butler YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
, T.S. Eliot, H.D.
H.D.
H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
, e.e. cummings and Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
, to mention just a few. They wished to freshen the craft conventions of Canadian poetry and therefore committed themselves to a new realism of expression, to tonal wit and irony, as opposed to merely effusive lyricism, and to a view of the poet as a responsible and intelligent commentator on culture and society."
Cosmopolitanism
As the above list of models shows, the Smith group drew its models and its teachings from world literature. And world literature was what it tried to write. Like the Confederation Poets, the members of the Montreal Group were cosmopolitansCosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
to the core. Ironically, as members of the Group sometimes criticized the "Maple Leaf school" of poets for being wholly dependent on an imported tradition, they were vulnerable to the same criticism (which would be made, later, by the First Statement group). "A number of detactors saw [the Montreal group] as gulled by a thin cosmopolitanism that was at odds with the traditions of nationalist Canadian writing
Canadian nationalism
Canadian nationalism is a term which has been applied to ideologies of several different types which highlight and promote specifically Canadian interests over those of other countries, notably the United States...
, and some critics see them still as (ironically) derivative in their enthusiasm for poetic credos from elsewhere."
Symbolism
Smith, "who was to be the theoretician of the new poetry," wrote about symbolism in the second issue of MFR. His essay,"Symbolism in Poetry," argued "the necessity for the use of symbolism in modern writing and provided some theoretical and historical background for this idea. In the final paragraph of the article Smith quotes Yeats on the role of symbolism in relation to modern poetry ... This symbolism is meant to effect 'a casting out of descriptions of nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion ... and of that vehemence that would make us do or not do certain things.' This denunciation of the excesses of Victorianism can also be seen to apply to the Canadian poets of Confederation, who, too often, became caught up in descriptions of nature and in extended moralizing."
Imagism
As important as symbolism to the Montreal modernists was ImagismImagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
. Theoretically,their views were no different from the Imagists they took them from. In his Rejected Preface to New Provinces, for example, Smith talked about the poets' attempt to "get rid of the facile word, the stereotyped phrase and the mechanical rhythm..." and "to combine colloquialism and rhetoric...." (all ideas straight from F.S. Flint's 1913 manifesto). Smith went on to give a notable definition of imagism: "The imagist seeks with perfect objectivity and impersonality to recreate a thing or arrest an experience as precisely and vividly and simply as possible."
Smith wrote a number of "Imagist poems" to illustrate the theory, "the most anthologised and famous of" which is "The Lonely Land." Some later critics deny "that these poems are merely derivative of Imagism or, indeed, that they are successful, even in theoretical terms, as imagist poems. On the contrary, many of them violate imagist theory as expressed by Pound, Hulme, and others, adapting imagist ideas and practices in ways that are fascinating and significant ... [showing the] reciprocal relations between imported poetics and their Canadian environments and contents"
Determinism
In Volume II No. 4 of the MFR, Smith wrote an article arguing "that the new poetry 'must be the result of the impingement of modern conditions upon the personality and temperament of the poet' ... whatever the poet's response to modern civilization, Smith rightly saw 'the peculiar conditions of the time [as having] forced them all to seek a new and more direct expression, to perfect a finer technique.' Smith saw the experimentation in the forms of the arts that was so prevalent in the 1910's and 1920's not as something that stemmed out of a conscious choice on the part of writers, but as a condition 'forced' upon them."Anti-Canadianism
A part of the Montreal Group's program that looks questionable is its extreme anti-Canadianism. No Canadian writer (outside their own contributors) ever seemed to get a favourable comment in the movement's publications. Not because it had been read and found wanting; but because mostly it had not been read in the first place. As Leo Kennedy gleefully told biographer Patricia Morley in the 1970s: "We despised them unbeknownst, and you can quote me." Or as Scott later put it, "it was all through us. There was the general feeling that practically all poetry — particularly Canadian poetry — was hardly worth looking at, that something new had to be found, new methods of expression."Even modernist Canadian writers, though sometimes published in the group's magazines, were never saluted or even acknowledged in its poetics. "One gains the impression that the modern idiom in Canada '"sprang full-blown" from the editorial brow of A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott.' Smith has been credited with promoting the view that literary developments in Canada were a generation behind those of the international literary centres.... It was not until the 'forties that he acknowledged the efforts of his contemporaries like W.W.E. Ross
W.W.E. Ross
William Wrightson Eustace Ross was a Canadian geophysicist and poet. He was the first published poet in Canada to write Imagist poetry, and later the first to write surrealist verse, both of which have led some to call him "the first modern Canadian poet."-Life:Ross was born in Peterborough,...
and Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Kathleen May Livesay, was a Canadian poet who twice won the Governor General`s Award in the 1940s, and was "senior woman writer in Canada" during the 1970s and 1980s.-Life:...
."
Smith himself later repudiated this knee-jerk anti-Canadianism, and blamed it on youthful ignorance: "The atmosphere was a sort of diluted romanticism, a diluted transcendentalism. Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years....
was the only Canadian poet that we had heard of and what we heard, we didn't care for much. It was only later, when I began to compile books on Canadian poetry, that I found that Lampman, Roberts and Carman had written some very fine poetry."
Legacy
By the mid-1920s modernism was already firmly entrenched in both BritishBritish literature
British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...
and American literature
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
, and there is little doubt that it would have come to Canada with or without the Montreal Group. Still, the Group can be seen to have made a unique contribution in two ways: first, through the individual writings of its members; second, through the influence of its particular poetics on writing in general.
As to the first: "The Montreal Group is recognized chiefly for the early writings of its poets who later established themselves among the major Canadian modernists of the 20th century." Members of the group have gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
(Edel), five Governor General's Awards (Scott [2], Glassco, Klein, and Smith), three Lorne Pierce Medal
Lorne Pierce Medal
The Lorne Pierce Medal is awarded every two years by the Royal Society of Canada to recognize achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature written in either English or French...
s (Klein, Scott, and Smith), and a National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
(Edel).
As to the second: "In the end," says the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, "the McGill group changed the standard for writing poetry in Canada, and its sense of the function of the poet and the demands of poetic craft continued to influence the writing of poetry in Canada until the end of the 20th century."
Books
- Stevens, Peter ed. The McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott and Leo Kennedy. (Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1969). ISBN 9780770002947
Articles
- Ken Norris, "The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism," Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews, No. 11 (Fall/Winter, 1982), Canadian Poetry, UWO, Web.
- Alan Richards, "Between Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Poems of A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott in The Canadian Mercury (1928-29)," Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, Volume 30, Number 1 (2005), UNB.ca, Web.