During the Second World War, a number of young Canadian poets converged on Montreal and, in a few years of little-magazine and small-press publication, rewrote the story of modern English-Canadian poetry. The Montreal Forties establishes a new reading of Canadian modernist poetry in this crucial decade, during which the radical impersonality of high-modernist poetics gave way to an ironic expression of the modern individual in years of unexampled geopolitical and private crisis.
The book discusses four major English-Canadian poets of the forties; P.K. Page, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Louis Dudek. The character of the decade's poetry is explored through close scrutiny of the largely unread work published in the little magazines Preview and First Statement, as well as reference to their criticism, correspondence, and journals. Brian Trehearne shows that the Canadian poets emerging in Montreal in the 1940s faced in common a coherent set of artistic challenges general to poetry in English at that time. Chief among these was the function and value of the striking modernist Image in the 'whole' poem newly demanded of a generation at war, a matter vigorously debated by poets in Britain and the United States as well. The Montreal Forties allows us for the first time to see artists as diverse as Page and Layton, Klein and Dudek as part of a single Canadian and international generation, and breaks new ground for critics of Canadian modernist poetry.
Authors
- Bibliography, etc. Note
- Includes bibliographical references and index
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 811/.509971428
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 21
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- Geographic Area Code
- n-cn-qu
- ISBN
- 9781442681729 0802044522
- LCCN
- PR9190.5.M6
- LCCN Item number
- T74 1999eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaOTU
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (x, 381 p.)
- Published in
- Canada
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)thg00600599 (OCoLC)288146466 (CaOOCEL)417933
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaOTU
Table of Contents
- CONTENTS 8
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 10
- Introduction: Reading the Forties Poets 14
- 1 Imagist Twilight: Page's Early Poetry 52
- 2 The Poem in the Mind: The Integritas of Klein in the Forties 117
- 3 Image and Ego: Layton's Lyric Progress 185
- 4 Forties Continuations: Dudek's Long Poems and the Period Style 247
- Conclusion: The Generation of the Forties 319
- NOTES 332
- BIBLIOGRAPHY 368
- SOURCES AND PERMISSIONS 384
- INDEX 386
- A 386
- B 386
- C 386
- D 387
- E 388
- F 388
- G 388
- H 388
- I 388
- J 388
- K 388
- L 389
- M 390
- N 390
- O 390
- P 390
- R 391
- S 392
- T 392
- W 392
