Keepers of the Code : English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of the Nation [1 ed.] 9781442663466, 9781442613966

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KEEPERS OF THE CODE English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation

Keepers of the Code explores the complex network of associations and negotiations that influenced the development of literary anthologies in English Canada from 1837 to the present. Lecker shows that these anthologies are deeply conflicted narratives that embody the tensions and anxieties felt by their editors when faced with the challenge of constructing or rejecting national ideals. He argues that these are intensely self-conscious works with their own literary mechanisms and architecture. In reading the history of these anthologies, he witnesses a complex narrative of nation, a compelling story about the values and interests informing English-Canadian literary history. robert lecker is Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University.

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Keepers of the Code English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation

ROBERT LECKER

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2013 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-1-4426-4571-4 (cloth) isbn 978-1-4426-1396-6 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Lecker, Robert, 1951– Keepers of the code : English-Canadian literary anthologies and the representation of nation / Robert Lecker. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4571-4 (bound) isbn 978-1-4426-1396-6 (pbk.) 1. Canadian literature (English) – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 2. Anthologies – History and criticism. 3. Anthologies – Editing. 4. Literature publishing – Canada – History. 5. Canon (Literature). 6. National characteristics, Canadian, in literature. 7. Canada – In literature. I. Title. ps8021.l43 2013

c810.9

c2012-906570-6

The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

If only one book is to be chosen as an investment, or experiment, in the national literature, it should be a volume illustrating the quantity, variety and quality of Canadian poetry – an anthology. William Arthur Deacon, Poteen (1926) The ideal anthologist is a paragon of tact and learning. In him an impeccable taste is combined with a completeness and accuracy of information that is colossal. To an understanding of historical development and social upheavals he adds a sensitiveness to the finest nuances of poetic feeling. He is unprejudiced, impersonal, humble, self-confident, catholic, fastidious, original, traditional, adventurous, sympathetic, and ruthless. He has no special axe to grind. He is afraid of mediocrity and the verses of his friends. He does not exist. A.J.M. Smith, ‘Canadian Anthologies, New and Old’ (1941) For a good anthologist is – objectively considered – both a critic and a literary historian. His selection is really a judgment on the poets of the age he is presenting and also a time chart of the significant writing that age projects. We can learn as much about Victorian literary judgments from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as from any but the greatest nineteenth century critics. George Woodcock, ‘Two Aspects of A.J.M. Smith’ (1970) Who is the maker of anthologies and why? Is every writer his own secret anthologist? And after all, what is an anthology? A collection of poems or essays or stories? One long poem, itself, as James Reaney would have it? A critical rather than an historical comment? Eli Mandel, ‘Masks of Criticism: A.J.M. Smith as Anthologist’ (1979) How anthologies represent and/or produce value, as well as what that value entails, depends on the contexts within which they are disseminated and consolidated. Smaro Kamboureli, Making a Difference (2007)

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

3

1 Nineteenth-Century Anthologies and the Making of Canadian Literature, 1837–1900 22 2 Representations of Nation: Watson and Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature, 1900–1922 71 3 Anthologies between the Wars, 1922–1943

107

4 From The Book of Canadian Poetry to New Wave Canada, 1943–1966 166 5 Nation Making, Nation Breaking, 1967–1982 6 Solidifying the Canadian Canon, 1982–1996 7 Keeping the Code, 1996–2010 Works Cited Credits Index

367 369

343

305

214 267

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Acknowledgments

My thanks go to the following people who assisted me in various stages of the research connected with this book: Michael Darling, Joel Deshaye, Margery Fee, Claudine Gélinas-Faucher, Allan Hepburn, Gina Mitchell, Veronica Somos, Jacquelyn Sundberg, and Mary Williams. I am particularly indebted to Jodi Lewchuk for her expert editorial work on an earlier draft of this study. Thanks also to the editorial team at University of Toronto Press: Leah Connor, Siobhan McMenemy, and Frances Mundy. The writing and research for this project was supported through funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am very grateful for this assistance.

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KEEPERS OF THE CODE English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation

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Introduction

This is the first study of English-Canadian literature anthologies. While it discusses almost two hundred works published from 1837 to the present, its central focus is on those collections that define themselves as pan-Canadian in their perspective – books that are not restricted to a particular region, movement, age group, or period. I have strayed from this focus in the case of a few anthologies that have had a special historical impact, even though their subject matter might not be national in scope. I am interested in discovering how these anthologies represent the nation through its literature and in determining what unites them as texts that pursue this goal. Like many of the anthologists discussed in these pages, I feel the need to apologize for all that I have left out: this study can only begin to acknowledge the diverse range of interests and constituencies served by Canadian anthologies, many of which set out to challenge the very idea that any anthology could ever represent the wide-ranging literature of the country. Despite this disclaimer, the idea of effectively collecting the best of the nation’s literature has been a dream shared by influential anthologists in English Canada from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Although my broad intention is to treat these anthologies in the context of questions related to canon formation, national identity, and the material forces that have allowed Canadian literature to be published and disseminated, I also consider these works as narratives that embody the tensions and anxieties felt by their editors when faced with the challenge of constructing or rejecting national ideals. I argue that these editors share a complex code that translates their literary nationalism into archetypes, symbols, and metaphors that appear again and again in anthologies of English-Canadian literature. Their anthologies are never

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innocent collections; they are intensely self-conscious literary constructions with their own literary mechanisms and architecture. In reading the history of these anthologies I am also witnessing the unfolding of a conflicted narrative created by numerous English-Canadian editors who share a set of explicit and implicit values that align them in their task. I am particularly drawn to those collections that express a deepseated anxiety about their editors’ own attempts to assemble a picture of the nation that refuses to cohere. These anthologies are existential objects, anxious expressions of the desire for place and identity. As symbolic constructions erected in the midst of what was once a figuratively empty plain, they are maps, namings, narratives that try to impose order on the wilderness. Their editors imagine themselves as archetypal wanderers looking for a new place to call home. I call this group of editors the keepers of the code. At one level, this code is easy to describe: modern editors of EnglishCanadian literary anthologies are united by a deeply rooted sense of nationalism that links them with their nineteenth-century counterparts; the selections in these anthologies are geared towards supporting, rather than challenging, conceptions of nation and national identity. Because the valorization of nation rests on the idea of wholeness and continuity, the most influential anthologies of English-Canadian literature implicitly support the kinds of poetry and fiction that are best suited to reinforcing the concreteness of nation – conservative works that tend towards the mimetic and the realistic, rather than towards the expressive and the experimental. As Margery Fee has shown, the impact of European Romantic nationalism on Canadian literature and criticism was ‘firmly established in Canada well before 1890.’ A ‘central tenet of this theory is that great literature is the expression of the national soul.’ English-Canadian anthologists have participated in this Romantic nationalist tradition by linking the literature of the country ‘with what are considered distinctive characteristics of that nation – its language, geography, climate, race, history, myth, and folklore.’ Fee argues that this ‘national spirit’ is ‘simply a learned literary convention, transmitted from Europe, adapted to Canadian needs as well as possible by English-Canadian critics, and adhered to quite closely by those writers who wished to be considered Canadian.’ Fee calls this the ‘national convention’ (‘Literary Criticism’ abstract). It seems tautological to assert that English-Canadian anthologists are nationalists. However, many editors, preferring to see themselves involved simply in the act of selecting ‘the best’ or ‘the representative,’

Introduction 5

eschew the nationalist badge. The trajectory of anthological discourse in Canada is towards an increasing rejection of overt claims to nationalism. One would be hard-pressed to find a modern editor blatantly supporting the assertion made by Edward Hartley Dewart in his 1864 anthology that ‘a national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character’ (ix). If it is true that nationalism lies at the heart of these anthologies, but that open expressions of this fundamental nationalism have increasingly been silenced in modern and contemporary works, the question becomes, Where is this controlling vision of nationalism hiding? In an essay published in 1990 on the canonization of English-Canadian literature, I argued that Canadian literature exhibits a number of features that point to its fundamental conservatism: ‘a valorization of the cautious, democratic, moral imagination before the liberal, inventive one; a hegemonic identification with texts that are ordered, orderable, safe – texts that work through what Lorraine Weir calls “sharability” and the “strategy of containment”’ (‘Canonization,’ 658). I argued further that this conservatism is a reflection of the institution that reinforces the canon. The canon functions reflectively, much like the literature it values, which tends to be mimetic because ‘mimetic discourse is the appropriate instrument of power in an institution that seeks to verify its solidity and authority over time’ (666). I proposed that mimesis is a displaced formal equivalent of nationalism. It is a mode of bearing witness to the country. It is also the mode that allows people to see themselves as members of a community: the literature reflects them to themselves. Mimesis is the means by which critics affirm that the subject of their inquiry is real. The tendency of critics and teachers is to support mimesis at the expense of the experimental, the marginal, the postmodern, the self-reflexive. One answer to the question ‘Where is nationalism hiding in Canadian literature?’ is that it is not hiding; it has only been displaced into realism. In attempting to explain the mimetic bias of the Canadian canon and the majority of its critics, I made no mention of Canadian anthologists, arguably the most influential group of all when it comes to defining the English-Canadian canon. Recent studies in anthology formation have focused on the nature of this influence outside Canada. As Jeffrey R. Di Leo observes, ‘Anthologies are considered to be reflective of the laws of their domain’ (1). They write back to the institution that empowers them, working with that institution to further its values. They influence the ways in which students understand literature, and

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especially when it comes to courses devoted to national literatures, they provide a particular rendition of the country, not only through the content of anthology selections, but also through the style and techniques employed by the collected writers who are brought together into a quasi-community speaking on behalf of the country they have been chosen to serve. Most discussions of anthology formation scarcely mention the ways in which anthologies manufacture and transmit cultural capital (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term), nor are they generally concerned with the materiality of these anthologies – with the ways in which they are distinct products of the economic conditions that gave rise to their publication and dissemination. Commentary on anthology formation usually focuses on what Barbara M. Benedict calls ‘the “demand” or consumer side of the literary culture of anthologies, the way they were received and read,’ while bypassing ‘the “supply” side – the story of the material connections informing the construction of value and cultural currency in anthologies’ (31). This book examines the evolution of English-Canadian anthologies in relation to both the ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ sides. I aim to show that these anthologies, like all literary works, are shaped by the conflict and contact among various individuals and institutions, including publishers, writers, reviewers, professors, tenure committees, funding agencies, critical journals, banks, and the bookselling industry, to name just a few of the forces contributing to the construction of critical and literary taste. Although there are scattered articles that focus on these questions in terms of English-Canadian anthologies, there is no sustained historical study. Theories of anthology formation are the product of challenges to the English literary canon that emerged in the early 1980s as a result of the rise of feminist theory, increasing multiculturalism, the devaluation of traditional models of literary historiography, and the heightened prominence of ideologically based readings of cultural history. In the United States, national literature anthologies such as the Norton Anthology of American Literature came under attack for the ways in which their selection criteria supported cultural hegemonies tied to a patriarchal, white, and exclusionary canon aligned with a restrictive view of cultural literacy. Robert von Hallberg’s Canons (1984) contained a number of influential essays that pointed to the contingent nature of anthology making and to the ways in which anthologies function as instruments of organization and control. Paul Lauter’s The Heath Introduction

Introduction 7

to American Literature (1990), which was edited by a group of fourteen scholars determined to challenge the prevailing canon, was a blatant call to arms. The fierce debate about the canon that followed the publication of Lauter’s anthology clarified several issues related to how anthologies operate as canonical instruments, particularly when they are used in the classroom to acquaint students with a nation’s literature. Influential works devoted specifically to canonicity include Charles Altieri’s Canons and Consequences (1990), Carey Caplan and Ellen Cronan Rose’s The Canon and the Common Reader (1990), Lauter’s Canons and Contexts (1991), Henry Louis Gates’s Loose Canons (1992), and John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (1993). Particular studies of anthology formation draw on canon theory to explore the ways in which anthologies transmit institutional authority, configure national literatures, and define and control reading and writing practices within schools. Prominent among these studies are Barbara Benedict’s Making the Modern Reader (1996), Leah Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000), Anne Ferry’s Tradition and the Individual Poem (2001), and Joseph Csicsila’s Canons by Consensus (2004). There are two collections of essays devoted to anthology formation: Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Stephanie Lethbridge’s Anthologies of British Poetry (2000) and Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s On Anthologies (2004). Although anthologies are often discussed in the context of canon formation, studies of the representation of nations in these anthologies are comparatively rare. Yet anthologies are used to teach national literatures and to acquaint students with national values. The process of creating these anthologies involves imagining the country, imagining a community, imagining an identity. Through this kind of imagining, the anthology editor promotes a form of what Edward Said calls ‘affiliation.’ For Said, affiliation is a ‘kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a worldvision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship’ (19). National literature anthologies express a particular world vision, a deliberate textual construction of the country that the reader is invited to join. This kind of anthological affiliation is not restricted to the twentieth century. In Discourse Networks, Friedrich A. Kittler observes that ‘anthologies in late eighteenth-century Germany replaced the Bible as the book that unified a culture’ (qtd. in Di Leo, 7). Benedict explains why anthologies can be seen in this way. She says that ‘because of their cooperative means of production and multiple authorship, anthologies are material expressions of a kind of community, and their format also

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directs readers to understand them as vessels of a common enterprise, even while registering the independence of each author’ (242). The problem of representing the nation in anthologies, especially those used in schools, is compounded by one of their most prominent features: textual apparatus. By including an introductory overview, biographical and critical commentary on each author’s work, explanatory notes, thematic groupings, or even essay topics and assignments, the editor configures the ways in which the nation’s authors (who become its metaphoric spokespeople) are known to the community that is created through the sharing of specific literary works. The apparatus of an anthology encodes assumptions about how an author is to be understood and valued in a given culture. Frequently, that culture comprises young readers, students who have little conception of nation. For them, the voices collected by a particular editor will provide their first sustained exposure to the idea of nation. What comes out of this exposure is therefore formative in their developing sense of citizenship itself. Although the relationship between reader and anthology obviously does not enact a direct correlation between citizen and nation, the relationship between the audience and the anthology remains highly figurative, a symbolic means of experiencing the country through the always-conflicted pages of the text. There can be no such thing as the accurate representation of the nation through a national literature anthology. Paradoxically, national literature anthologies underline the fact that nations are plural and unstable, unmappable in any form. As edited collections, they are necessarily self-defeating. What we learn from such anthologies is that the nation they purport to represent cannot exist. At best, that nation is inevitably undermined by the anthological act. National literature anthologies are naturally conflicted and in doubt. So they should be; nations are naturally conflicted and in doubt. The challenge is to read these anthologies through the anxieties that haunt them. This can be a mobilizing cultural experience for students who are encouraged to explore the nature of these anxieties as they emerge in the anthologies they use. As texts that unite editors and their publishers with teachers and their students, national literature anthologies mediate between critical values, material realities, and pedagogical goals. They act as matrixes that display the tensions, doubts, and ideals attached to crucial historical moments in the cultures that produce them. In this sense, they are narratives in their own right. Every anthology tells a story about how it came into being, and about how it means to be.

Introduction 9

Just as the national literature anthology implicitly supports a code that reifies and verifies the nation, so does it establish a relationship with a reading community that is also committed to the code. The professionalization of Canadian literature was in many respects founded on the assumption that the nation was knowable, that one means of knowing it was through its literature, and that teachers explaining that literature were implicitly explaining the country. Realistic literature served this function much more effectively than experimental writing, which was often more concerned with the nature of language than with the ability of language to truthfully represent external reality. One of my aims in discussing anthologies of English-Canadian literature is to test the idea that their editors are fundamentally Romantic nationalists who have gradually displaced the value of nationalism into the value of mimesis. Nationalist discourse fades into language about how the Canadian writer is distinguished by his or her attention to the details and beauty of place. The pursuit of these details becomes a sign of quality, mainly because capturing the ‘essence’ of a place is a form of bearing witness to it, of proving that it exists. Anthologists in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were all drawn to various elements of realism: its scientific bias, its faithfulness to details and everyday events, its grounding in the here and now, its emphasis on measurability, location, exactness. This focus on time and place is also a means of affirming community, for those who participate in the process of bearing witness to a place are also configuring themselves as members of a community who are giving collective voice to a shared vision. The unstated pact between teachers and anthologizers rested on the tacit sharing of the canon as an epistemological base. Literature was about knowing the country. The anthologizers delivered the means of accessing this knowledge. The canon supported the belief that what was known had been tested by others in the past and had met the standards of those whose function it was to police the canon in the present. The users of the canon understood that there would be disruptions of the canon – incursions, rejections, exclusions, faddism – but they also understood deeply that the anthologists they trusted would know the limits, that they would not allow the canon to be so truncated as to become unrecognizable, any more than they would assume that Canada was unknowable. For if that happened, what would befall courses in Canadian literature? Why call them Canadian? The users of the canon were invested in those courses and the country. They were invested in the existence of the literature and the country

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because their jobs depended on it. The training of their successors also depended on the presence of a describable tradition, a sense of heritage that made the idea of a national literature tangible, teachable, and real. The professionals could object to constructions of the nation, but they could never abandon their belief that Canadian literature was worth understanding. The anthologists were conduits to this understanding. They provided the means to access what was essentially a conversion experience in the guise of pedagogy. This is not surprising, because many of the professors of Canadian literature who have emerged since the 1970s were inevitably touched by the literary evangelism that has characterized the post-centennial years. And their prodigies could hardly ignore this evangelical past. To serve them, the keepers of the canon had to promote a literary model based on mimetic ideals, for only the mimetic model would allow for self-recognition and the potential for existential awakening that comes with such recognition. An anthological focus on realism calls upon readers to pay tribute to the country, to join the editor in affirming the presence of the place. Although this process of framing the country is initially an editorial activity, the ritual of reading Canada in this way – of joining others in a group devoted to a central text that affirms the national object of their study – has obvious religious implications. Canons originate in the church; therefore, studying canonical texts is historically aligned with acts of faith. The construction and maintenance of canons has ecclesiastical roots. This is another aspect of displacement. If nationalism morphs into realism, it can also be argued that a religiously based canon must have a modern and secular form. Canonical texts in the secular world are still documents attesting to faith. The group of believers who place their collective faith in those documents form a distinct community – a modern-day congregation. The act of bearing witness to the country, of partaking in the realistic act, is simultaneously a religious experience in secular guise. The congregation has moved from the church to the classroom; the preacher has become the teacher. Yet what is happening in the classroom still centres on questions of belief. Anthologists provide teachers with a form of proof concerning the presence of the nation. Realism helps them with this testimony and catalyses the act of faith. Their job through successive generations is to pass down the Romantic nationalist mythology, to sustain the discourse of nation, to promote its archetypes and language, to uphold the canon as a vital transubstantiation of Canadian culture. This portrayal of Canadian anthologists as culture keepers, as secu-

Introduction 11

lar agents vested with the responsibility of transmitting national archetypes and tropes, means that we can conceive of them as storytellers in their own right. Some are merely dilettantes, but the vast majority of editors who have devoted themselves to anthologizing EnglishCanadian literature create powerful narratives through the processes of selection and representation. Although there is scattered commentary on the values or biases connected with various Canadian anthologists, and although we can find analyses of their role in constructing canonical value, there is practically no scholarship on how these editors emerge as characters in their own right or on how they create tension-ridden narratives about their own role as literary creators. In this study, I focus on these narratives as they are revealed by the tropes, strategies, and structures employed by editors to frame and explain their books. While I am concerned to a certain extent with the specific poems and stories contained in various anthologies, my central aim is to show how the editors of English-Canadian anthologies from 1837 to the present share a set of beliefs and practices that make them keepers of the code. Not all anthologists endorse this code. Some anthologists work against it, even unintentionally. Some are false prophets – they think they are transmitting the code, but they are simply using the language without understanding its symbolic potential. The most influential anthologists are those who inherit the code, struggle with the implications of their role, and end up creating narratives about the nature of human choice. It would be inaccurate to claim that each of these editors follows the same path or explores identical archetypes. That would make their anthologies static documents. By and large, they’re not. They are dynamic texts precisely because their editors try to negotiate between a stable and cohesive view of literary history and the desire to destabilize this cohesion in pursuit of material that challenges established norms. These anthologies are interesting subjects of study precisely because they do not propose a unified vision and because they do not necessarily agree on canonical values. However, beneath their varied exteriors, they struggle with the same issues and display a similar range of metaphors and archetypes related to that struggle. I don’t think of these anthologists first as editors. I think of them as narrators putting together a story, creators of what Eli Mandel suggests are long poems that meditate on the nature of nation. Like all long poems, they display the anxieties of their creators, their uncertainty about their historical position, their desire to impose order, their fear that order is an illu-

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sion, their perpetual and restless search for an ending to their multivocal accounts. Chapter 1 begins with a consideration of John Simpson’s Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII (1837) and ends near the turn of the century. In discussing eleven prominent anthologies published in those years, I look at the formation of the canon in relation to ideas of national identity as Canada approached Confederation and then responded to its effects. Early English-Canadian anthologists faced a particularly daunting task. They had to conceive of a national literature at a time when the concept of a Canadian nation was in its infancy. At the same time, they had to deal with difficulties posed by punitive copyright laws, poor distribution networks, and the nepotism of contemporary critics who often stood in the way of innovation and dissent. Simpson established the relation between literature and politics and the idea, repeated by many later anthologists, that literature had political force. His anthology consciously explored the relation between readers, literature, and national identity and figured the anthologist as a person whose duty it was to promote stability and order. Edward Hartley Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets (1864) was conceived in the years leading up to Confederation, a fact central to Dewart’s belief that in collecting Canadian poetry he was simultaneously giving voice to a heightened sense of national identity. But Dewart’s preoccupation with literary nationalism often overshadows the central claim his book makes: that an apprehension of poetry is a means of apprehending God, and that experiencing a new country through its poetry is fundamentally a conversion experience. As an editor who was also a poet and a preacher, Dewart saw his anthological undertaking as a means of interpreting and expounding upon ‘symbolic language’ (xiv) in such a way that God’s presence in things and individuals would be revealed. Several anthologies appeared after Dewart’s, but no collection devoted to a national perspective was published until 1889, when William Douw Lighthall released his Songs of the Great Dominion. Unlike Dewart, Lighthall was a distinctly secular figure who was involved in numerous political and cultural projects at the turn of the century. Lighthall was a busy man about town who absorbed the Romantic nationalist idea that his editorial activity as an anthologist was a means of offering redemption and deliverance to his readers. Lighthall presents the act of reading Canadian poetry as a means of self-construction. The

Introduction 13

editor becomes the agent of this construction, forming both personal and national identity through the act of collecting poetry. In seeing himself as an agent of culture, Lighthall was influenced by Matthew Arnold’s idea that those who taught literature (and by extension, those who edited it) were purveyors of culture, performing a role similar to that of the clergy. Chapter 2 deals with anthologies published from the turn of the century to the years immediately following the First World War. The major focus is on Albert Durrant Watson and Lorne Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature (1922), mainly because its appearance marks such a radical break with the editorial assumptions that governed earlier twentiethcentury anthologies, and also because it was the conflicted product of two editors who had very different ideas about the function and value of Canadian literature. Our Canadian Literature demonstrated Pierce’s indefatigable devotion to the nationalist cause of Canadian literature (Pierce was the guiding force behind Ryerson Press, which had its roots in Methodist ideology) and Watson’s mystical leanings, a combination that made for a strange anthology produced at a time when Canadians had a new sense of national identity and purpose. Simply by virtue of the fact that their anthology included both poetry and prose, Watson and Pierce promoted the idea – radical for their time – that poetry was not the only means of evoking national consciousness. The collection they published was full of contradictions, owing to the fundamental differences in each editor’s aesthetic. Because the book embodies these tensions, it becomes a singular expression of the different values that pulled Canadian literature in different directions in the years immediately following the war. It is energized by its double-sidedness. Chapter 3 is about anthologies between the wars. I discuss twelve central volumes, beginning with Edmund Kemper Broadus and Eleanor Hammond Broadus’s A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse (1923) and ending with Ralph Gustafson’s Anthology of Canadian Poetry (1942). The 1920s were marked by intense domestic debates about the meaning of Canadian nationalism, especially in the context of Canada’s relation with Britain and the United States. Most of the anthologies produced in this period display self-consciousness about their role in envisioning a post-war Canada, but some are more willing than others to depart from earlier anthological models built on the imperial ideal. For example, the Broaduses created an anthology that promoted the myth of ‘representativeness’ originally proposed by Watson and Pierce. They

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claimed to value a mimetic model that equated quality with the reproduction of a perceived external reality, but then they chose to ignore their immediate reality. Even in the second edition of their anthology, which appeared during the Great Depression, the Broaduses promoted a vision of the country that was fascinatingly out of step with the times. Clearly, it wasn’t necessary to recognize change in order to be successful as a Canadian anthologist. This was amply demonstrated by the career of A.M. Stephen, who published a number of collections in the 1920s. He shared Lorne Pierce’s evangelical enthusiasm for Canadian literature. Stephen was editing his anthologies and maintaining this vision at a time when modernism had arrived in Canada, although he steadfastly refused to include modernist works in his books. The main challenge to the status quo came in an anthology of short fiction – Raymond Knister’s Canadian Short Stories (1928). By editing the first Canadian anthology devoted exclusively to short fiction, Knister was making the bold statement that such fiction was valuable and that it could stand on its own. In poetry, New Provinces (1936) deliberately challenged existing conceptions of nation embodied in earlier anthologies. Although its original preface, written by A.J.M. Smith, was rejected in favour of a less militant document authored by F.R. Scott, Smith’s preface (eventually published in 1965) reveals a good deal about the man who would become one of Canada’s most influential anthologists. By the time Ralph Gustafson published his Pelican Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English) in 1942, challenges to the Canadian poetry canon were coming from several directions. Gustafson’s anthology was eminently successful in terms of sales, mainly because it was commissioned by the Canadian military, but it did little in the way of reflecting the changes that marked the Canadian poetry scene. That task was left to A.J.M. Smith, who edited The Book of Canadian Poetry in 1943. In chapter 4 I consider Smith’s controversial native-cosmopolitan model, his influence on Northrop Frye’s developing theories of Canadian literature, John Sutherland’s angry response to Smith in Other Canadians (1947), the impact of the Massey Commission report in 1951, and the gradual rise of a ‘heathen’ element drawn to American poetry and fiction. Smith’s introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry was explicitly about the native-cosmopolitan tension, but that binary is much less interesting than the metaphors it invokes, especially when one considers that Smith edited the anthology many years after he left Canada to live in the United States. I read Smith’s introduction as the

Introduction 15

record of a dispossessed anthologist whose book exposes his own internal conflicts. The reason Smith’s book plays such an important role in keeping the code is that it continues and makes predominant the historical tendency of Canadian anthologists to see their editorial activities in archetypal terms and to imagine the reading of their books as journeys into a wilderness that end only when the literature has been truly apprehended via the editor’s hand. Most commentators on Smith’s anthology, invested in the central distinction he makes between native and cosmopolitan, ignore Smith’s strong interest in realism. In the best-known attack on Smith, John Sutherland took the anthologist to task for being a colonialist in cosmopolitan clothes. But Sutherland got so involved in his critique of Smith that he neglected to consider what values they shared. Smith recognized that in order to be alive, poetry had to demonstrate its involvement with the real world that people inhabited. The introduction to his anthology is peppered with references to realism, mimesis, faithfulness, accuracy, and the importance of focusing on everyday life. In order to construct Smith as an adversary, Sutherland chose to ignore Smith’s repeated calls for realism. Although Sutherland contributed to the small-press culture that would flourish in Canada in later decades, there remained few outlets for alternative poetry and fiction in Canada in the 1950s and few venues for debate. Canadian publishing continued to be dominated by large companies; the margin was in textbooks and commercial titles. There was little demand for experimentation because venues for alternative criticism were also lacking. The remainder of the decade continued to be characterized by an absence of poetry anthologies that challenged the status quo. Much the same could be said about fiction. When Desmond Pacey published his A Book of Canadian Stories in 1947, there had been no substantial collection of Canadian fiction since Knister’s Canadian Short Stories in 1928. In his pursuit of realism, Pacey was simply following the path of earlier anthologists who saw their books as a means of verifying the existence of the nation. Again, the driving force behind the call to realism was an all-pervading nationalism. Regardless of the name attached to the editorial aesthetic, the primary impulse remained the same: find selections that testified to the existence of the nation. The late 1950s saw an increasing tendency to proclaim the canon in collections that were designed for school use. The most influential collection to appear before the centennial was Canadian Anthology (1955), edited by Carl F. Klinck and Reginald E. Watters. The introduction of

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the New Canadian Library series in 1958 gave a boost to the teaching of Canadian literature in high schools and universities, and new funding provided by the Canada Council also promoted measures designed to encourage course adoptions along with classroom visits and speaking tours by writers. By 1966, Canadian literature was increasingly being taught in the schools. The formation of a fundamentally conservative curricular canon only served to reinforce the connection that anthologists had made between Canadian literature, nationalism, and realism. Chapter 5 is bracketed by two important years. It opens with an examination of anthologies published at the time of the centennial celebrations in 1967 and ends in 1982 with the release of Margaret Atwood’s The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, a central anthology that demonstrates a number of crucial shifts in the representation of nation. By 1982, the effects of the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty were beginning to register in English-Canadian anthologies; their editors recognized that, in one way or another, the nation would never be the same. Conveniently, 1982 also marks the date of the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Anthologists working in this period had to grapple with the task of representing a country that was in the midst of a rapid transformation and with the idea, fermenting in Quebec, that any concept of national coherence was dead. Ironically, the dream of unity that inspired English-Canadian anthologists weakened progressively after the centennial, but in 1967 it was still there in full force, embodied in the kind of nation-building anthology one might expect to see published in such a central year. That anthology is H. Gordon Green and Guy Sylvestre’s A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne (1967). Looking back at Green and Sylvestre’s undoubtedly well-intentioned collection, we can see that the figures it contained and the editorial strategies it employed came from two distinct realities that were artificially united in a book that did little to reflect the actual relations between English- and FrenchCanadian writers at the time. Although the 1970s is often referred to as a decade marked by an ‘explosion’ in Canadian writing, the world of Canadian literature remained largely unmapped. The process of naming, categorizing, and ordering had hardly begun. Critics exploring this new world were inevitably struck by the lack of resources available to them. There were few bibliographies of Canadian writers, there were not many listings of secondary sources, and there was precious little informed criticism of younger writers. The field was wide open. It was also a semi-wilderness.

Introduction 17

Like Dewart and Lighthall in the previous century, anthologists in the 1970s and 1980s saw themselves as guides in this wilderness. They were obsessed with organizing the material that constituted their world. This is not surprising, for by editing anthologies, writing criticism, and talking about Canadian literature, anthologists were in many ways contributing to a creation narrative. But the construction of multiple constituencies, and the publication of anthologies designed to serve them, did not succeed in dislodging the large-scale anthologies as instruments of canonical transmission. The most widely recognized anthologies produced in the 1980s continued to be those designed specifically for curricular use. By far the most ambitious of these was Russell Brown and Donna Bennett’s twovolume An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (1982/3), which I take as my point of departure in chapter 6. While it is true that numerous small presses and alternative magazines encouraged anti-canonical aesthetics throughout the 1970s, an important change had occurred: anthologists like Brown and Bennett understood that the Canadian canon had become primarily curricular. The editors of national literature anthologies had to appeal to the professors and teachers who functioned as gatekeepers, the professional class responsible for determining how the Canadian canon would be represented and explained. If the kind of material that was anthologized reflected a predominantly conservative canon, it was because so many of the courses taught by academics were conservative in structure and orientation. EnglishCanadian anthologies were made to serve the needs of pedagogy, not to challenge those needs. It was only after this canonical model came under direct attack in the early 1990s that the overt nationalism inspiring the tradition of EnglishCanadian literature anthologies began to erode in the face of increasing globalization and the impact of multiculturalism. The breakdown of this nationalist spirit was necessarily accompanied by an interrogation of the canon itself. For many anthologists, this shift represented a crisis of faith, a new sense of anxiety about the meaning of home. This anxiety was both textual and existential. The idealized Canada, like the idealized canon, had ceased to exist. Looking back on the anthologies that appeared in the canonically liminal zone of the 1980s and early 1990s, we can see how various editors either embraced or ignored the changing nature of the canon, which was always a reflection of the changing nature of the nation. The gradual accommodation of difference in Canadian anthologies of

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the 1990s and early 2000s owed a great deal to two crucial collections that challenged the canonical norms. These were Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie’s An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (1991) and Smaro Kamboureli’s Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996). Moses and Goldie’s anthology speaks powerfully about a Native tradition that had been virtually ignored by EnglishCanadian anthologists. Kamboureli’s book made it very clear that the same anthologists had bypassed multiculturalism at a time when the government of Canada had ostensibly embraced its values. Making a Difference is a crucial anthology because it marks the end of canonical innocence. It replaces that innocence with uncertainty and doubt about the idealized constructions of Canada that had informed the country’s national literary anthologies since the nineteenth century. Although Kamboureli focuses on several reasons why the dream of Canadian unity dissolved from the late 1980s onward, one factor she does not mention is the political climate in Quebec, even though her anthology appeared a year after the 1995 referendum took place. The results of that referendum came so close to a ‘Yes’ vote for Quebec sovereignty that the entire concept of Canadian unity was thrown into disarray. For federalists living in Quebec, especially, the referendum was a defining existential moment. While they were watching the referendum numbers come in, they understood that the Canada they knew might cease to exist, at least symbolically, that very evening. The anxiety caused by this realization undoubtedly affected Canadians around the country, but the difference in Quebec was that those federalists who lived in the province had to consider the possibility that they might have to emigrate in order to stay on Canadian soil. This simple consideration forced a massive resurgence of English-Canadian nationalism in Quebec in the weeks leading up to the referendum. Even after the separatists failed to achieve their objectives, the echoes of that resurgent nationalism could be heard for years. I know, because I still live in Quebec, and I heard it. All of this was happening at a time when literary theorists were telling us that Canadian nationalism and the dream of a unified Canada were dead. Frank Davey made this case in Post-National Arguments. He argued that Canadians had come to inhabit a globalized and technologized world in which national borders and national ideals would inevitably be erased. And indeed, anthologists such as Kamboureli observed that these ideals were ultimately myths, constructions put in place by those who held power in order to keep the subalterns in check. The

Introduction 19

argument was hard to disprove, and besides, who would want to disprove it? Yet none of these observations about the demise of national ideals did much to come to terms with the nationalist belief, undoubtedly nostalgic and romantic, that there was a better time when the nation cohered, when a person did not have to wake up every morning and wonder what country he or she would be living in the next day. I am making this observation from the point of view of someone who did face that kind of uncertainty, and I know that for many others it was all too real. Objectively and intellectually I could understand that the nation I had always connected with Canadian literature didn’t really exist in the way I imagined it, and in fact had never existed in the way that anthologists had constructed it. I also understood, in retrospect, that I had actively participated in the evangelism I saw in editors and critics and professors who came out of my generation. I shared what I saw as their secular but quasi-religious belief that verifying the existence of the literature was implicitly a verification of the country, an act of citizenship, an act of faith. To give up this belief was, at a certain level, to give up myself, or what I had allowed myself to become. It would not be an easy conversion. The more I dwelt on this problem – on the pull I felt towards and against the ideal of nation – the more I realized there was no need to resolve the tension, and that it was the very existence of that tension keeping me energized when it came to the study of Canadian literature. It was never going to be what I thought it was. But at the same time, here was this body of literature. Here were the anthologies. Here was this body of criticism that spanned more than a century and had been devoted to proving that the national literature had power and that it was worth imagining. It might have been a myth, but it was a myth that inspired many. The energizing moment was to realize that the myth was conflicted, open to question, the subject of revision and doubt. If an anthology could capture that kind of interrogation while at the same time acknowledging the power of idealization, it could share in the tension that seemed to define contemporary Canada and that went back decades, maybe even to the very seed of the idea of the nation itself. Looking back over the dozens of national literature anthologies published since Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets in 1864, I realized I was attracted to those that expressed a deep-seated anxiety about their own desire to assemble a picture that refused to cohere. From this perspective I began to understand that the anthologies I valued were existential objects, testimonies to the need to find a place and an identity

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in the midst of some unending chaos, regardless of their age. And then I understood that the anthologists were archetypal figures, wanderers looking for a new place to call home. Their collections were maps, namings, geographies that tried to impose order on the wilderness, cities built in the midst of what was once a figuratively empty plain. In chapter 7, I consider the extent to which a post-referendum Canada is captured in national literature anthologies that appeared after Kamboureli’s work. Making a Difference was published at a time when literary studies and the conception of Canada were being rapidly transformed by a host of forces that had emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century, undermining prevailing assumptions about the integrity and cohesion of the nation. While most English-Canadian anthologists working after 1996 recognized this radically altered landscape, they struggled to affirm the fundamental relation between canonical and national stability that they had inherited as keepers of the code. This is why they sometimes seem removed from the political and social climate in which they operated. In 2005, participants in the Trans.Can.Lit conference in Vancouver were arguing that Canadian literature occupied a field of ‘occlusion and repression’ superimposed on a ‘troubled trajectory’ that contests the country itself (Kamboureli, in Kamboureli and Miki, ix). In Kamboureli’s words, ‘Canada is an unimaginable community, that is, a community constituted in excess of the knowledge of itself, always transitioning’ (Kamboureli and Miki, x). Given the widespread attraction to course packs designed by individual instructors for their courses, the traditional authority of national literature anthologies is bound to dwindle, especially when online anthologies begin to proliferate, as they inevitably will. Now every teacher can become an anthologist and the ‘transitioning’ of the canon will be a matter of personal choice. Further, that plural canon, and all that it implies about Canada, will no longer shift slowly over the years as new national literature anthologies come into print. It will shift rapidly from institution to institution and from instructor to instructor every single year. In this way, future anthologists of Canadian literature may find that they are unable or unwilling to maintain the code, simply because they will be operating in a world devoid of the sense of permanence, community, and archetypal direction embraced by their predecessors, who saw themselves as protectors and directors of literary faith. The idea of faith – the evangelical underpinning of so many Canadian anthologies – brings me back to Edward Hartley Dewart. Cana-

Introduction 21

da’s first major anthologist did not leave many papers, and none that I found dealt directly with his anthology. But Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa holds a small Dewart fonds that contains a notebook with fragments of an autobiographical sketch written in Dewart’s hand. I visited the archives in order to see this item. It was delivered to me on a tray lined with blue velvet. I donned white gloves, opened the first page, and began to read. Dewart told stories about his daily life. He loved the physical world around him. He was a minister who saw his landscape as evidence of God. What became clear in reading his autobiographical sketch was how consistently he conjoined his perception of the environment with his religious beliefs. Climate and landscape and terrain all provided evidence of a higher order, but also evidence of a specifically Canadian order. Dewart believed that he was inhabiting a God-given world, a belief that coloured his writing and inspired the religious sentiment informing his editorial efforts when it came to collecting Canadian literature. Poetry itself was God-given. To know it was to find a means of knowing the Creator, and to know the Creator was to know the Canadian landscape He had made. Dewart provides one point of departure for what I am describing as a central anthological code: the belief that the business of selecting Canadian literature offers a route to spiritual fulfilment. However, this study would not be doing justice to that code if it simply started with Dewart, because almost thirty years before he produced his anthology, John Simpson published Canadian Forget Me Not in 1837. This study begins with an exploration of Simpson’s work, which establishes some of the basic patterns and values to be found in English-Canadian anthologies in the years before and after Confederation. It ends with a consideration of some recent anthologies, including my own Open Country (2007). That project made me wonder how other editors had seen the country through its literature, and what problems they faced. I was surprised to discover that there were lines of continuity, issues connected with nation and representation that tied me to the earliest Canadian anthologists. I found that in many ways, I, too, was a keeper of the code. I needed to understand how I inherited that role, how it affected my choices, how it introduced me to a community of editors who had devoted themselves to a literature that they were determined to make their own.

Chapter One

Nineteenth-Century Anthologies and the Making of Canadian Literature, 1837–1900

The first anthology of Canadian literature was born in troubled times. The Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII was published in January of that year (1837). Its editor, John Simpson, had arrived in Canada two years earlier, after leaving his business as a linen draper in London and moving to Niagara, Upper Canada, where he established himself as a bookseller, printer, editor, and publisher of the Niagara Chronicle (Cornell). Simpson must have been a brave man, or a man open to change. He gave up his business in England and emigrated to Canada just a year after a devastating cholera epidemic had killed thousands throughout the British colonies. And he chose to make the move during a period of massive financial upheaval: the world economy was in full recession, caused mainly by out-of-control land speculation fuelled by lax loan standards in the United States. In Canada, crop failures in 1835 compounded the economic crisis. The publishing industry was particularly hurt by the downturn. To make matters worse, the forces behind the rebellions of 1837 were gaining strength. By the time he had established his bookstore in Niagara, Simpson would have known that Upper Canada was bound to see strife: William Lyon Mackenzie had been pushing for reform since 1836 and there had been numerous calls to arms. The antagonism between Mackenzie’s reformers and the conservatives was growing. When Sir Francis Bond Head was appointed lieutenant governor of Upper Canada in 1835, he was forced to deal with the conflict. After he arrived in Toronto in 1836, Head tried various means of working with the reformers aligned with Robert Baldwin and Mackenzie, but ultimately he proved to be a staunch conservative who used ‘plain homely language’ to defend the imperial connection

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(Wise). In fact, Head was grossly inexperienced. He fancied himself a writer and businessman (he had been engaged in an unsuccessful mining enterprise in Argentina), but he had never voted in an election. In 1831, Head received a knighthood from King William IV, ‘evidently for no other reason than having demonstrated to his sovereign the military usefulness of the lasso’ (W. Wilson). Nicknamed ‘Galloping Head’ for riding across South America between Buenos Aires and the Andes, he was also the author of Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau (1834), described by Sydney Wise as ‘a travel book of ingratiating superficiality’ that nevertheless ran to six editions. Simpson dedicated his Canadian Forget Me Not to Head, of all people. Why? Because he identified with the lieutenant governor’s conservative ideology? Because he saw in Head’s desire to preserve the imperial connection a reflection of his own allegiance? Or because Head was a symbol of order and coherence in the midst of political upheaval? The selections of poetry, stories, essays, and dramatic snippets in the Canadian Forget Me Not were collected to appeal to bourgeois, middle-class readers who associated the material with literary genres and conventions they knew through earlier British models: gothic poems, stories about romantic love, closet dramas, caricatures of political figures, various depictions of virtue and vice, sublime representations of the natural world, stories of unrequited love. In his study of literary annuals and gift books, Ralph Thompson summarizes the ‘highly sentimental and exotic’ content of many annuals in the period: ‘Lords and ladies, far-off lands, and a somewhat impossibly glorious national history were normal products of romanticism as well as a means of transcending middle class existence. Tender and genteel verse satisfied emotional longings, unrealistic engravings the visual. Not until the gift book fashion was about at an end did realism or contemporaneity periodically intrude’ (5). Simpson’s Canadian Forget Me Not performed the political-cultural work of connecting New World readers with their British counterparts, thereby reinforcing the connection between colony and empire. As Peter Lipert observes, ‘Simpson knew that he was reflecting rather than trying to shape his audience’s literary tastes’ (81) and that he shared their conservatism, which Lipert calls ‘a fear of the political agency and disaffection of “the masses”’ (83). Lipert argues that ‘satirical and moralistic depictions of inappropriate suitors and political corruption encourage a reader to recognize in an imaginative and vicarious manner their own social and moral agency’ because ‘the value embodied

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in the text could be both endorsed and abjured’ (101). In other words, the very form of Simpson’s anthology empowered its readers by allowing them to judge behaviour within a conservative moral framework that repudiated change. And Simpson was surrounded by the threat of political change. He made his concerns about the reformers central to his dedication to Head: When the speculative Philosopher shall in future ages, be asked for some celebrated example in the difficult art of Government, he will point with a smile of triumphant gratification to that page of Upper Canada’s History, in which are recorded the difficulties that beset Your Excellency on assuming the Government of this Colony, and the statesmanlike manner by which they were overcome. Disaffection and complaint were widely spread and extending; a large portion of the people, filled with fearful anticipation of evil, were panting after undefined changes; when the opportune arrival and energetic proceeding of Your Excellency dashed the cup from the very lips of the Apostles of anarchy, revived the hearts of the loyal, collected the straggling affections of the wavering, and proved to the world that British honour and Canadian loyalty, are alike untarnished and inseparable. (4)

The language used by Simpson in his dedication and the genre of the anthology itself are revealing. Simpson notes that ‘this is the first work of its kind in the Colony’ and says that ‘like the star that ushers in the morning, it may be the harbinger of the day of Canadian literature.’ The purpose of the anthology was connected with Simpson’s desire for political stability: ‘It is by the dissemination of knowledge alone that every subject of Your Excellency’s administration can be taught to appreciate the value of good Government, truly estimate the blessings of internal tranquility, and understand the means necessary to secure individual happiness, and the public good’ (5). Simpson was expressing his hopes that Head would create ‘good Government’ in January 1837, the date attached to his dedication. Simpson believed that his editorial work could have political consequences, just as other writers in this period – most notably Susanna Moodie – believed that authors could intervene effectively in the political conflict at hand (Ballstadt, ‘Secure in Conscious Worth’). By the end of the year, however, he would know that Head had largely failed in his mission: the uprising led by Mackenzie became a military crisis, however short-lived. While Simpson gave credit to the

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man who would defend the imperial connection, he simultaneously voiced the widely held conviction that Upper Canadian culture was developing, distinct, and orderable. His rhetoric prefigures the strong sense of Canadian nationalism that emerged in the years leading up to Confederation. It marks the first self-conscious editorial equation between a national literature and the process of anthology making, an equation that characterizes the most influential anthologies of Canadian literature to be published in later years. In his study of Protestant culture in nineteenth-century Ontario, William Westfall reminds us that the desire for order in government, and in literature, has religious roots. This desire was the expression of a larger sense of order inspired by God: ‘There was nothing extraordinary or unpredictable here: all the pieces came together, and everything worked in an orderly and integrated way. If people led virtuous lives (it was in their own self-interest to do so), they would achieve everlasting happiness, humanity would regain the order and perfection that it has lost at the fall, and the earth would become the garden of the Lord. It was, in effect, a highly-ordered pattern that proclaimed above all the value of order itself’ (33). Westfall observes that ‘order was a religious and social necessity’ (36) and that literature embodied this order; or as Mary Lu MacDonald writes, ‘Canadian literature and the political society in which it was produced were … closely connected’ (7), especially in the early nineteenth century, when debates about nations and nationality appeared frequently in the press. Through his editorial activity, Simpson was participating in this debate. His anthological activity was framed in tropes of national coherence and salvation, even if the material he collected did not address the issue of national identity at all. Simpson would have been well aware of his role as a defender of Canadian values. Printers and newspaper editors at this time provided the means of disseminating information that distinguished their political and cultural infrastructure from the American model. Gilles Gallichan notes that ‘the years 1834 to 1837 were marked by intense publishing activity in both the Canadas. Posters, political pamphlets, constitutional tracts, and newspapers were abundant in these years of political turbulence. This energy presaged an inevitable clash between the government and the many printers, editors, and writers who supported the actions of the Patriotes and the Reformers’ (‘Publication and Power,’ 327–8). Like Simpson, Mackenzie was involved in publishing and had been a victim of public outrage directed at printers and presses. In 1826, the

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York (Toronto) offices of his newspaper, the Colonial Advocate, were stormed by men loyal to the colonial government. They threw Mackenzie’s printing press and his types into the lake. This was evidence that ‘newspapers gave voice to political will that could lead to physical violence as well as to legislative activity’ (Brouillette, 239). Mackenzie and Simpson both understood that, at one level, newspaper and book publishing were linked to questions about national identity. As Michael Peterman notes, ‘The challenge from the beginning was the need to distinguish Upper Canadian political interests, social ideals, and cultural values from those south of the border, which were too near and too influential to be ignored’ (396). The challenge to Simpson as an early Canadian anthologist was to define the distinctions between his world and the United States. His anthology was conceived as a literary means of establishing a readership centred on a shared national vision. It consciously and unconsciously explored the relation between literature, readership, and national identity. A similar path was pursued by early American anthologists, who sought to publish works that would define a distinctly American literature. The first American anthology was Elihu Hubbard Smith’s American Poems, Selected and Original (1793). According to Alan C. Golding, Smith was motivated by the idea that ‘poetry’s function … was to provide a national identity and morality.’ From this perspective, ‘excellence’ in poetry ‘rested on its embodiment of national characteristics’ (282). As a printer and publisher, Simpson understood the political value of anthology making. But he also understood its commercial potential. Although his collection of the works of nineteen authors was certainly not groundbreaking in terms of its content, it was a kind of anthology that had never been seen in Canada before: the literary gift book annual. This was a distinct genre with European roots going back to the Almanach des muses, begun in Paris in 1765. The first English annual was published in London by Rudolph Ackerman in 1823. An American version, The Atlantic Souvenir, appeared in 1825. As a printer, Simpson would have been cognizant of these commercially successful precursors (not surprisingly, the British annual was also called the Forget Me Not). In England, the annual became ‘a fad or a craze.’ By 1832, sixtythree of these annuals appeared in a single year (Faxon, xi). The fad even spread to India, with the publication of the Bengal Annual. Simpson was looking to an established and commercially viable genre when he published his Canadian Forget Me Not in 1837.

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These annuals shared specific editorial and aesthetic values. Many of them were highly designed, with ornate bindings, embossed covers, gilt stamping, engraved paper sides, and often colourful ribbons used as page markers. Some special editions even used varnished papier mâché, inlaid with irregular bits of mother-of-pearl. Simpson’s collection was not that ornate, but it did contain illustrations and an embossed cover, as did many examples of the genre. In the absence of stringent copyright laws, the publishers of these books often appropriated material that had appeared in annuals from previous years, a cannibalization that explains, in part, why so many of the contributors to anthologies went unnamed: the editor did not want to draw attention to an author’s work having been reprinted without permission. As Ralph Thompson notes, ‘Most gift book publishers simply appropriated from a variety of sources such prose and verse as struck their fancy. This practice was in keeping with others of the time; it is well known that Americans had no qualms about reprinting entire British volumes that promised to sell, and until 1891 and the granting of copyright to non-residents and non-citizens it was the fortunate English writer who received a shilling from the American sale of his work. Even American writers found their work pirated, despite the copyright act of 1790. The expense of publishing a gift book could be sensibly reduced by the use of old engravings and writings culled from periodicals or other books. The public apparently had a short memory and was not always exacting in its demands’ (13). This means that it is entirely possible that Simpson’s Canadian annual – which contains its fair share of anonymous contributors – used material that was American or British in origin, an unremarkable assumption considering the tide of foreign literature that made it into Canada as a result of lax copyright laws. For this reason, it is redundant to consider the extent to which the content of his anthology expressed distinctly Canadian themes, since it is impossible to determine the provenance of many of the selections, although seven of the twenty-eight pieces were written by Simpson himself. More important is the symbolism of the book – the appeal to national order in the dedication to Head through a format that was marketable and well known. Frederick Winthrop Faxon says that these books were always ‘free from the slightest taint of impropriety’ (xxi). Some annuals were devoted to specific issues such as slavery, temperance, or even particular political campaigns or events. Most of them were also implicitly nationalist. Thompson explains that ‘gift book writing as a whole in the United States was probably under-

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taken in a more sincere spirit than in the mother country. America had a literary reputation to make for herself, and for a while it was rarely forgotten that the annuals would further this end’ (18). The creation of these books was a nationalist pursuit: ‘National pride as well as personal ambition spurred the search for “culture.” Foreign critics had sneered at American barbarity and crudeness, and only the most ardent patriot could deny that the sneers were in some degree justified. Could not those who had thrown off a political yoke escape also the intellectual, and thereby prove their complete independence? Sydney Smith’s now-famous query was not without effect. Who could honestly argue, moreover, that the Hudson highlands were less worthy of the artist or the poet than the hills of Westmoreland?’ (Thompson, 4). By participating in a publishing tradition linked to nationalist values, Simpson signalled his intention of aligning Head with the moral dimension of his undertaking while at the same time ensuring that readers would be attracted to the novelty of seeing what was apparently Canadian literature reproduced in such a recognizable and marketable Forget Me Not–anthology format. It would not be inaccurate to say that the anthologization of Canadian literature – an edited notion of nation – began in the form of a gift book that allowed the literary evidence of nation to be designed, packaged, and marketed as a bourgeois moral offering. The very fact of its commodification in this way implied a configuration of nation – or a reconfiguration – that had never been seen before. But the anthology’s presentation also implied a conflict: the form of the book said it was not any more Canadian than its generic ‘annual’ counterparts all over the world. At the same time, however, its appeal was national and politically specific. Simpson’s use of the term ‘Canadian literature’ in his anthology was a seed. Those who purchased the Canadian Forget Me Not were being introduced to the idea that a national literature could be named and could occupy the same kind of generic prominence granted to other literary annuals that featured writers from specific countries. While Simpson may have been exploiting the naming of Canadian literature as a commercial idea, his editorial act empowered the belief that Canadian writing was worthy of anthologizing, even if the writing he collected was not always strictly Canadian. His little book served to mediate between a conservative elite (represented here through the editor’s appeal to Head) and the public audience for the book itself, the common readers. Through this mediation, those readers were placed in the same position as the editor: they all had the power to judge and

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to choose. In this respect, I found it interesting to note that the copy of Simpson’s book I consulted bore a handwritten note on the title page, dated 1838. It reads: ‘Canadian Rebellion 1838. Forget the “no mercy.”’ The owner of the anthology was connecting it with the uprising and repudiating the idea of showing the rebels ‘no mercy.’ In other words, for this book owner, the anthology became a field on which to inscribe the idea of reconciliation. It was the symbol of a battle won, but it also expressed the reader’s desire to turn a page on the conflict. The inscription is a strong indication of the link readers could make between the presence of a literary work and their immediate political realities. The editor-reader dynamic established by Simpson’s anthology replicated the dynamic that might be found in a situation of responsible government. It was not only the idea of nation that was empowered through the collection; the reader (as citizen) was empowered too. The figurative effect of the anthology was to normalize the relation between classes in the name of Canadian literature and good government. Simpson initiated the anthologizing of English-Canadian literature by introducing a crucial code. The anthologist was a national gatekeeper whose process of literary selection had political and cultural ends: the anthologist’s responsibility was to reinforce and stabilize the connection between literature and nation. By the end of 1837, it was clear that Mackenzie’s Republic of Canada, proclaimed on Navy Island (not far from Simpson’s hometown of Niagara), would become a historical oddity. Canadian self-consciousness increased with the union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841. Yet no Canadian anthology after Simpson’s reflected this self-awareness until the appearance of Edward Hartley Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets in 1864. Surprisingly few anthologies appeared between 1837 and 1864, despite the considerable literary activity in Canada during this period. Local newspapers that included poetry, sketches, and essays proliferated, although it was hard for them to stay afloat. One of the most successful magazines, the Literary Garland (1838–51), operated out of Montreal and published Susanna Moodie’s sketches along with several other important literary works by Rosanna Leprohon, John Richardson, and Charles Sangster. Other literary magazines, such as the Colonial Pearl and the Amaranth, ‘struggled,’ in George L. Parker’s words, ‘to give readers and writers alike a sense of the necessary place of literature in nation-building’ (Beginnings, 91). But there were few new books, mainly because readers were attracted to cheap editions imported from the United States, an importation that ‘grew

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enormously between the 1840s and 1860s’ (Beginnings, 91). Also, as Parker explains, writers who wanted to survive had to seek markets abroad, a factor that often encouraged them to downplay their Canadian connection. Eli MacLaren provides a succinct description of the copyright problems in the Confederation period: In brief, the heart of the problem for the nascent Canadian publishing industry was this. Imperial copyright law prevented Canadian firms from reprinting an original British edition, thereby keeping Canada a captive market for that edition, and at the same time exposed it to any American edition or subedition of the same work, including an unauthorized reprint. (Because American authors could secure imperial copyright by publishing first or simultaneously in Britain, the terms original British edition could also include an American-authored work.) Thus the law doubly rendered Canada a passive recipient of books from abroad. Canadian wholesalers … had to contend with the legal possibility that a domestic rival would undercut them by importing and selling another edition. To the nationalist-minded businessmen of the period, this situation was an intolerable paradox: Britain allowed Canada to be a place where American publishers thrived. (11)

Few Canadian publishers were able to navigate these troubled copyright waters to their advantage. One who did was John Lovell. In 1838 he launched the Literary Garland magazine, along with his brother-inlaw, John Gibson. Both men realized that, given the copyright impediments to book publication, the best way to nurture Canadian writing was through magazine publication of original poetry and fiction. In addition, the Literary Garland often serialized full-length works. Lovell and Gibson also started a book publishing company devoted to Canadian writing. Lovell produced Edward Hartley Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets in 1864. It is the first serious anthology of Canadian poetry. Lovell may have felt that Dewart’s anthology would enjoy the same kind of success in Canada as Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury did in Britain, where it had appeared three years earlier, in 1861. Palgrave’s collection remains the best-selling anthology of English poetry and was enormously popular when it first appeared. As Klaus Peter Müller notes, part of the success of Palgrave’s anthology can be explained by the increasing public sense that ‘literature is a gathering of fundamental human knowledge.’ It was ‘connected with the libera-

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tion of English literature from the constraints of classical texts, with a strong nationalist element in the country almost at the zenith of the British Empire’ (129). Dewart’s collection also celebrated Canadian nationalism through literature. Many people owned Palgrave’s anthology but did not read it; nevertheless, possessing the book as part of a household was a symbol of cultural status and progress. Similarly, Dewart’s anthology was a concrete symbol of Canada’s rising currency, especially in light of the impending Confederation. Dewart organized his anthology as did Palgrave – by theme and mood. As Fee observes, ‘Dewart, by collecting literature before Confederation and labeling it “Canadian” is helping to construct the myth of the nation himself’ (‘Literary Criticism,’ 29). In his introductory essay, Dewart says that ‘the literature of the world is the foot-prints [sic] of human progress’ (ix). Dewart was influenced by nineteenth-century notions of romantic historicism that were grounded in what J.M. Kertzer describes as ‘a current of thought that sweeps from Europe to North America, with Hippolyte Adolph Taine’s History of English Literature (1864) offering the strongest defense of the environmental/national thesis in literature’ (75). But Dewart did not need to look to Europe for inspiration when it came to celebrating Canadian progress. A number of highly visible Canadian politicians and writers were strong proponents of literary nationalism, chief among them Thomas D’Arcy McGee. While Dewart was compiling his anthology in 1863, McGee’s ideas were gaining wide circulation through two articles published in the British American Magazine that same year, in which he advocated the development of an independent Canada within a strong empire, as he did in ‘The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,’ an address delivered to the Montreal Literary Club in 1867. But even before this, when he edited the New Era between 1857 and 1858, McGee produced a series of five editorials focusing on the creation of a national literature. These editorials demonstrate the extent to which writers and critics of the day were preoccupied with the values of Romantic nationalism. In the first editorial, McGee made a simple but influential assertion: ‘no literature, no national life’ (qtd. in Ballstadt, ‘Father,’ 86). Later, he argued that ‘every country, every nationality, every people, must create and foster a National Literature, if it is their wish to preserve a distinct individuality from other nations. If precautions are not taken to secure this end, the distinctive character and features of a people must disappear; they cannot survive the storms of time and the rude blasts of civil commotion. The popular mind must be trained and edu-

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cated according to the physical appearances and social condition of the country; and the people who are so unfortunate as to possess no fountain from which they can procure the elixir of their existence, will soon disappear from the face of the earth, or become merged in some more numerous or more powerful neighbor’ (New Era, 24 April 1858, qtd. in Ballstadt, Search, 21–2). Dewart seems determined to celebrate McGee’s ideas about the connection between literature and nation. As Carl Ballstadt observes, ‘Dewart begins his essay with virtually the same observation: “A national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character.” Whether the similarity of the statements is coincidental or not, it serves to show that a consciousness of the need for a literature expressive of the lives of the people was being created in the years preceding Confederation’ (‘Father,’ 86–7). Dewart’s anthology was ambitious for its time. It contained 172 poems by forty-eight authors. The selections were made in the year leading up to the Quebec Conference in 1863. That conference set out the resolutions that would form the basis of Confederation in 1867. Dewart’s book reflects the excitement he felt during this period of increasing national self-awareness, but it also reflects his individual perspective, which was deeply religious. His parents were members of the Anglican Church but converted to Methodism when they arrived in Upper Canada in 1834. By the late 1840s, Dewart was teaching at a Methodist school and preparing lectures for the Sons of Temperance, a fraternal society that expanded in Canada during the decade. He was soon asked to become a preacher, a request that ‘produced a serious mental crisis’ (qtd. in Marshall). By 1855 he was ordained into the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Dundas. His circuit expanded, and by the 1860s he was well known throughout Canada East and West as a preacher and church administrator. In 1869 he was named editor of the influential Christian Guardian, the official weekly newspaper of the Methodists. He continued in this role until 1894. For Dewart, literature was primarily a religious vehicle. ‘Some of his early writing was exhortative, encouraging readers to seek salvation immediately’ (Marshall). He believed that poetry was a sacred display of the divine and was a staunch conservative who saw tobacco and alcohol as evil barriers to converse with God. In the preface and introductory essay to his anthology, Dewart also made some crucial claims about the relationship between a national literature and citizenship. Perhaps his most frequently quoted words defining this relationship appear in the ‘Introductory Essay’: ‘A national literature is an essen-

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tial element in the formation of national character. It is not merely the record of a country’s mental progress: it is the expression of its intellectual life, the bond of national unity, and the guide of national energy. It may be fairly questioned, whether the whole range of history presents the spectacle of a people firmly united politically, without the subtle but powerful cement of a patriotic literature’ (ix). Dewart was responding to his own sense of nationalism, which prompted him to ‘rescue from oblivion’ (ix) many of the poems that had appeared in newspapers but never in books. However, his perspective was not entirely original. As early as 1840, James Holmes had argued, in the Literary Garland, that ‘the literature of a country is the measure of its progress towards refinement’ (qtd. in Klinck, Literary History, vol. 1, 161). Dewart’s position was that Canadians had ignored the literature of their country and that such ignorance had to end in order to forge a strong and enduring nation. Most of Dewart’s introduction is devoted to explaining to his audience (his literary congregation) how the experience of reading true poetry (a secular scripture) is fundamentally religious. Poetry is evidence of God: ‘It is not some artificial distortion of thought and language by a capricious fancy: it has its foundation in the mental constitution which our Creator has given us’ (xi). Or as Dewart says a little later, ‘the useful and the beautiful are both from God’ (xii); poetry ‘educates the mind to a quicker perception of the harmony, grandeur, and truth disclosed in the works of the Creator’ (xiii). The further Dewart gets into his introduction, the more fervent are his claims for the poet as an agent of God: ‘He stands as a priest at Nature’s high altars to expound her symbolic language, to unveil her hidden beauty, to dispense her sacred lessons, and to lead the mind up from the tokens of his presence on earth to the Green Father of all in heaven’ (xiv). Dewart’s language becomes exegetical. As an editor who was also a poet and a preacher, he sees his anthological undertaking as a means of interpreting and expounding upon ‘symbolic language’ in such a way that God’s presence in things and individuals will be revealed. The editor is going to lead us out of a postlapsarian wilderness. He will find the signs and interpret them and show us the way back to the garden. The signs are the poems marking his collection. The garden is called Canada. Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies note that ‘although limited by its exclusion of aboriginal and radical verse,’ Dewart’s anthology ‘nevertheless cast a wide net that included most of the recognized women poets of the period. By assembling the work of several dozen

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currently active poets, Dewart contributed to the heightened sense of cultural identity that was to accompany Confederation in 1867’ (369). In his assessment of the anthology, A.J.M. Smith is a bit less generous: ‘Most of the poems in the book seem “elegant” and old-fashioned. They might find a place in one of those handsomely bound collections of album verses drawn from the popular ladies’ magazines and found in Victorian drawing rooms. Sentimental piety, melodramatic emotion, and conventional feeling about nature, expressed in rather dull verse, make up the greater part of the book’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 460). Dewart’s anthology begins with poems that are ‘Sacred and Reflective,’ followed by those that are ‘Descriptive and National,’ and ends with ‘Miscellaneous Pieces.’ The opening poems echo Sangster’s belief in ‘God’s glory and omnipotence.’ Those in the second section come a bit closer to what we might recognize today as early Canadian nature poetry, with some of the selections anticipating the mood and cadence to be found in the works of the Confederation poets. Although Dewart did not include Canadian poetry published before 1815 (he seems to have identified his starting point as the year coinciding with the end of the War of 1812, a potent source of Canadian nationalism), he did engage in a selection process that began to credit some of the more accomplished writers to emerge between 1815 and 1864, including Charles Sangster, Alexander McLachlan, Rosanna Leprohon, Susanna Moodie, and Charles Heavysege. Yet no editor picked up the thread initiated by Dewart until Susan Frances Harrison (writing under the pseudonym ‘Seranus’) published her anthology in 1887. At first glance, it seems odd that more anthologies did not appear between 1864 and 1887. Proponents of literary nationalism were vocal and often appeared in print. Charles Mair, one of the founders of the Canada First movement in the 1870s, had argued in ‘The New Canada’ (1875), much as Dewart had argued in his anthology, that the ‘common cause’ of the nation ‘must be embodied in our school-books, be illustrated by the chisel and the pencil, and enter into the more thoughtful spirit of the press. One of its infallible signs is the growth of a national literature. This, to be characteristic, must taste of the wood, and be the genuine product of the national imagination and invention’ (qtd. in Ballstadt, Search, 152). Mair had defended Canadian nationalism during the Red River Rebellion in 1869, when he was briefly taken prisoner by Louis Riel. Riel’s defeat led to the creation of the province of Manitoba and the expansion of Canada westward. The Northwest Territories was created in 1870, and British Columbia was established the

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next year. Prince Edward Island joined the Confederation in 1873. New railway lines connected the provinces. The coast-to-coast completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway occurred in 1885. As W.H. New observes, ‘railroads were perceived as signs of national unity’; they contributed to ‘a belief in a commonality that could be identified as the “Canadian” character, but although this proved to be a functional political gesture, it too was at heart a fiction’ (History, 80). In fact, there were deep divisions within the new federation, both political and economic, that made it difficult for Canadian writers and publishers to establish themselves in the post-Confederation period. As George Parker notes, ‘between 1840 and 1867 the limitations on authorship and native publishing were crystallized into patterns that would last into the twentieth century’ (Beginnings, 91). Because of the availability of cheap American books and reprints, and because the Canadian market was so small, ‘authors had to be journalists and had to find markets abroad, as a local audience slowly manifested itself’ (91). Conditions did not improve much for writers after Confederation. Eli MacLaren argues that it is important to dismantle the assumption that a national literary culture must naturally or necessarily have flowed from the political creation of 1867. If … the law of copyright coerced the book trade in English Canada into operating primarily by importing, reproducing and disseminating American and British books, then as long as this law prevailed we should not expect to see the rise of a distinctly Canadian literature at the national level but an array of local creations, drawing more on the ideas and forms of the imported publications than on each other. We should expect to see not an internally coherent artistic tradition but a constantly interrupted succession of texts written locally, each reflecting immediate experience to some extent but otherwise largely responding to insights and innovations from elsewhere, and either limited by a sub-national circulation to a sub-national significance or astonishingly bounding into the international arena through intentional or unintentional printing abroad. (147)

Because restrictions subordinating Canadian copyright to British copyright were not lifted until 1924, literary publishing in Canada ‘fell away from domestic production and became essentially the distribution of imported products’ (MacLaren, 15). The restrictions hampering Canadian publishers were made worse in the decade following Confederation when the failure of a major American bank in 1873 triggered

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a financial panic that turned into a four-year-long depression. By 1877, 89 of the 364 railroads in the United States had gone bankrupt and the unemployment rate hit 14 per cent. These statistics did not bode well for Canada, which had placed such faith in the relation between railway building and nationhood. There were also problems in the manufacturing industries. Faced with the need to sell their goods at any price, American manufacturers began to dump their products on the Canadian market, often at prices below cost, simply to move their inventory. This drove Canadian companies out of business and threw into question the national economic policies of Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals, who were fundamentally opposed to protective tariffs. The effects of the depression were compounded by an equine influenza epidemic in the United States that began in 1872. This ‘Great Epizootic’ combined with the economic downturn to bring American industry to a standstill. Like other industries, Canadian publishing suffered, right into the next decade. As Parker says, ‘Even though there was economic growth during the eighties, that decade seemed to consist of endless bankruptcies and failures in the book trade, as elsewhere, until the prosperous years arrived in 1896’ (Beginnings, 166). In order to survive, publishers turned to reprinting material, or to subscription-based printing, or to preparing titles for the textbook market. There was little incentive to publish new literary works, a factor that discouraged would-be editors from taking on new anthology projects. Many Canadian writers simply left the country to pursue possibilities in the United States and abroad. As Nick Mount has shown, dozens of Canadian writers emigrated towards the end of the century. These economic conditions help to explain the lapse in anthology publishing during the 1870s and 1880s. When editors did turn to anthologizing during this period, it was not in the spirit of Dewart’s literary nationalism but much more in the spirit of creating books that might have a measure of financial success. The two most prominent anthologies to appear in these years were J. Douglas Borthwick’s The Harp of Canaan; or, Selections from the Best Poets on Biblical Subjects (1871) and William Shannon’s The Dominion Orange Harmonist (1876). Both collections illustrate the widely held idea that anthologies could serve moral and political ends. Dewart shared this belief, of course, but he was much more subtle in its application, and his immediate political agenda was considerably wider than those envisioned by Borthwick or Shannon. Nevertheless, their anthologies give us a sense of the preoccupations of their age.

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Borthwick was a well-known Montreal educator who wrote many books for use in schools. His anthology was intended for curricular use as well. The preface sets forth some strong opinions about the state of competing volumes that students might consult: ‘So little attention has been paid to the quality of the verses contained in books of poetry and elocution from which young people are to learn,’ he argues. ‘Till very lately they were all but made up of the very refuse of the English language’ (3). To rectify this situation, Borthwick proposes his biblical poems because ‘sacred poetry is … the brightest possession of the Church – the richest pasturage of her children; eminently fitted, therefore, for her little ones, who, as yet, require none of her stern discipline’ (4). Borthwick provides another reason why such poetry is suited especially for children: ‘Poetry is the safest, as it is the highest exercise of the imagination’ (3). Borthwick brings together religious poems by a diverse range of authors, including Canadian writers such as Rosanna Leprohon, William Henry Drummond, Charles Heavysege, and John Reade, to name a few. Clearly, the progress of Canadian literature had been slowed in the years following Dewart’s editorial efforts. Susan Frances Harrison’s The Canadian Birthday Book (1887) represents a serious attempt to collect Canadian literature that was secular and nationalist in its orientation. In their Highways of Canadian Literature (1924), J.D. Logan and Donald G. French call this ‘the first anthology to engage public attention’ (38). Harrison included eighty-eight writers. The most represented poet was Sangster (twenty-three poems), followed by Charles G.D. Roberts (eighteen), Isabella Valancy Crawford (sixteen), Kate Seymour Maclean (ten), and Charles Heavysege (eight). Harrison picked up where Dewart left off by returning to the equation between nation building and writing that marked Dewart’s earlier work. An influential cultural figure in the late 1800s, Harrison was born in Toronto. Her family relocated to Montreal when she was in her teens, a move that allowed her to become interested in French-Canadian history, literature, and music. After her marriage to John Harrison in 1879, the couple moved to Ottawa, where they ‘transformed the musical life of the city’ (Gerson, ‘Susan,’ 145). Perhaps her most important contribution was in Toronto, where she settled in 1887. As principal of the Rosedale branch of the Toronto Conservatory of Music, ‘Seranus’ contributed to magazines in Canada, Britain, and the United States, and was a regular correspondent for the Detroit Free Press and the Toronto Globe. She was sensitive to the problems facing Canadian writers and

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publishers at the time and did not always find it easy to publish her own work, despite her relatively high profile. In the title story of her first book, Crowded Out! (1886), she captures the frustrations of a Canadian writer who cannot find publication abroad. Harrison was a secular writer. She had little time for the religious belief that informed earlier Canadian writing and not much sympathy for the Methodist agenda that supported it. While it’s true that Harrison’s writing often fell back on romantic cliché, her secular approach to English- and French-Canadian literature was highly professional. The book’s poetic epigraph provides a good sense of Harrison’s approach: No eulogy to-day I bring Of Canada’s fair fate, Her greatness coming years may sing, ’Tis ours to work and wait.

The coming greatness of the country is a matter of ‘work,’ rather than faith. Harrison’s anthology is unique because she brings together French and English writers and because she includes early Canadian poetry. She claims that hers is ‘the only existing publication where, between the same covers, may be found carefully selected specimens of French and English Canadian verse’ (3). The selections go back as far as 1732, when Jean Taché published his Tableau de la Mer in Quebec, up to the publication date of The Canadian Birthday Book – ‘these latter days sweet with the impassioned singing of a Roberts and a Sangster’ (3). She calls the later poets ‘representatives of the modern or postTennysonian school, the ephemeral and often beautiful contributions noted in the various ill-fated magazines that from time to time have struggled into existence and fallen out of it again in an incredibly short period – these are some of the sources from which have been drawn the contents of the following pages’ (3). The central figures selected by Harrison are those we begin to recognize as part of the Canadian poetic canon: Charles Sangster, Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Susanna Moodie, E. Pauline Johnson, and Archibald Lampman. Harrison’s anthology is significant in terms of its secular approach and her appreciation of those poets who were devoted to rendering the Canadian landscape. At the same time, the form of the collection is revealing in its material strategies, for this is not a conventionally organized selection of poems. Harrison employs the format of the ‘birthday

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book’ to increase the sales potential of the volume. As she says, the idea behind the ‘birthday book’ is that ‘there shall be given for “every day of the year” a noble thought, an improving maxim, or new idea’ (4). However, Harrison admits, a bit drolly, that she ‘found some difficulty in procuring exactly Three Hundred and Sixty-five Noble Thoughts, Improving Maxims, and New Ideas’ (4). To rectify this situation, she organizes the book by months and days under each season, but many dates are simply left blank, so that if you were searching for inspiration connected with your birthday you might find yourself out of luck. Harrison also provides short biographical and critical notes at the end of her anthology, another feature that indicates the seriousness of her intent despite the birthday-book packaging. The very existence of this kind of birthday book in Canada in 1887 says a good deal about shifting patterns of readership. As Judith Wilt points out in her review of Leah Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, the period that produced this type of anthology ‘saw the professionalization of writing and reading through a variety of intermediate identities, many of which writers and readers assimilated into their own identities. Writer, copier, editor, anthologizer, abridger, reviewer, critic, preacher, teacher, reader – all roles lie to hand for all, abetting and contending’ (412). As a writer with multiple roles and as an anthologist, Harrison was working in a much more plural universe than her predecessors. And her ability to construct an anthology that rested on the tested format of the British birthday book while at the same time incorporating exclusively Canadian material says something about the shifting nature of the reading public: they were able to bridge worlds and genres, to understand that Canadian writing could fit comfortably within what was essentially a British mould, while at the same time claiming its distinctness by virtue of being Canadian. The implied reader of The Canadian Birthday Book was literate, secular, and savvy. Once the conventional equation between poetry and religion was sundered, as it was in this collection, it would not take long for narrative – novels and short fiction – to take on a new role. Because it opens the door to such narratives, Harrison’s anthology stands appropriately on the edge of the twentieth century, but it hesitates before taking the final step. Two years after Harrison’s collection appeared, William Douw Lighthall published a turning-point anthology: Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada (1889). In E.D. Blodgett’s words, the book was ‘indicative of Cardinal

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Newman’s argument that “literature is both the agent and the expression of the organic unity of a national culture, the synthetic power of culture in action”’ (Five-Part Invention, 38). Songs was one of three anthologies under Lighthall’s name, including Canadian Songs and Poems (1892), which was essentially a reprint of the earlier anthology under a different title, and the pocket-sized and abridged Canadian Poems and Lays (1894). My copy of the last volume is a little fetish object with a soft brown suede cover that sits like a small pet in your hand. Songs of the Great Dominion was originally suggested by William Sharp, an editor at Walter Scott Publishing in London, where it was first published (Adams). Ironically, the anthology was primarily designed for a British audience, as Lighthall indicated when he claimed that the selections would ‘transport you to the Canadian clime itself. You shall come out with us as a guest of its skies and air, paddling over bright lakes and down savage rivers; singing French chansons to the swing of our paddles, till we come into the settlements; and shall be swept along on great rafts of timber by the majestic St Lawrence, to moor at historic cities whose streets and harbours are thronged with the commerce of all Europe and the world. You shall be there to hear the chants of a new nationality, weaving in with songs of the Empire, of its heroes, of its Queen’ (xxiv). In this construction, Canada becomes a New World Venice, a storied land of heroic traders inhabiting a magical world that is pristine and sublime, romantic in its associations with the French voyageurs and exotic in its blend of the savage and the civilized, the historic and the untouched. The anthology is offered as a testimony to the country’s greatness, but also as a testimony to the idea that none of it would be possible without Queen and Empire, the source of this fantasy called Canada, which is celebrated by its collectively chanting poets who bear witness to Britain, the abiding inspirational force. Lighthall’s readers are invited to participate in a literary voyage that replicates the colonial activity surrounding Canada’s discovery – the revelation and affirmation of a new world filled with riches. Lighthall’s anthology promises a journey away from the wilderness of an old world towards a literary promised land. To enter this new world is to be delivered by Canadian literature, which becomes a redemptive force. Lighthall was not overtly religious, but in his anthological activity he was still keeping a quasi-religious code. The qualities of this code were not lost on literary historians who assessed Lighthall’s contribution. For example, Logan and French describe Lighthall’s anthology as if reading

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it were part of a conversion experience. Even the cadence of their language becomes more biblical as they warm to the nature of Lighthall’s higher calling. In a single paragraph, they use the word ‘spirit’ four times and italicize the connection they make between ‘faith,’ ‘exultation,’ ‘serenity,’ and the land itself, drawing our attention to the Canadian landscape as an object of worship and a vehicle of deliverance: What Lighthall in his Songs of the Great Dominion attempts to do is not to present us with a mere quantity of Canadian poetry which we may receive with delight or reject, but to invite us to the home of the Canadian National Spirit and to show us what the Canadian spirit, as it is envisaged and expressed in the poetry of the Dominion since Confederation, has achieved and means to achieve. One who reads Lighthall’s anthology cannot escape catching in it glimpses of the essential Canadian spirit. In the poems in Lighthall’s volume the Canadian spirit sings clearly its full gamut. We hear the ‘notes’ always of courage; of self reliance; of hope; of exultation; and of good cheer and serenity; and these notes of courage and faith and exultation and indomitable will and heroism and good cheer and peace in the heart of man in Canada are but the antiphons to the voices of the land and the sea and the forest, the great waters and the sky and the maples, and elms in their strength and also in their gentler and peaceful humors. (383)

Lighthall grew up in Montreal and attended McGill University where he completed a BA, an MA, and a degree in law. He was the mayor of Westmount from 1900 to 1903, where he also served as the school commissioner from 1908 to 1909. Lighthall was active in numerous organizations, including the Art Association of Montreal, the Royal Historical Monuments Commission, the Royal Metropolitan Parks Commission, the Arctic Club of Canada, the Canadian Authors Association, the Antiquarian Society of Montreal, the Montreal Committee in Support of Spanish Democracy, the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors, the Masons, the Independent Order of Foresters, the Prince of Wales Regiment, the Victoria Rifles, and the Canadian Association of Returned Soldiers, to name a few. He was also chairman of the McCord Museum. Not content with these associations, Lighthall decided to found The Society of Canadian Literature in 1889, the same year his anthology was published (Cambron and Gerson, 129). This extensive list shows Lighthall’s diverse range of interests. As Donald Wright puts it, ‘there was not an issue, debate, event or organization with which he was not in some way affiliated’ (‘Sometime Con-

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federation Poet,’ 3). Here was a man with a liberal education, running a progressive city in an urban context, who at the same time embraced antiquity, collected Native artefacts, joined secret fraternities, and immersed himself in the rituals and history of military life. How could these contrasting passions be explained? In a detailed article about Lighthall’s close friendship with the McCord Museum’s founder, David Ross McCord, Wright argues that both men devoted themselves to ‘the attempt to deal with, and make sense of, modernity, not by rejecting it, but by creating an antimodern space, an intellectual and at times physical retreat “from some of its most palpable realities.” Precisely because their lives – the commitment to imperialism, the invention of an imagined French Canada, the fascination with Aboriginal culture, and the emphasis on militarism and the cult of manliness – parallel the period from c.1880 to 1918, when the age of imperialism and Canada’s great economic and social transformation towards modernity intersected, Lighthall and McCord afford an opportunity to rethink imperialism as, in part, a process of resistance to, and accommodation with, modernity’ (‘Antimodernism,’ 135). T.J. Jackson Lears defines antimodernism as ‘the recoil from an “overcivilized” modern existence to more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience’ (xiii). Wright adds that ‘in opposition to modernity – its unbearable lightness, anonymity, and its awesome capacity to obliterate tradition – antimodernism venerated, in its various guises and forms, the idealized premodern community of face-to-face contact, rootedness and connection’ (‘Antimodernism,’ 135). Lighthall’s eclectic interests (he collected Flemish primitives and Iroquois masks and was given the name Tekenderoken by the Caughnawaga Iroquois) can be explained by his response to an encroaching turn-of-the-century modernism, which he resisted through his pursuit of an idealized and masculine vision of Canadian history. This resistance was ironic, for as his biography makes clear, Lighthall was devoted to progressive movements of the day and was actively involved in the burgeoning urbanity of Montreal. Yet as Wright points out, Lighthall’s identification with earlier times was more than an example of late-nineteenth-century English-Canadian imperialism; it could also be called ‘retromedievalism’ in its attraction to chivalry and romance, which often manifested itself as an affirmation of French-Canadian culture, which was seen as a symbol of ‘organic and traditional’ resistance to change. In his introduction, Lighthall describes the ‘old Chanson literature’ as positively ‘charming,’ ‘medieval,’ and ‘embalmed’ (Wright, ‘Antimodernism,’ 138).

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Lighthall’s support of French-Canadian literature was part of his need to find ‘simplicity, rusticity, and authenticity’ (138) in a modern world. His inclusion of this material in his anthologies was a means of preserving an earlier sense of order. The same impulse explains Lighthall’s embrace of Native culture. In his romance, entitled The Master of Life, Lighthall wrote about how the Native possessed ‘a marvellous physique, a keen eye and quick reflexes, amazing stamina, a natural wisdom, a simplicity of manners, a poetic way of speech, and all the other attributes of a people totally in tune with nature’ (23). Lighthall’s obsession with military ritual and history was not at odds with his devotion to Native culture. As Wright explains, it was part of his desire to affirm an earlier world of ‘primitive, elemental masculinity’ centred on the imperial ideal. These militarist values profoundly influenced Lighthall’s anthology selections. In Wright’s words, Concern with manliness also found persistent expression in Lighthall’s introduction to Songs of the Great Dominion. Courage remains the defining tone of Canada’s poets, ‘for to hunt, to fight, to hew out a farm, one must be a man! Through their new hopes, doubts, exultations, questionings, the virility of fighting races is the undertone.’ More specifically for Lighthall, the poetry of Charles G.D. Roberts is distinguished by its authoritative manliness: ‘He speaks with a voice of power and leadership, and never with a mean note or one of heedless recklessness. This manliness renders him particularly fitted for the great work which Canada at present offers her sons.’ Charles Mair, ‘who has lived a life almost as Indian and North-West as his poems,’ is a ‘manly figure.’ Living on the Prairies, he once snow-shoed ‘nearly five hundred miles through the wilds of Dacota [sic].’ Not only did Canada’s male poets write with manliness, so too did its female poets. For example, ‘Mrs Sarah Anne Curzon writes with the power and spirit of masculinity’ while Annie Rothwell ‘had only a name for prose novels until the spirit of militarism was thus lit in her.’ Lighthall could compliment these women because they were confirming, not challenging, his masculine ideal. By contrast, women who transgressed prescribed gender roles earned his scorn. (‘Antimodernism,’ 145)

Lighthall did not hide his imperial values; the belief that a strong Canada could exist through the imperial connection was widespread at the time (although Wright’s article makes it clear that few people saw in Native culture or in the French-Canadian habitant the idealized evidence of an imperial masculine ethos). Anyone opening Songs of the

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Great Dominion would see the imperial connection immediately, since Lighthall dedicates the book ‘to that sublime cause, the union of mankind, which the British peoples, if they are true to themselves and courageous in the future as they have been in the past, will take to be the reason of existence of their empire’ (v). The epigraph is an excerpt from a poem by Frederick George Scott (F.R. Scott’s father). Like Lighthall, Scott celebrated imperialism and a Canadian nationalism that he equated with the Canadian north (he was known as ‘The Poet of the Laurentians’). For Lighthall, Canada’s northernness was aligned with Anglo-Saxon superiority. He believed that the greatness of the Empire derived from ‘the common heritage of the Imperial Race’ or ‘the white stocks of the Empire’ (qtd. in Wright, ‘Sometime Confederation Poet,’ 17), who were identified with things northern. Here he was picking up on a theme articulated earlier by writers such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who frequently compared Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland as examples of northern countries that had revealed their richness in history, poetry, and astronomy (Ballstadt, ‘Father,’ 87). He attributes this richness to a northern penchant for ‘indoor labor of the brain’ and fully expects Canada to see a like richness (‘A National Literature for Canada,’ qtd. in Ballstadt, ‘Father,’ 87). Similarly, Charles Mair celebrated the ‘noble heritage’ that would allow Canadians to triumph through a northern identity that would make them bodybuilding supermen inhabiting an equally muscled country: ‘An atmosphere of crystal, a climate suited above all others to develop the broad shoulder, the tense muscle, and the clear brain, and which will build up the most herculean and robust nation upon earth’ (qtd. in Ballstadt, Search, 154). As Wright observes, for Lighthall ‘the imperial equation was simple: north equalled superiority, south equalled inferiority. Lighthall maintained, for example, that Canada’s geographic position was superior to that of Brazil, “that hot land,” as tropical regions were unable to support “white populations”’ (‘Sometime Confederation Poet,’ 18). In his foundational essay on the relation between Canadian northernness and identity, Carl Berger shows that a preoccupation with the qualities of northernness was ‘a recurrent theme in nationalist thought which flowered in the half century after Confederation and which is, in muted form, still with us – the idea that Canada’s unique character derived from her northern location, her severe winters and her heritage of “northern races”’ (‘True North,’ 4). The hardships of life in the north resulted in Canadians developing ‘the attributes of a dominant

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race’ that made the idea of north ‘synonymous with strength and self reliance,’ while southern cultures were ‘equated with degeneration, decay and effeminacy’ (5). This masculinist model was also Aryan. The ‘superior race’ of the north was figured as white, a depiction that allowed turn-of-the-century imperialists to argue that Canada’s climate would ensure its escape from the racial problems that plagued the United States. To go north was to move up the evolutionary scale. It was to become white and virile. Meanwhile, the popularization of Darwinism during the same period reinforced the idea that the Canadian climate would eliminate the weaker races. Berger argues that as the idea of north developed, it was equated not only with white and masculine superiority, but also with moral purity and health, while southern climates were seen as suffering from ‘lax morality’ (‘True North,’ 10) and physical degeneracy. It was this moral purity that allowed northern nations to enact better laws, to find a stronger sense of liberty, and to establish an enlightened belief in political unity. As Berger says, ‘the north – with its sparkling clear air and sharp outlines which could never be apprehended with the techniques of Old World art – was much more than a field of art: it was the mirror of national character’ (‘True North,’ 21). Lighthall’s introductory material picks up on this northern theme. He describes the poems in his volume as products of ‘the most athletic country in this world,’ which is known for its ‘virility’ (xxi) and is ‘the result of simply the noblest epic migration the world has even seen’ (xxii). The book’s subtitle – Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada – frames the content as an exploration narrative that unites the dual poles that attracted Lighthall: the voices in the collection come from ‘forests,’ ‘waters,’ and ‘settlements,’ which he associated with a romantic and idealized past, as well as from the ‘cities’ he aligned with a progressive vision of modern Canada. Lighthall saw his editorial activity as a means of bridging the natural and the urban, the historic and the modern. In his introduction, Lighthall makes his editorial aims crystal clear: ‘The reader who enters this anthology will hear something of great Niagara falling, of brown rivers rushing with foam, of the crack of the rifle in the haunts of the moose and caribou, the lament of vanishing races singing their death-song as they are swept on to the cataract of oblivion, the rural sounds of Arcadias just rescued from surrounding wildernesses by the axe, shrill war-whoops of Iroquois battle, proud traditions of contests with the French and the Americans, stern and sorrowful cries of valour rising to curb rebellion.

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The tone of them is courage – for to hunt, to fight, to hew out a farm, one must be a man!’ (xxi). Lighthall’s opening comments exhibit the tensions that pulled him two ways. On one hand, he seems to see the extinction of the ‘vanishing races’ of indigenous people as a sign of progress, just as he sees the hewing of farm from forest as a civilizing act. On the other hand, he values the idea of rescuing multiple Arcadias from an encroaching wilderness and of situating the manly nature of this pastoral rescue in relation to ‘proud traditions’ of battle linked with a heroic past. Lighthall casts his description of the Canadian landscape in terms of an aesthetic of the sublime that was very familiar to his readers, an aesthetic that links him with his editorial predecessor, Edward Hartley Dewart. As Susan Glickman notes, Dewart also made use of the sublime when he spoke of how Canada provided ‘inspiration for its poets in its scenery’ (49). He wrote: ‘In our grand and gloomy forests – in our brilliant skies and varied seasons – in our magnificent lakes and rivers – in our hoary mountains and fruitful valleys, external Nature unveils her most majestic forms to exalt and inspire the truly poetic soul’ (xix). Glickman points out that ‘the sublime legacy is still strong in later critics like W.D. Lighthall, the subtitle of whose anthology … gives the land parity with civilization in the expression of national character’ (49). The reader of Lighthall’s anthology was implicitly involved in this expression of national character. The act of reading was a means of self-construction, an assertion of identity that equated creative writing with self-creation and the articulation of national values. In their history of Canadian literature to 1924, Logan and French pinpoint this connection between Lighthall’s anthology and identity formation, both at the personal and national level. They note that ‘Songs of the Great Dominion not only implies a kind of creative vision and imagination on the part of the compiler, but distinctly and unmistakably appeals to the same faculties in the reader. In other words, Lighthall’s volume delights the heart and the imagination by way of the intrinsic beauty and the moral substance of the poetry in it; but it delights more the constructive imagination of the reader by way of the illumination it sheds on the essential nature, will, and ideas of the Canadian spirit, of the Canadian people’ (384). Logan and French’s comment on the way in which the anthology enables ‘the constructive imagination of the reader’ frames the collection and its readers in terms of a new sense of agency. In their construction, the reader is no longer the passive recipient of the anthologist’s values; instead, the anthological read-

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ing experience frees the reader to imagine a private and public identity. Also new is the realization that this ‘constructive imagination’ is not fundamentally religious. It is distinctly secular, a product of reading, rather than faith. What is missing from Lighthall’s introduction that was overwhelmingly evident in Dewart’s is the religious rhetoric that links creativity and the sublime with God. Lighthall refers to the poetry in Dewart’s collection as ‘apologetic and depressed’ because it is ‘antiquated’ and does not display ‘the tone of exultation and confidence which the singers have assumed since Confederation’ (xxxv). While there is an implicit suggestion in Lighthall’s introduction that a full apprehension of the Canadian landscape through its literature opens a window to a higher order, he recoils from the outright suggestion that this order might be divine. Salvation lies in the land. Dewart was the minister. By contrast, Lighthall was the man about town, the archaeologist, the mayor, the collector. His anthology begins the process of secularizing Canadian literature. It replaces God with Nation. By doing so, it implicitly embraces mid-Victorian ideas about the function of literature. As an anthologist himself, it seems likely that Lighthall would have read Matthew Arnold’s ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Humphry Ward’s popular anthology The English Poets (1880), in which Arnold argues that poetry will inevitably replace religion and that readers ‘will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry’ (xviii). Patricia Jasen has demonstrated that Arnold’s ideas about literature and culture became influential in Canada soon after the publication of Culture and Anarchy in 1869. Arnold’s belief in the necessary conjunction of ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hebraism’ as a means to salvation allowed critics, editors, and teachers to argue that literature was an essential vehicle for providing spiritual improvement. Arnold visited Toronto in 1884, just a few years before Lighthall started work on his anthology; Arnold’s ideas were very much in the air. They transformed pedagogy. Many professors came away from Arnold’s books and lectures with the belief that their job was to train a new generation of students to appreciate culture, rather than religion or morality. In short, culture became a new religion. As Jasen points out, Arnold prompted professors to believe ‘that they, as purveyors of culture, were performing a role analogous to that of the clergy and one

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which was equally worthy of respect. They felt that two processes were underway in their undergraduate classrooms: the professor brought students into contact with culture – with ‘literature which binds men together in a spiritual world’ – and, in addition, offered students a model to emulate by ‘teaching traditional values and deportment through his own behaviour’ (556). The transformation that professors hoped to encourage in their students involved more than an appreciation of culture, for in prompting them to follow this route, they were also training them to become better citizens. Arnold’s writing allowed literature to be explained as a key factor influencing the construction of nation and citizenship. Jasen quotes W.S. Milner’s assessment of the Arnoldian function of the Canadian arts college in 1906: ‘to carry our people through the vast material prosperity awaiting us, to foster our higher life, to furnish wealth with noble interests and ambitions, to kindle the spirit of citizenship, to rescue democracy from the spirit of the crowd … to hold out proper aims to government, to give grace to a raw civilization, to plead the beauty, the dignity and solemnity of life, in short to create “the soul of a people”’ (557). In commenting on Lighthall’s anthology, A.J.M. Smith reflects on how his selections represented this kind of self-improvement as a simultaneous improvement of the nation: ‘It was a young, strenuous, self-conscious, growing nation, and when the poets that make up the bulk of Lighthall’s book were writing it was almost impossible not to believe that energy, courage, industry, imagination, and shrewdness, left to themselves, must work out an immense and brilliant destiny. Self-reliance and self-help – Emerson and Samuel Smiles – blessed by the Everlasting Yea of a teeming continent, these seemed all that were needed to unlock the rich store of good things that lay ahead for sturdy Canadians. Mr. Lighthall’s introduction was lyrical in its expression of this faith’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 462). Lighthall’s rhetoric may have been both lyrical and practical, but it remained a displaced ‘expression of faith,’ a late-nineteenth-century manifestation of the translation of religious value into cultural value. Yet it remains evangelical in its assertion that literature was a means to salvation, that the country could be built around an idea of continuity and progress embodied in the literature, and that the reader could discover a heightened sense of nation through its poetry. The organization of Lighthall’s anthology reflects the complex set of tropes he aligned with this kind of literary advancement, which was always combined with his pursuit of imperial values. He divides his anthology into nine sections: (1) The Imperial Spirit, (2) The New

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Nationality, (3) The Indian, (4) The Voyageur and Habitant, (5) Settlement Life, (6) Sports and Free Life, (7) Historical Incidents, (8) Places, and (9) Seasons. Although each of the sections in his anthology is implicitly connected with the imperial spirit, the first section of the book is quite short, perhaps because it does draw on some of the religious rhetoric that characterized imperial poetry of the day, a rhetoric from which Lighthall was trying to distance himself – not always with success, as the prayerful stance of his own poem ‘National Hymn’ makes clear. He felt the need to open the volume by recognizing the imperial connection directly, yet the brevity of this section (it includes only five poems) suggests that Lighthall was more interested in the idea of imperialism as a metaphor of unity and community. The remaining sections in the collection show how he understood the Indian, the voyageur, and even sports as secular expressions of the imperial paradigm. The challenge was to make his readers see how their daily lives and their history enacted a connection with imperial order that was everywhere present but not necessarily seen. Lighthall linked imperialism with the warrior mentality. Imperial cultures were heroic, masculine cultures. Their poets spoke for those cultures. This meant that the warrior spirit had to be shared by men and women alike. So Lighthall sees Sarah Anne Curzon (ironically, a committed feminist and recording secretary of the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association) as a woman who ‘writes with the power and spirit of masculinity’ (xxxii), and Annie Rothwell of Kingston as the author of some of ‘the best war-songs’ (xxxii). Mrs M.J. Katzmann honours ‘The Battle of Grand Pré.’ Agnes Maule Machar (writing under the pseudonym ‘Fidelis’) celebrates British war victories in ‘Canada to the Laureate.’ Militarism is everywhere. The collection opens with a celebration of battles fought, and the promise of a new land. John Reade, literary editor of the Montreal Gazette, writes of the Battle of Hastings and Canada: So God doth mould, as pleaseth Him, the nations of His choice; Now, in the battle-cry is heard His purifying voice; And now, with Orphic strains of peace he draws to nationhood The scattered tribes that dwell apart by mountain, sea, and wood.

Mary Barry Smith asks: Have we not crossed together the Rubicons of the nation, Shoulder to shoulder marching, a solid phalanx and strong?

(4)

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Keepers of the Code Statesmen, Warriors, Sages, brave ones of every station? Here on this height, together, let the cheers be loud and long!

(5)

Lighthall seems less invested in these kinds of direct pronouncements than he is in promoting Canada as a mystic new world where explorations of forest and river promise an entirely new perspective. Perhaps this is why he closes the brief section devoted to the imperial spirit with a poem by William Wye Smith entitled ‘The Canadians on the Nile,’ which presents the Ottawa River as ‘dark Egyptian water.’ Gwendolyn MacEwen herself might have felt quite at home with Smith’s Egyptian motifs, or even with his exotic Canadian pine tree that ‘becomes a palm’ (11). The landscape here is mystical, transformative, metaphoric. In the second section, Lighthall includes poetry that comments directly on Canada and its future potential. The tone is celebratory. Fidelis writes about Dominion Day and Canadian history, valorizing ‘French noblesse’ (15) and the idea that Canada represents ‘Four nations welded into one’ and the best attributes of each – ‘English honour, nerve, and pluck’; Scots’ ‘love of right’; France’s ‘grace and courtesy’; and the Saxon’s ‘faithful love of home’ (16). The union of these cultures makes Canada ‘the worthy heir of British power and British liberty’ (17). The section is completed with poems by Charles G.D. Roberts (a man marked by his ‘manliness and dignity,’ according to Lighthall [xxv]); Charles Sangster (who stands ready to invoke ‘martial fires’ to defend the country from any ‘rash intruder’ [25]); Barry Straton, who sees an ideal Canada as a place populated only by white Anglo-Saxons (‘Shall we not all be one race,’ he asks [24]); William Wye Smith, whose ‘Here’s to the Land’ raises a cup to the military symbolism of farming (‘Here’s to the scythe that we swing like the sword’ [27]); and Lighthall himself, who includes several of his own patriotic poems. The militarist discourse in Songs of the Great Dominion seems at odds with the value placed upon the Aboriginal, mainly because Aboriginal peoples were so often victimized by white settlers and soldiers. For Lighthall, however, the Natives and the conquerors had something in common: they were disappearing in the rush to civilize and modernize the country at the end of the century; both soldier and ‘savage’ were victims of progress and industry. In Lighthall’s anthology, as in so much literature of the period, indigenes come to represent an idealized past that is threatened by an encroaching urban culture. There is little variation in the depiction of the Native in Lighthall’s selections. The noble savages in the anthology inhabit an uncorrupted natural world

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that is sublime in its grandeur and mystery and innocence, as in the excerpt from Charles Mair’s Tecumseh, which presents us with a ‘tameless soul,’ the ‘sunburnt savage’ who lived amidst ‘the rocky gloom of canyons deep’ or ‘hoary pines’ (43) (the sublime) and also in a realm of ‘spacious peacefulness’ (42) where ‘all that flowed was sweet and uncorrupt’ (43) (the Edenic). The animals in this world – unaffected by human presence – occupy the landscape like the detached tigers in Rousseau’s taxidermic jungles. (Rousseau’s paintings had drawn considerable attention by the time Lighthall published his anthology, but it seems unlikely that any of the authors included in the volume would have actually seen his work. Nevertheless, they shared Rousseau’s interest in depicting imaginary animal kingdoms that remained aloof to human presence.) The ‘Indian’ in George Martin’s ‘Change on the Ottawa’ lives just on the outskirts of the ‘naked space’ that is the city (40). He ‘sighs for glories that are gone’ and longs for ‘the primal grandeur of the solemn woods,’ which has been disrupted by the white man and his tools – ‘the blazing forge’ and ‘swift machinery’s whirr and clank and groan’ (38–9). The iron machinery strikes ‘like whetted knives, the red man’s soul’ (39). This is a Canadian version of what Leo Marx called ‘the machine in the garden’ – an example of the way in which technology began to displace a rural landscape and reconfigured an understanding of that landscape in terms of a tension between nature and culture. The Huron warrior in Charles Sangster’s ‘Taapookaa’ inhabits ‘primal woods’ (52). Frederick George Scott’s ‘unlettered children’ emerge ‘from the depths of forest wilds,’ yet they ‘perish with the pine’ (53) in the face of ‘gods of iron / And fire’ that came, ‘devouring all, and blackening earth / And sky with smoke and thunder’ (54). The ‘shining meadows’ (56) of their past have vanished and they know they ‘must die’ (58). The theme of extinction looms over this section of the anthology. Lighthall’s collection is a contradiction in terms. It exists in order to celebrate the ‘Great Dominion’ twenty years after Confederation, but the voices it collects in its opening sections find it difficult to speak of Canada without invoking Britain, or British aesthetic language, or British conceptions about the relation between white man and Native. Even the fourth section, devoted to French-Canadian poems in translation, invokes the myth of a golden era linked to the habitants, as if that past somehow had much more relevance to Lighthall than any poetry of the day. The section begins with a celebration of ‘The Old Regime’ in a translation by Susan Frances Harrison. With the exception of Duncan

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Campbell Scott’s ‘At the Cedars,’ which displays an uncharacteristically fresh use of language and colloquial diction for this anthology, the central value is expressed in these lines from ‘The Old Regime’: Here – tower and trophy, mound and monument, The cairn and cuneiform of an Old World Give place to Nature in her purity. But what we have, we cling to. We would keep All dear tradition; be it picturesque, In the old voyageur with gay festoons Of floating ribbons, happy, noisy, free.

(68)

Exceptions to this kind of valorization of a vanished heroic past emerge infrequently. Lighthall focuses on stories of chivalry and heroism; he longs for an ideal age. It is difficult to find the Canada of 1889 here. If Lighthall is going to break out, his strongest opportunity lies in the fifth section, which is devoted to ‘Settlement Life.’ This is still not the present, but it is certainly Canada; Lighthall tries to include poetry that comes out of that time and place. Poets such as Isabella Valancy Crawford, Charles G.D. Roberts, William Wilfred Campbell, John E. Logan, and Kate B. Simpson manage to employ fresh language that begins to pull this anthology towards the twentieth century. The selections include excerpts from Crawford’s ‘Malcolm’s Katie’ as well as Roberts’s ‘Burnt Lands,’ Campbell’s ‘A Canadian Folk-Song,’ Logan’s ‘The Injun,’ and Simpson’s ‘Rough Ben.’ In choosing these works, Lighthall demonstrated that he could value the unadorned language so evident in Roberts’s work and that he was open to the use of colloquial diction, even if it had a macabre edge, as it does in ‘Rough Ben’: ‘Starved to death,’ sounds kind o’ hard, eh? But its true’s I’m holdin’ this ’ere knife, An’ thet woman dumped in the grave to-day Jes’ starved to death, sir, ’pon my life. Ye wonder how in a land o’ plenty, Where even Injuns wallop around With their belts a-loosened of overfeedin’, Fur a poor white critter grub ain’t found.

(136)

The noble savage is gone. John Logan also forces his readers to confront their stereotypical understanding of the Native in ‘The Injun’:

Nineteenth-Century Anthologies Ye think the Injun isn’t squar’? That’s jes’ whar’ ye mistake; Fer bein’ true to them that’s true The Injun scoops the cake.

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(143)

When Lighthall turns his attention to ‘Sports and Free Life’ in the sixth section, the reader is left with a curious sense of how and when Canadians spend their free time. There are twenty poems here. Of these, eight focus on the delights of canoeing. The rest are set in winter, with the exception of a poem devoted to football, in which the season is unclear. The preoccupation with canoes is significant in terms of constructing the code of nation. Blodgett argues that the canoe ‘becomes the Canadian sign of empire and reaches into nature and represents various kinds of domination’ (Five-Part Invention, 39). For Misao Dean, ‘the canoe was the means whereby Canada “became a nation”: it facilitated exploration and the fur trade, those two east-west movements which eventually united the nation “a mari usque ad mare”’ (339). Lighthall’s canoes symbolize white presence in Native landscapes. But Lighthall also saw the canoe as a symbol uniting Natives and whites, a reassuring connection to readers who wanted to see a link between latenineteenth-century Canada and Canada’s Aboriginal past. It offered evidence of history and tradition. As Eva Mackey writes, ‘Native people have played important supporting roles in defining Canada’ (38) and they also ‘represent Canada’s heritage and past, providing a link between the settlers and the land and helping to negotiate the rocky terrain of creating Canada as “Native land” to settlers’ (39). Beyond offering a connection between present and past, the canoe also appears as a vehicle signifying transcendence, bliss, or erotic fulfilment. Bliss Carman dreams of the ‘Red Swan,’ his favourite canoe, in epiphanic terms that are reminiscent of Archibald Lampman’s ‘Heat’: I follow and dream and recall. Forget and remember and dream; When the interval grass waves tall, I move in the gleam Where his blade-beats glitter and fall.

(162)

Moodie celebrates the return of hunters in canoes that bear their catch. Crawford’s canoes are erotically charged. E. Pauline Johnson’s canoe leaves her dreaming, as does Carman’s and Roberts’s. From Lighthall’s editorial perspective, the canoe is a transforming symbol; it takes peo-

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ple away from urban life. The city has little presence here, other than as something to be escaped, or as the site of celebrations that take its inhabitants away from the details of their daily existence. In other words, Lighthall’s idea of ‘sports and free life’ has little to do with quotidian reality. In his reality, time stands still, or it is altered through art. The poems devoted to winter are about quests to leave the city or about skating as a means ‘to the mystic way’ (198) in a kind of ‘fairy scene’ (197). This is an example of Lighthall’s interest in creating what Wright calls ‘an intellectual and at times physical retreat’ from the ‘palpable realities’ of urban life (‘Antimodernism’ abstract). Even in a poem devoted to the ‘gaudy pageant’ of a winter carnival (‘Fleurange’), a youth dreams of the city as a ‘fairy palace’ that is under attack (206). He awakes from his dream but is left with a sense of ‘the old-world languor’ (206) that allows him to think of himself as ‘a King, whose subjects free, / Are loyal to his rule’ (207). Although it is not explicitly stated, the scene captured in this poem presents the spectacle of the night-time storming of the Ice Palace in Montreal, which Logan and French describe as high drama: ‘The whole city, dressing itself in the picturesque snow-shoe costume and arraying its streets in lights and colors, rises as one man in a tumultuous enthusiasm’ (383). They conclude, as Lighthall did, that ‘something of a future lies before the poetry of these strange and wonderful elements’ (383). The ritual of storming the ice palace in Montreal began a few years before Lighthall’s anthology was published and clearly left a strong impression on him and a number of the writers represented in his volume. Part of Lighthall’s attraction to this event had to do with its connection to an older period dominated by castles, armies, and military units massing in the night. Sports were also an expression of ‘manliness,’ and manliness belonged to another age. The connection between sports and antiquity is made clear in the anonymously authored ‘The Football Match,’ which transforms the players on the field into homoeroticized mock-heroic figures plucked from the Trojan War: O wild kaleidoscopic panorama of jaculatory arms and legs. The twisting, twining, turning, tussling, throwing, thrusting, throttling, tugging, thumping, the tightening thews. The tearing of tangled trousers, the jut of giant calves protuberant. The wriggleness, the wormlike, snaky movement and life of it; The insertion of strong men in the mud, the wallowing, the stamping with thick shoes;

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The rowdyism, and elan, the slugging and scraping, the cowboy Homeric ferocity. (Ah, well kicked, red legs! Hit her up, you muddy little hero, you!) The bleeding noses, the shins, the knuckles abraded: That’s the way to make men! Go it, you border ruffians, I like ye. (209)

Lines such as these point to the quirkiness of Lighthall’s taste. He has chosen the work of a poet who wants to locate the football players in a Homeric context, but the distinctly unheroic nature of the language works against that option. Through the collection we see this kind of tension repeated again and again: Lighthall is attracted to poetry that seems to have shaken off the romantic and religious diction associated with an earlier tradition, but at the same time he is drawn to history and seems unable to truly place his faith in the present. No sooner do we approach the immediate world than Lighthall returns us to an earlier time, as if to remind himself that history exists, that there is grounding in tradition, that modernity is part and parcel of the past. The narrative line in his anthology is jagged, troubled, frenetic. It doubles back on itself, jerks forward, retreats. These tensions explain the strange narrative turn that Songs of the Great Dominion makes after the poems devoted to sports and leisure. The next section, ‘The Spirit of Canadian History,’ takes us back in time and then moves us forward again: it unfolds with poems about Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), the Huguenots and Frontenac (1622–98), Daulac (1635–60), the Battle of Grand Pré (1747), the Loyalist activities (1775– 83), General Brock (1769–1812), the capture of Fort Detroit (1812), and the Northwest Rebellion (1885). By the end of the section, Lighthall has returned to the present – the Northwest Rebellion occurred just four years prior to the publication of the anthology. The events surrounding the rebellion had a strong impact on Lighthall, mainly because of the challenge they posed to his idealized vision of Canada and Empire. The epigraph to the volume quotes the last lines of Frederick George Scott’s ‘In Memoriam,’ a poem dedicated to Canadians killed in the conflict: ‘Wild the prairie grasses wave / O’er each hero’s new-made grave; / … But the future spreads before us / Glorious in that sunset land’ (275). The selections – many of which deal with crucial battles – provide evidence of Lighthall’s attraction to military exploits. For him, ‘the spirit of Canadian history’ is about battle, heroism, and sacrifice rather than daily life, civic events, economic issues, or cultural shifts. By the beginning of the seventh section of Songs (‘Places’), the edi-

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tor has returned to a more immediate sense of time and place. In these selections, we can see the beginnings of the formation of a poetic canon; a number of Lighthall’s choices are still included in Canadian literary anthologies. He selects Roberts’s ‘The Tantramar Revisited,’ Carman’s ‘Low Tide on Grand-Pré,’ D.C. Scott’s ‘Ottawa,’ and several poems by William Wilfred Campbell. In the last section, entitled ‘Seasons,’ Lighthall continues this trend by including several selections from Lampman, Fidelis, Carman, Johnson, Crawford, and Moodie. Lighthall may have been a traditionalist, but he was also open to change. Many of the poets represented in the last two sections of the book were comparatively young for inclusion in such a prominent anthology. For example, Roberts was twenty-nine years old; Carman was twenty-eight and had never published a book; Scott was twenty-seven and had no book; Lampman was twenty-eight and had just released his first collection; Campbell was thirty-one and had one book; E. Pauline Johnson was twenty-seven and had no book. Lighthall was willing to take chances. This risk taking is seldom noted in discussions of Songs, perhaps because of its conventional elements and its preoccupation with historical subjects. If the same risks were taken by an editor today, it would be most unusual. Contemporary anthologists are wary of including material by writers who have not achieved the stamp of approval associated with book publication, and in many cases editors will look for several book publications before they take a chance on an author. In making selections from several contemporary writers, Lighthall demonstrated his willingness to support new writing and his awareness of those authors who were relative newcomers, many of whom became canonical figures. As A.J.M. Smith says in his assessment of Lighthall’s work, ‘we are in the familiar company of the poets, then in the first flush of their power, who have now taken their places as the classics of our golden age’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 462). While it is true that we may be in this familiar company, it is also true that that company is attached to a different age. Writing in the Globe in 1892, William Wilfred Campbell maintained that Lighthall’s Canada ‘is represented as a crude colony, whose literature, if it could be called by such a name, is merely associated with superficial canoe and carnival songs, backwoods and Indian tales told in poor rhyme, and all tied together by pseudo-patriotic hurrahs’ (qtd. in Davies, 203). Campbell is right: Lighthall is unable to divorce himself from a clichéd, romantic version of a poetic past. History has value because it lies at the centre of his idea of nationhood. Yet at the same time, he wants to move forward,

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to embrace the changes represented in the works of younger poets. The structure of his anthology moves back and forth between tenses, casting its readers into a double role. At one point they are moderns, looking forward to the twentieth century; at another point they are caught in the past, setting out as explorers on a journey of discovery. In the poem about Montreal’s winter carnival that he includes in the volume, Lighthall describes the population of the city rising up ‘as one man in a tumultuous enthusiasm’ who ‘must feel that something of a future lies before the poetry of these strange and wonderful elements’ (xxxvi). But he concludes the introduction to his anthology by moving away from this future. He figures the reader as a voyageur ready to set out on a quest: ‘And now, the canoes are packed, our voyageurs are waiting for us, the paddles are ready, let us start!’ (xxxvii). Unusually, Lighthall’s anthology was published by Walter Scott in England, a company specializing in educational books and poetry series. On the galley proofs, Lighthall provides the following explanation concerning the choice of publishers: ‘In the spring of 1888 I saw in the window of E. Picken a Canterbury Poets volume entitled “Australian Ballads and Rhymes.” Being interested in our own poets, I bought and read it and was much pleased. On thinking over the subject I came to the conclusion that we could do as well in Canada, and fired with this patriotic idea, wrote the publishers offering to complete the volume. They soon accepted’ (qtd. in Wright, ‘Sometime Confederation Poet,’ 62). When Lighthall sent out a circular requesting submissions to the book, he stressed his interest in finding ‘pieces and passages distinctive of Canada, drawn from its scenery, life, races, history, feelings – the canoe, forest, toboggan, settlements, North-West and so forth.’ Charles G.D. Roberts cautioned him against taking this approach, writing that the anthology would fail ‘if it absolutely excluded such work which is, like much of the best English and American work, cosmopolitan!’ (qtd. in Wright, ‘Sometime Confederation Poet,’ 63). Roberts’s words anticipate those of A.J.M. Smith, whose own prominent anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), focused on the tension between what he called the native and cosmopolitan traditions in Canadian poetry. Lighthall largely ignored Roberts’s advice. The result, as Roy Daniells says, is that he sacrificed poetic quality ‘for representative national sentiment,’ a fact that made the collection ‘the product of a high colonial culture’ despite its inclusion of poems by Crawford, Lampman, Carman, and Scott (‘Confederation,’ 212).

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Although Lighthall’s anthology was published in Britain, most nineteenth-century Canadian anthologies found publishers in Canada. The role of these publishers in disseminating Canadian literature is seldom fully appreciated. Even at the end of the century, publishing Canadian literature in any form was a risky business, just as it is today. In the same year that Lighthall released his anthology, a leading intellectual and editor of the day, G. Mercer Adam, published ‘Literature, Nationality, and the Tariff,’ an essay in which he lamented the public indifference to Canadian writing and the resulting ‘withdrawal of the native writer from Canada, and the carrying of good work to other and better markets’ (qtd. in Ballstadt, Search, 26). Adam pointed to ‘the growing helplessness of inducing Canadian publishers to take up literary enterprises which might bring honour as well as profit to the country’ (qtd. in Ballstadt, Search, 26) and raised once again the negative impact of copyright laws, ‘a subject which a colony is not permitted to control’ (qtd. in Ballstadt, Search, 28). Given the difficulties of profiting from Canadian literature, the risks taken by the publishers of anthologies were substantial. Most of these anthologies were backed by publishers who were ardent literary nationalists also interested in the profits to be made by placing Canadian literature in the schools, or by packaging it in a way that would make it more attractive to the reading public. John Simpson’s first anthology in 1837 was the product of a man who was a bookseller, printer, and publisher by trade. He used a popular commercial trade format (the literary annual) to package ‘Canadian literature’ in a way that would make it accessible to a wide range of readers. Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets was published by John Lovell in Montreal, the printer of numerous schoolbooks, gazetteers, and city directories, as well as the Literary Garland. Lovell’s business slogan was ‘Encourage Home Industry,’ an indication of his nationalist leanings. Lovell was the first publisher of an anthology of French-Canadian literature and an ardent promoter of legal rights for Canadian authors at a time when copyright laws made it very difficult for them to obtain protection or decent payment for their work at home. Problems with Canadian copyright law persisted from well before Confederation up to the end of the century. The Imperial Copyright Act of 1842 and the Foreign Reprints Act of 1847 favoured British authors and permitted American publishers to reprint foreign material at much cheaper rates than those allowed to Canadian publishers. The negative aspects of the copyright laws allowed the Canadian market to be dominated by

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American publishers and encouraged many Canadian authors to publish in the United States or Britain, or to relocate permanently to other countries (see Parker, ‘Distributors’). Despite the restrictions faced by Canadian publishers, Lovell demonstrated that he was a smart businessman who understood the sales potential connected with placing anthologies in schools. Between 1842 and 1853, the British colonies in North America revised their educational system to establish uniform school standards, provide teacher training, and develop uniform textbooks. In response, Lovell developed the Lovell’s Series of School Books by 1860. He was acutely aware of the trend towards national adoption when he published Dewart’s book in 1864. Songs of the Great Dominion was followed by Raise the Flag and Other Patriotic Songs and Poems in 1891. Although the editor is not named in the volume, he was Colonel George Taylor Denison of Toronto. Along with such prominent figures as George Monro Grant and Sir George Robert Parkin, Denison was one of the major defenders of imperial unity in Canada. He was a colourful figure and a man of strong beliefs. Concerned about the threat of Canada’s annexation to the United States (a major issue in the federal election of 1891), Denison devoted himself to defending the imperial connection through his writing and through public office. In the months before the election, Denison had arranged demonstrations at Ontario schools to commemorate ‘Canada’s glorious Thermopylae,’ the Battle of Queenston Heights. Berger explains that ‘when Goldwin Smith asked whether it was really “loyal to turn our Public Schools into seedplots of international enmity by implanting hatred of the Americans in the breasts of our children?” and when he lamented that two generations had not effaced “the evil memories of 1812,” Denison’s retort was to say that all virile people had a national sentiment and that only the inculcation of Canadian patriotism would defeat the annexationist policy’ (Sense, 98). Earlier, Denison had been involved with the Canada First movement, a nationalist group that he founded in 1868 along with Henry Morgan, Charles Mair, William Foster, and Robert Grant Haliburton. The group advocated exclusively British immigration and resistance to American influence. Although Denison ran (unsuccessfully) for election to parliament in 1872, his main preoccupation became military issues and protocol relating to the British Empire (a preoccupation he shared with Lighthall). He wrote a book entitled History of Modern Cavalry (1877), which he submitted to a contest being run by the Czar of Russia for

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the best books on cavalry. It won first prize. Appointed a police magistrate in Toronto, he wore a helmet and spurs to court and rendered judgment with merciless efficiency, sometimes trying up to 180 cases in three hours. As Berger reports in The Sense of Power, Denison’s impatience and ‘inability to endure opposition patiently’ (19) made him an easy target for cartoonists. ‘One cartoon of 1910 showed him with the inevitable bowed legs and pill-box hat, chagrined, puzzled, and with tears in his eyes, standing before a picture of Washington: “There was,” he is saying, “George the Third, George Washington and George Denison, and there’s only one of us left”’ (19). Denison’s anthology was a product of the growing emphasis placed on inspiring loyalty to the Empire among students during this period, and the nature of that loyalty was gendered. As Lara Silver explains, From a tender age, Canadian children were imbued with imperial loyalty from their family, their schoolteachers and the pulpit, as well as from popular toys and games. In the home, gendered segregation took place as girls were reared towards domesticity, while boys were socialised into a more ‘masculine’ role, which invariably meant endowing young boys with a military mindset. By the 1880s, child clothing for boys included masculine sailor suits and military overcoats, the most popular toys were tin soldiers and toy guns. Boys that did not like to play with such toys were chastised for being ‘effeminate.’ The culture of masculinity in Canada echoed the same trends that were occurring concurrently in Britain. Socialisation continued at school, where a reliance on imported textbooks from Britain had the effect of teaching Canadian students that the British Empire was ‘the epitome of all that was good, true and beautiful.’ In Ontario in 1890, the Minister of Education, George Ross, approved requests from fellow imperialists Colonel George T. Denison and Sir George R. Parkin to provide a patriotic education to the youth, which required all schools in the province to raise the red ensign flag and participate in the annual celebrations of Loyalist Day and Empire Day. To instil further patriotic feeling among schoolchildren, Denison prepared Raise the Flag, a small volume of songs and poems, which he sent to the headmasters of each school. In addition, Ross published a similar volume in 1893, entitled Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises intended for wide circulation in schools. Schoolchildren were often instructed to recite imperial verse, such as the following poem, ‘Canada to England’ by Toronto’s superintendent of schools, James L. Hughes:

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Oh! Mistress of the mighty sea! Oh! Motherland so great and free! Canadian hearts shall ever be, United in their love for thee. (13)

At sixty-three pages in length, Raise the Flag is a small, curious book that sports a full-colour cover. In its description of the cover, the Toronto Public Library says that ‘the booklet itself was a prize for essays written about the anniversary of the Battle of Queenston Heights, the best of which were awarded a large flag for the schoolhouse. The cover image shows the flag being raised on a schoolhouse in honour of an unnamed national anniversary. The gentlemen are waving their hats, but the girls and ladies wave handkerchiefs. Ladies’ hats were pinned on, in the fashion of the day, to protect their complexions, and were not removed outdoors.’ Behind the schoolhouse, a large tree proclaims the fertility of the scene. The preface to the collection spells out the book’s inspirational aims. It indicates that its purpose is to raise national self-awareness by selecting songs and poems that ‘strike the keynote of Canadian history and sentiment,’ while the guiding principle behind the volume is clear: ‘Fear God, honor the King’ (iii). The editor meditates upon the changes that have taken place in Canada since the War of 1812 and celebrates how ‘the triumphant martial spirit of a victorious people breaks out exultingly in the poems of this war – Queenston Heights, the Capture of Detroit, and the brave exploit of Laura Secord being described in stirring verse’ (iv). The poems are unequivocally patriotic, and include works by Roberts, Fidelis, William Kirby, and Charles Mair, along with selections by lesser-known figures. The book was published by the Rose Publishing Company, which produced texts for the education market along with firms such as Copp Clark, the Methodist Book and Publishing House, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Canada Publishing Company, W.J. Gage and Company, and Lovell. Rose Publishing was owned by George Maclean Rose, who was a leading campaigner against what Canadian publishers saw as the injustice of imperial copyright laws that permitted American publishers to use material that was off limits to their Canadian counterparts. He was a founding member of the Canadian Publishers’ Association, which was established to channel complaints about the copyright laws. What is interesting about this anthology, aside from the way it cements the relationship between school, nation, and verse, is the irony

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inherent in the fact that it remains widely available today in a facsimile reprint from an American company located in Whitefish, Montana. The trend towards the curricular study of Canadian poetry was reinforced by two other anthologies that appeared soon after Denison’s collection. The organization and presentation of J.E. Wetherell’s Later Canadian Poems (1893) stands in sharp contrast to Lighthall’s volume. Wetherell was a school principal in Strathroy, Ontario, and the editor of several books on ancient Rome, world travel, and rhetoric. His anthology was published by Copp Clark in Toronto, a company that focused on textbook publishing after its founding in 1869. Wetherell’s preface simply indicates that the anthology ‘contains selections from the productions of the best known of our younger Canadian poets’ and that ‘the volume, it is believed, contains no poem published before the year 1880’ (n.p.). As D.M.R. Bentley makes clear, the anthology was primarily designed to showcase the work of the group that would come to be known as the Confederation poets. Charles G.D. Roberts identified the anthology as ‘the first collective appearance in print of his “little band”’ of five poets, including himself, Bliss Carman, William Wilfred Campbell, F.G. Scott, and D.C. Scott (Bentley, Confederation Group, 9). In two letters written in late 1892, he told Carman that Wetherell ‘wants to use half a dozen poems from each of us, save, perhaps, Pauline [Johnson]! … It will be good for us all … He will do it well, and give us a good send off … The Collection will be select; and it will help impress our greatness on the rising generation!!’ (qtd. in Bentley, Confederation Group, 10). An early review of the anthology indicates that it would be published in three bindings, ‘two for school use and one for presentation and library purposes.’ The unidentified author of the review notes that ‘for the first time for Canadian poetry, in Ontario at least, is there a chance of its introduction into our schools and a chance to be woven into the growing fabric of the Canadian intellect’ (‘Bold Attempt’). Wetherell’s anthology was well received and seems to have made an impact on educators, although I have been unable to find any copies of the school edition mentioned above. My own copy was presented as the valedictory prize in the graduation ceremonies at the Ontario Agricultural College in 1896, an indication of its currency at the time. Apparently the college believed that it would be of interest to its young valedictorian, and with good reason: several features mark this anthology as decidedly contemporary in its orientation. The male authors included in the collection are all young. The oldest, George Frederick Cameron, was thirty-nine when the book appeared, while the others

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(Campbell, Carman, Lampman, Roberts, D.C. Scott, and F.G. Scott) were born within a year of one another and were in their early thirties. No biographical information is provided; in this way, Wetherell seems to be suggesting that the works could speak for themselves, a radical turn towards empowering the text rather than its author. Many of the poems we find here remain familiar to readers of Canadian literature anthologies today, including Campbell’s ‘How Spring Came to the Lake Region,’ Carman’s ‘Low Tide on Grand-Pré,’ Lampman’s ‘Among the Millet’ and ‘Heat,’ and Roberts’s ‘The Sower’ and ‘In the Wide Awe and Wisdom of the Night.’ Wetherell was able to identify the poems that would appeal to later generations and to bring them together in a succinct package unmarked by the moral and religious justifications that characterized earlier anthologies. He seemed to be saying, ‘Here is the work. Let it speak for itself.’ In his focus on the Confederation poets, Wetherell had struck a rich vein. Two years after his anthology appeared, the prestigious Edinburgh Review published an article entitled ‘The Progress of Canada’ that lauded the works of Roberts, Carman, Lampman, and Campbell. This was the first international recognition of Canadian poetry. Wetherell introduced another feature that is familiar to modern readers – the author photograph. Lighthall would have had no way of using photos in his book (halftone printing processes enabling photojournalism date to 1892; previously, images in books were printed via handmade wood engravings of their content, but the actual photos could not be reproduced). However, Wetherell could take advantage of the advances in photography made in the intervening years, and this allowed him to reproduce images of the writers in his collection. The presence of these images introduced an important shift in the way audiences perceived contemporary authors. Now those authors had a visual presence that made them seem tangible and real. The photographs testified to the youthfulness of the poets. Even more, the photographs, given their novelty and prominence in the book, conveyed cultural status. The authors participated in creating this status. Roberts liked his image in the book. ‘The photograph itself I think flatters me,’ he wrote to Wetherell. Roberts also volunteered to help with Bliss Carman’s image: ‘I am sending my own photograph of Carman, who is a magnificent looking fellow’ (Letter to Wetherell, 23 January 1893). By marrying poetry, celebrity, and image, Later Canadian Poems popularized the role of the contemporary writer. Unlike Lighthall, Wetherell made no effort to introduce the writers in his collection or to offer com-

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ments on their works. The absence of such commentary made the writers seem less academic and removed, while the use of photographs conveyed the sense that this collection was less stuffy than its predecessors. Although the book is organized alphabetically (it opens with Cameron, born in 1854, and ends with F.G. Scott, born in 1861, despite Roberts’s attempt to persuade Wetherell to drop Cameron, or at least to reduce his prominence), the proximity of birth years of most of the contributors negates any strong sense of a historical progression. Obviously Wetherell wanted to create a record of what was happening in the present. His anthology allowed the presentation and reception of Canadian poetry to be grounded in his time. He also tried to break away from the conventional role of the Canadian anthologist as an explicit proponent of nationalism at the expense of literary merit. In this respect, he thought Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion contained ‘too much trash’ (qtd. in Boone, 160). Some of his contributors shared this view. F.G. Scott told Wetherell that Lighthall’s work was ‘from its title page to finish (except in the case of some rare poems from Roberts, Lampman, etc.) … a huge monument of vulgarity and spread pigeonism [sic]. His method of selection and his rhapsodies over obscure females make Canadian Literature (?) a laughing stock.’ William Wilfred Campbell believed that Lighthall was engaged in a deliberate plot to discredit him. He told Wetherell that ‘in Mr. Lighthall’s anthology I have been cruelly misrepresented, by a willful choice of my poorest matter’ (Letter to Wetherell, 14 November 1898). Scott encouraged Wetherell to make selections based on ‘literary and not national questions’ (Letter to Wetherell, 15 April 1899). Wetherell followed Scott’s advice: he makes no claims about nationhood, and the poems do not embrace the kind of blatant nationalism that appeared in many of Lighthall’s selections. This shift makes Later Canadian Poems a very different kind of anthology than its predecessors. Wetherell also included a higher percentage of female writers than any other Canadian anthologist before him, with 46 per cent of the poets in his work being women. While this percentage might suggest that Wetherell endorsed a rough equality between male and female contributors, he did not believe in equality enough to place the women alongside the men. All of the women writers in his volume are consigned to a ‘supplement’ at the end of the anthology, which Wetherell describes as ‘an addition to the original plan of the book’ (iii); in that original plan, Wetherell had no intention of including women writers at all. But then, ‘under pressure from Pauline Johnson, he added the “Supplement”’ (Gerson,

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‘Anthologies,’ 151). Johnson’s influence was bolstered by the support she received from Charles G.D. Roberts, who had written to Wetherell on several occasions, expressing enthusiasm for her work. Relegated to the back pages, the six women are allotted a mere twenty-seven pages, or only 15.5 per cent of the total page count, lower than earlier anthologies such as Dewart’s (35.5 per cent), Harrison’s (16.5 per cent), or Lighthall’s (35.5 per cent) (see Gerson, ‘Anthologies’). The placement of the women at the end of the volume suggests that Wetherell’s decision to include them came very late, probably after the original selections had been typeset. As it stands, the female poets he includes are presented as an afterthought, even though Wetherell showed himself to be aware of the prominent female authors of his day, who were introduced in this order: E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913), S. Frances Harrison (1859–1935), Agnes Maule Machar (1837–1927), Ethelwyn Wetherald (1857–1940), Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850–87), and Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861–1922). For the women, Wetherell dropped his alphabetical ordering and presented the poems thematically. As Bentley observes, the result is that ‘the female poets appear less as individuals than as members of a supporting chorus’ (Confederation Group, 11). Strangely, the only member of this chorus with a photo is Johnson, as if her image served to represent all the women included in the book. She had reached the status of synecdoche. Wetherell himself was strongly influenced by the nationalism of Charles G.D. Roberts, who described the collection as a ‘little anthology for Ontario Schools’ and who said he would do all he could to encourage its curricular adoption in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (Bentley, Confederation Group, 9–10). Whether he was successful in securing this adoption is difficult to determine, but one thing is clear: the link between anthology and curriculum marks a crucial shift in the way Canadian literature was publicized. Now the currency and value of Canadian poetry was connected with the school system, which itself was seen as a vehicle for promoting Canadian nationalism through Canadian literary study. Literature and nationalism were linked, as they were for Dewart in 1864, but now that link was placed in the context of the educational system, a crucial shift. Wetherell moved the anthologization of Canadian literature towards the study of Canadian literature as a viable curricular pursuit. By doing so, he gave credence to the idea that national values, and indeed citizenship itself, could be taught and learned through the country’s literature. His anthology takes the first step towards institutionalizing Canadian literature, a trend that would

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continue throughout the twentieth century as more and more Canadian literature found its way into schools. In sharp contrast to Wetherell, George W. Ross’s Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises (1893) looks back to a considerably earlier anthological model, even though it was published in the same year as Wetherell’s book. Ross was a conservative educator who was not afraid of controversy. He became the premier of Ontario in 1899, after holding the office of minister of education in the province for sixteen years, from 1883 to 1899. He served as premier until 1905. Ross’s influence was considerable. During his term, a scandal erupted the year after he took office, when Ross announced that he would support the creation of a single authorized reading series (the Ontario Readers) for students in the province, to be developed by the Education Department, a departure from previous policy, which endorsed the publication of competing series developed by publishers such as W.J. Gage and Company, Copp Clark, Thomas Nelson and Sons, and the Canada Publishing Company. This decision led to charges of favouritism and collusion, especially because Ross wanted to hire senior editors of his own choosing to write the books, rather than practising teachers. When booksellers learned that the new series would render the previous series of Gage Canadian Readers obsolete, they complained that they would be stuck with unsaleable inventory. Over seven hundred booksellers protested against Ross’s plans in Toronto in 1885 (see Clark, ‘Reckless Extravagance’). Needless to say, Gage and Company stood to lose the investment it had made in readers that had recently been approved by the Education Department, as did Thomas Nelson. Now, under a new ten-year agreement, the three companies that had been responsible for producing earlier readers would be relegated to the status of printers for the officially sanctioned new series. Each company would be responsible for printing a third of each reader and for sharing that third with the other two companies, so that every Ontario Reader would be the product of three companies. This eliminated competition but also dramatically increased profits, since the readers were required purchases in the school system. Penney Clark argues that this was Ross’s ‘way of making amends to the three publishers for the losses they incurred in 1884’ (‘Reckless Extravagance,’ 198). However, the tenyear oligopoly granted to ‘the textbook ring’ did not sit well with the public. Clark notes that ‘the “textbook question” was like a canker sore on the public psyche, erupting quite regularly in the pages of newspapers and book trade journals’ (202). The controversy resulted in an

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arbitration process that began in 1889 and ended in 1891, which led to charges of bias and collusion among the arbitrators themselves. By the time he published his anthology in 1893, then, Ross was used to controversy, but it didn’t seem to give him pause. He dedicated Patriotic Recitations ‘to the teachers of Canada’ and included a disclaimer on the title page that read: ‘No pupil or teacher in the Province of Ontario is obliged to purchase this volume as a textbook for School purposes.’ That was thoughtful of Ross, but he was the minister of education, and many teachers felt obliged to buy into the collection. The book itself is a peculiar expression of the ways in which literary, curricular, and nationalist values cohere around literary anthologies. Ross was inspired by a suggestion, made by a local historical society, that a special day be put aside for patriotic exercises, which became Empire Day, first practised in 1899. Arbor Day was an earlier version of Empire Day. Ross’s title page includes lines from Roberts’s ‘An Ode to the Canadian Confederacy,’ certainly a patriotic verse, but the quotation that follows his dedication to the teachers of Ontario gives Roberts a strange bedfellow: Otto von Bismarck. The quotation reads: ‘We owe to our schools the thankful task of strengthening the feeling that we are all Germans.’ Although Bismarck was responsible for the unification of Germany, and although he believed that national unity was something that could be instituted through education, it seems strange to find his thoughts about German nationalism in an anthology of Canadian poetry, and even stranger to find Canadian teachers being referred to the words of a man who believed that the best way of solving political issues was through ‘iron and blood.’ What was Ross thinking? It may not be possible to answer this question beyond hypothesizing that Ross must have admired the way Bismarck linked education and nationalism, for that is exactly the linkage that informs Ross’s anthology. In the preface, Ross explains that in addition to including selections of poetry, the collection ‘contains suggestions which the teacher might find useful in preparing his pupils for properly appreciating the purposes of a national holiday and other important events in the history of the country.’ He also wanted the book to serve as a guide to how various levels of government functioned so that the student would gain a stronger sense of the education system and the Empire ‘to which he belongs’ (v). Part 1 provides short commentary on such topics as the Queen’s birthday, Dominion Day, parliament, and the election of municipal councillors. Part 2 is devoted to patriotic verse of the most outspoken kind by a wide assortment of contributors. Part 3 brings in

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British material, while part 4 focuses on Arbor Day itself, the idea being that to know one’s trees is to know one’s land, and to encourage the growth of those trees is to encourage the development of one’s country. The organic metaphor has a religious and moral connection. At the end of his anthology, Ross includes selections from the Bible that stress the connection between planting, vegetative fecundity, and divine intention. But the scriptural selections also carry a warning for parents and their offspring: ‘every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit,’ and those corrupt trees are ‘hewn down, and cast into the fire’ (370). As Ross makes clear in his selection from Deuteronomy, ‘the tree of the field is man’s life,’ and as Jeremiah proclaims, ‘Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be like a tree planted by the water, and spreadeth out his roots by the river, and shall not fear when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green, and shall not be careful in the year of drouth, neither shall cease from yielding fruit’ (369). Patriotic Recitations is complex in the way it sees faith, learning, government, empire, poetry, and the natural world as intertwined. In sharp contrast to Wetherell’s strippeddown approach, Ross makes his collection didactic and moral, as if the poetry he collects is really only a stepping stone to what he perceives as a higher order, just as the Arbor Day exercises he describes provide a secular means of introducing students to myths of power, social structure, and divine presence in their daily lives. Rituals devoted to trees, or poetry celebrating the land, are really a means of affirming man’s place in a larger celebration of God and his creation. Although a few more anthologies were published before the end of the century, none presented itself as a national collection. That endeavour was picked up again by Theodore H. Rand in his A Treasury of Canadian Verse, which appeared in 1900. The inclusion of fiction in Canadian literature anthologies would have to wait until 1922. Early Canadian literature anthologies configured the national literature as poetry. This is not surprising. Gerson points to the ‘disdain for fiction’ that ‘coloured the reception of Canadian imaginative writing from its beginning’ (Purer Taste, 19). This changed a bit after Confederation, when ‘overtly nationalistic fiction gained increasing acceptance due to the political need to create for Canada an identity distinguishable from that of the United States’ (Purer Taste, 18), but the resistance to fiction continued well into the twentieth century. The gradual acceptance of fiction as a valid form of creative expression went hand in hand with an increasing

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willingness to see literary realism as a viable means of capturing the local and particular features of different regions in the country. While such realism was largely absent from nineteenth-century anthologies, there was a kind of poetic realism introduced through the works of the Confederation poets and other writers with whom they are associated. The inclusion of their poetry in the anthologies edited by Lighthall and Seranus and Wetherell turned Canadian literature in a new direction, one that valued the particular over the universal, the local over the archetypal, and the regional over the national. Latenineteenth-century anthologies of Canadian poetry began to embrace a form of secularization that would inform anthology making in the following decades. The collection of these poets’ works in anthologies also began to erect the rudimentary foundations of a national canon and its canonized authors. At the same time, however, those anthologies retained a crucial connection with earlier models: they all embraced the idea, first formulated by Dewart, that literature and nationalism reinforced each other. This means that, in one way or another, all of the nineteenth-century anthologies were eminently political in their drive to value different models of Canadian nationalism as the nature of the country evolved. In this way, they kept a common code. John Simpson produced his Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII as a book in support of the conservative forces in Upper Canada aligned with Sir Francis Bond Head. He had no conception of Dewart’s Canada, of course, but for him, anthology and nation were still linked. Dewart had a broader sense of nation, since his collection was published in the years leading up to Confederation, but the principle is the same: the anthology would give credence to the country and its editor would use his powers of selection to reinforce an idea of nation that was distinct from British and American models. Although their own brand of nationalism was often mixed with a support for imperialism that seems odd today, anthologists such as Lighthall, Denison, and Ross all saw Canada as a nation that could assert its independence and identity within the imperial sphere. Their books testify to the challenges facing anthologists who wanted to embrace the imperial order while asserting Canadian difference. And finally there was Wetherell, who had the courage to present the writing as writing, leaving the rhetoric behind. Yet even his suggestion that the poetry in his volume did not need to be rationalized was itself a kind of bold national assertion, a statement of pride

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in the refusal to justify an emerging national literature. In this sense, Wetherell was ahead of his time, just as he was in his belief that his anthology might find a place in Canadian schools. The end of the century marks the beginning of a conception of Canadian literature as a curricular force aligned with national self-awareness. ‘Nation’ could be taught, and literature was one means of teaching it, if only the subject could be required in the schools. This was the bold dream of the latenineteenth-century anthologists. It would take another sixty years for that dream to become a reality.

Chapter Two

Representations of Nation: Watson and Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature, 1900–1922

Although several anthologies of Canadian poetry appeared in the early twentieth century, no substantial challenge to the form emerged until 1922, with the publication of Albert Durrant Watson and Lorne Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse. While this chapter focuses mainly on that collection, it is useful to position it in relation to other anthologies of English-Canadian literature published between 1900 and 1922, each of which furthered the unproblematized discourses of nationalism and imperialism that characterized earlier works (with the exception of Wetherell’s stark departure from that norm). Anthologists in this period chose to ignore many of the dramatic changes taking place in Canada in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Reading these anthologies gives the reader no sense of the way in which the Canadian west was being opened up and settled by an influx of immigrants, no sense of the extent to which those immigrants were establishing their own literary communities and publications, no sense of the ways in which the country was being industrialized and urbanized, and no sense of the extent to which Wilfrid Laurier’s government had succeeded in promoting Canada as an independent country on the international stage. That unproblematized version of nationalism forms the pedagogical centre of Theodore H. Rand’s A Treasury of Canadian Verse (1900). The book sold approximately two thousand copies and was reprinted in 1901 – a sign of its success. Never one to refrain from demonstrating how anthologies are always sites of contestation, A.J.M. Smith said that the poetry Rand collected was ‘quite as good as that in the various yearbooks of the Canadian Authors’ Association – it is mainly conventional and dull, the competent production of well-educated ladies and gentlemen

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who lack nothing but an original impulse and an imaginative power of expression’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 466). Rand participates actively in romanticizing the Canadian landscape. His language is filled with rhapsodic clichés about the insights to be gained through an appreciation of the natural world, which provides a sublime display of God’s presence: A sane and wholesome spirit is characteristic of the verse, and its spiritual quality seems to me to be of a high order. The sympathetic reader will notice a marked pictorial use of nature in some of the specimens given, as well as a sensuous delight in nature itself, depicted, as it is, with true feeling and not infrequently with an almost flawless art. He will notice also that nature is often humanized, and tenderness, love and pity, and the subtle problems of man’s life and existence, are enshrined in original and poetic similitudes to the melody of haunting music. Nor are there altogether wanting instances of that insight and vision which beholds the phenomenal and cosmic with rapt wonder as awesome beauty-gleams, radiant symbols, or sublime manifestations of the immanent and loving One in whom all things consist. (x)

The absence of twentieth-century anthologies willing to break with this discourse no doubt had something to do with the lacklustre demands of the reading public. As Michael Peterman and Janet Friskney observe, ‘The large and steady sale of A Treasury of Canadian Verse was, in fact, anomalous. Apathy characterized the turn-of-the-century response to Canadian poetry’ (75). Most anthology sales were made to schools. One of the most successful school titles was E.A. Hardy’s Selections from the Canadian Poets (1909). Hardy’s collection was published as part of the Morang Educational Company’s Literature series. In the introduction, Hardy describes his aim in compiling the anthology: ‘The aim of this little book is to be as helpful as possible to teachers of literature. In his selections the editor has endeavoured to choose poems that would appeal to a boy or a girl of ordinary capacity and taste, due regard being paid to the inherently beautiful. There has been no attempt made to produce a small Treasury of Canadian Verse, but the desire has been to collect such poems as would really interest the pupil and stimulate him to a further acquaintance with Canadian poetry. Nature and love of country, therefore, have a large place in these selections’ (6). Hardy encourages teachers to inspire their students by asking them to compare various poems on snow. He even provides potential essay topics for the students, such as ‘“Does Canadian poetry possess real merit?” “Why should Nature play so large a part in Canadian poetry?”

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“Does Canadian poetry voice the real feelings and aspirations of the Canadian people?”’ (7). It is hard to imagine elementary or high school students responding to these questions, which were designed to assure teachers that Hardy was keeping the code. His task was to reinforce the anthological connection between Canadian literature, Canadian people, and the land (‘nature and love of country’). Hardy organizes the poetry in a way that might be useful to teachers, dividing his material into three periods: pre-Confederation, 1867 to the turn of the century, and ‘the last ten or fifteen years,’ during which, Hardy says, ‘few new voices of note are to be heard’ (5). Hardy can find only three poets worthy of representation in this period, and one of them is himself. The student who was asked whether recent Canadian poetry possessed ‘real merit’ might understandably puzzle over the question. William Wilfred Campbell’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse appeared in 1913. It allowed Campbell to vent his frustration with earlier anthologists over their approach to his own work. He felt that Lighthall had intentionally discredited him (Letter to Wetherell, 14 November 1898). He insisted on determining which of his poems would be included in Wetherell’s anthology (Letter to Wetherell, 14 November 1892), and then complained that other poets received more attention than he did. He refused to let any of his poems appear in Rand’s collection (Rand, 12 [1900]). So Campbell finally had a chance to break new ground and to grind some axes. But he spends most of his introduction debating with himself about the definition of Canadian poetry. None of the material he collects is recent, and the poet he allots the most space to is himself. The only other major anthology to appear before the end of the First World War is John Garvin’s Canadian Poets (1916). Garvin was a prominent critic who understood the relation between literature and his times. In his introduction, he writes that ‘almost simultaneously with the Great War, has come a renaissance of Poetry, which is significant of that law of balance by which the heart turns instinctively from the terror and confusion of devastating human emotion, to the purity of a clearer and serener air’ (5). Although Garvin apprehended an encroaching modernism and the turn towards ‘art which faces and pictures the truth in nature and human nature’ (5), he was reluctant to allow his anthology to embrace the modernist and realist aesthetics he alludes to in his commentary. Logan and French emphasize that Garvin’s anthology was worthy of praise precisely because it did not get off the beaten track: ‘It contains nothing that is not typical of the Canadian national spirit and Canadian civilization and culture’ (386). A.J.M. Smith had a

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different perspective. Garvin, he wrote, ‘can be censured for cluttering up the last third of the book with a vast array of minor versifiers, whose stuff ranges from the dull to the execrable, and from the pretentious to the simpering’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 471). He felt that ‘the influence of Garvin’s anthology more than anything else [was] responsible for the outrageous over-estimate of the “genius” of Canadian poets which passes for orthodox opinion in the meeting rooms of the C.A.A.’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 470). Only after the war ended did editors such as Watson and Pierce show themselves willing to challenge the prevailing notions about what made Canadian art art. But even in their case, not everyone agrees that they mounted an authentic challenge. Our Canadian Literature was published by Ryerson Press in 1922. The anthology is significant because it was the first Canadian collection to include works of prose as well as poetry, and also because it was the first literary anthology to appear after the First World War. Approximately four hundred volumes of fiction were published between 1880 and 1920, but none of it had been collected or excerpted in book form (Roper, 276). Simply by virtue of the fact that their anthology included both poetry and prose, Watson and Pierce promoted the idea – radical for their time – that poetry was not the only means of evoking national consciousness. Because it was the first anthology to include prose, it contributed enormously to the establishment of a Canadian fiction canon and to the type of fiction that would be admitted to this canon in the future. (While Our Canadian Literature was the first Canadian collection to combine works of poetry and prose, there were some British models that might have inspired Watson and Pierce, notably G.E. Hadow and W.H. Hadow’s three-volume Oxford Treasury of English Literature [1907] and W.H. Hudson’s Representative Passages from English Literature [1914].) While Our Canadian Literature unites poetry and prose in this way, it also provides the first book-length example of the comparative value accorded to these genres by the two editors, whose task it was to show readers how Canadian poetry and prose functioned in the representation of nation. The anthology’s title conveys the idea that the nation’s poetry and prose was shared collectively (‘Our’), an emphasis that restated the equation between literature and citizenship so prominent in earlier collections. Since the anthology was the product of two men with very different views of art, it is also a record of the dynamic – or the absence of a dynamic – that results when two distinct editorial visions govern the architecture of a single volume devoted to a so-

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called representative vision of the country. The book that Watson and Pierce produced is uneven and conflicted. The editors approached their joint task from completely different aesthetic perspectives, a fact that resulted in a collection rife with internal tensions and conflict. But it is precisely because the book embodies these tensions that it becomes a singular expression of the different values that pulled Canadian literature in opposing directions in the years immediately following the war. In some ways it is a post-war book, but in a number of ways it was the kind of anthology that could have been published at the turn of the century. This chapter explores the anthology’s doubleness. There is no doubt about the commercial success of Watson and Pierce’s book. Notes on the typescript for the third edition of Our Canadian Literature indicate that the first edition, published in December 1922, sold out immediately. A second edition was printed in January 1923, followed by a third edition (revised and enlarged) as well as a deluxe edition in August 1923. A two-volume edition and a school edition were issued in September of the same year. The collection was designed with the school market in mind, and it was the first Canadian anthology to gain wide usage in Canadian classrooms. To some extent, its success was the result of the widespread demand for Canadian books and content following the war (Cambron and Gerson, 129). The original edition brought together fifty-three poets and forty-three writers of fiction and prose. Correspondence in the Lorne Pierce Papers at the Queen’s University Archives reveals that Watson was responsible for making the poetry selections and for writing an introduction to them, while the prose section, including its introduction, was handled by Pierce (Letter, Moore to Chapman, 6 December 1922). The two sections were very different in their contents. Watson included a sprinkling of nineteenth-century poems by such figures as Jean Blewett, Bliss Carman, William Wilfred Campbell, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Archibald Lampman, Charles Mair, Theodore Rand, D.C. Scott, and Charles G.D. Roberts, but he kept his distance from earlier poets, omitting such previously anthologized figures as Henry Alline, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Heavysege, Rosanna Leprohon, Fidelis (Agnes Maule Machar), Alexander McLachlan, Jonathan Odell, Charles Sangster, and Pamelia Vining Yule. Since Campbell, Carman, Roberts, and Scott continued to write well into the twentieth century, it is worth determining how many of the poems selected by Watson were strictly ‘nineteenth-century’ poems. Watson obviously thought of Campbell as a nineteenth-century poet,

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since he includes none of his twentieth-century verse (the three Campbell poems in Our Canadian Literature were first published in 1888 and 1889). With Carman the reverse was true: although Carman published several volumes of poetry prior to 1900, all of the poems in the anthology are from 1909 or later. In this way, Watson ‘modernized’ Carman. He seemed to be divided about Roberts, in that he included three poems from very different periods in Roberts’s career: ‘The Potato Harvest’ (1886), ‘A Song of Growth’ (1890), and ‘The Summons’ (1919). Scott was represented primarily as a twentieth-century poet. Only one of his five poems included in the anthology was originally published before 1900 (this was ‘The Voice and the Dusk,’ which first appeared in the Independent [New York] in 1892). Watson’s main interest was in poets who had come to prominence since 1900, and he drew heavily on the works of many of the figures who had appeared in Garvin’s Canadian Poets. Pierce was more concerned with historical representation, perhaps because he was collecting prose for the first time and felt it important to respect much earlier as well as current writing. His selection includes fiction by such early writers as T.C. Haliburton, Joseph Howe, William Kirby, Susanna Moodie, Gilbert Parker, John Richardson, Catharine Parr Traill, Lord Dufferin, and Goldwin Smith, as well as contemporary writers such as James Cappon, Frank Connor, Norman Duncan, Marian Keith, Basil King, Agnes Laut, Stephen Leacock, R.G. MacBeth, Peter McArthur, Nellie McClung, and J.G. Sime. He also included non-fiction prose selections by Robert Laird Borden, J.D. Logan, Lord Dufferin, Egerton Ryerson, Goldwin Smith, and George Wrong, among others. Although it may seem, in retrospect, that Our Canadian Literature was simply another expression of the celebration of Canadian nationalism that had inspired so many earlier collections, it strikes me as a much more troubled narrative than those produced by earlier editors. In many ways, Our Canadian Literature is about Watson and Pierce’s anxietyridden attempt to come to terms with the very idea of representativeness in Canadian literature. As such, it records their own insecurities about the relationships between poetry, prose, anthology construction, democracy, mimesis, and nation. Watson and Pierce each had doubts about the value of their undertaking and about their individual roles as literary proponents of Canadian culture. Although their discourse of decision making was fundamentally Arnoldian in its assumption that a knowledge of culture – most accessible through familiarity with one’s national literature – provided the means to personal and social salva-

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tion, their fervent nationalism was also driven by Watson’s theosophical beliefs and by Pierce’s Methodism. Pierce first met Watson in October 1920, after he had been named literary critic and advisor of Ryerson Press. Watson was a practising physician in Toronto, but in his later years (he died in 1926) he became profoundly interested in mysticism and psychic research. He was a staunch supporter of Canadian writing and was named the first vicepresident of the Canadian Literature Club of Toronto when it was founded in 1915 (Murray, 157). Despite their difference in age (Watson was thirty-one years older than Pierce), they became close friends. Pierce was protective of his co-editor, whose interests in spiritualism and mysticism were to become a source of controversy, although Watson was by no means alone in his theosophical pursuits; post-war interest in spiritualism and theosophy was widespread. Michele Lacombe notes that ‘the years 1920 to 1930 were the heyday of Theosophy in Canada. In 1921 membership in Toronto alone amounted to 240, and by 1922 there were three thriving lodges in the Toronto region’ (102). As David Bentley has shown, this interest was largely Ontario-centred and contributed to ‘an Ontario hermeneutic’ (‘Preface,’ x) that was organized around hermetic ideas shared by numerous religious thinkers, writers, architects, and painters, most notably Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven. Certainly, Watson was not the type of man who sought after representative things, as Pierce suggested in a commentary he published a year after their anthology was released. Pierce summed up his partner’s uniqueness in these words: ‘Most people get mystical at christenings and at funerals; they admit heavenly realities at the beginning and the end of life, but it is the span between that really matters! Now it is the spiritual superstructure which Watson raises that perplexes some, terrifies others, and renders many indifferent. Being unusual it is queer, and queerness, outside the Midway and our usual sources of amusement, is not allowed. We eat queer foods, are entertained by queer people, submit to queer initiations and court queer methods of obtaining social and financial advancement, but when it comes to queerness in matters of religion we are first and last for the established order’ (Watson, 5). Pierce’s comment was intended as a defence of Watson, whose theosophical involvement with psychics as well as the seances held in his Toronto home had been called fraudulent by James Mavor, a professor of political economy whose 1919 attack on Watson created a heated exchange in Toronto newspapers. The assault on Watson’s theosophical beliefs – beliefs that he shared with other prominent Torontonians

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– led Watson to reject ‘spiritism’ in 1923, but theosophical values certainly informed his selection criteria in Our Canadian Literature, which is in many ways an expression of Watson’s occultist convictions about the nature of God and creation. In his diary entry for 17 September 1923, Pierce described Watson as a ‘fanatic’ who perplexed many of his contemporaries in his relentless pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Margery Fee calls Watson ‘one of Pierce’s failings’ (55). Yet, he fascinated Pierce, who confided in a diary entry dated 17 September 1923: ‘I should like to settle the secret of Watson. I want very much to tell the world about him. He has suffered because of his spiritistic experiments’ (Pierce, diary entry, 17 September 1923). By ‘experiments’ Pierce meant the seances that Watson conducted for the Toronto Theosophical Society. Watson was also involved with other spiritualist organizations: he was president of the Association of Psychical Research for Canada and the founder and president of the Canadian Ethology Organization, a society that aimed to create loftier national ideals. A reading of Watson’s output suggests that Pierce was correct in concluding that ‘No man entertains so many strange faces, tongues, sects, systems, enthusiasms, artists, poets, fanatics, and sages as he does’ (Watson, 7). This may explain why Pierce felt that Watson had a ‘far, quiet, detached look’ about him (Watson, 7). In An Outline of Canadian Literature (1927), Pierce provided another revealing description of his co-editor: ‘Watson’s mind was compounded of chivalry and curiosity. Too brave to lie, he was too generous to retaliate when wronged. The questioning mind with which he confronted the world was that of a mystic. He believed absolutely in a spiritual world, that the centre and core of all life is spirit. He taught the solidarity of all life and truth, recognized no barriers and no frontiers. He examined philosophies and religion and appropriated what was good. The world of sages and sects, philosophers and fanatics made a beaten track to his door; his home was an antechamber to the universe of truth, love and beauty. His curiosity made him a cosmopolitan. It also gave birth to his cosmic consciousness’ (92). Pierce had to engage in a considerable amount of diplomacy in order to keep Watson on track. Yet Pierce’s view of literature was also influenced by his extra-literary beliefs, which had deep religious roots. He grew up in a Methodist household, was ordained a Methodist minister in 1916, and graduated from Wesleyan College in Montreal in 1922, two years after he became the editor of Ryerson Press, which was an outgrowth of the Methodist Book and Publishing House, established in 1829 to publish

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a variety of materials for the Methodist Church, including the Methodist Magazine. As Sandra Campbell observes, ‘Pierce’s literary nationalism – so characteristic of many late nineteenth and twentieth century English Canadian men of letters – worked in concert with a strong moralism rooted in his Methodism’ (‘Nationalism,’ 135). Before he began his editorial work at Ryerson in 1920, Pierce recorded in his diary that he wanted to make the press ‘the cultural mecca of Canada’ (qtd. in Campbell, ‘Foundling,’ 68). Brian Trehearne reminds us that Ryerson Press ‘was inescapably subservient to ideals of evangelical Christian faith that directed in some degree every single volume’ released by the company under Pierce’s editorship (Complete Poems, xxx). In many respects, Our Canadian Literature can be read as a document that is profoundly Methodist, both in its aims and in its aesthetic. As such, it embodies many of the forces of Methodist progressivism that emerged after the First World War and the General Conference of the Methodist Church, held in 1918. In this post-war era, the Methodist Church began to emphasize the importance of spreading a social gospel and finding ways of converting groups, rather than individuals, to the ideals of social Christianity. Spiritualism and Methodism often flourished together, a fact which may help to explain Watson and Pierce’s decision to enter into their joint venture, even though their visions of nation were finally quite different and led them to endorse different aesthetic ends. Bentley observes that although Watson is remembered mainly for his mystical pursuits, many of his prose works ‘can be separated into relatively orthodox studies in the idealist and Methodist vein,’ including The Sovereignty of Ideals (1904), The Sovereignty of Character: Lessons from the Life of Jesus (1906), and Three Comrades of Jesus, which he published in 1919, two years before he began to work with Pierce (Bentley, Bliss Carman’s Letters, 2). Both editors were actually searching for a secular means of expressing what were fundamentally theological values. Their engagement in this process embodies a crucial transformation that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada, which Ramsay Cook describes as ‘the substitution of theology, the science of religion, with sociology, the science of society’ (4). The turn towards realism – problematically endorsed by Pierce and ultimately resisted by Watson – was part of ‘a modernist theology which insisted that Christianity was not separate from modern culture but rather should be adapted to it’ (4). In this context, modernist theology was ‘founded upon a denial of God’s transcendence and an insistence

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upon his immanence in the world. It followed that a society in which God was immanent was one that could eventually become the kingdom of God on earth’ (5). The teaching and promotion of literature played an important part in this socialization process and reinforced the connection between cultural and religious salvation. One of the most influential Methodist thinkers of the post-war period – S.D. Chown – developed a form of philosophical idealism that stressed ‘the complete substitution of sociological concerns for theological ones’ (McKillop, 225). Although Pierce did not entirely support such a complete form of substitution, he did endorse the post-war Methodist emphasis on practicality, empiricism, and the Methodist belief in the ‘sacrificial service and involvement in public life as an expression of religious commitment’ (Airhart, 116). At the same time, he remained faithful to many late nineteenth-century Methodist beliefs, many of which were promoted by an earlier anthologizer of Canadian literature – Edward Hartley Dewart, the Methodist editor of the Guardian from 1869 to 1894 and the editor of Selections from Canadian Poets (1864). Like Dewart, Pierce believed that there was a fundamental relation between literary and national identity. He also shared Dewart’s idea that social reform began with individual conversion, a spiritually transformative activity that Pierce enacted in his role as literary editor and critic. For both editors, like editors before them, literary selection and religious election were inextricably linked. Our Canadian Literature includes separate introductions to its poetry and prose sections. These tell us a lot about the editorial values informing the selection and collection process. Watson begins his introduction by repeating the standard nineteenth-century romantic clichés: there is ‘immortal art’ and it expresses truth in ‘distinctive form’; such art is ‘a gain to the whole race’; time will reveal the immortal in Canadian poetry and ‘give permanence to every universal note’ (7). But soon the clichés give rise to a quirkier vision of the relation between poetry and its followers. Watson argues that readers ‘are themselves potential artists and poets’ (7) whose response to the music can ‘reach around the world’ and give the poetry true range, even though he also explains that some poems, such as Crawford’s ‘Egypt, I Die!,’ have been omitted because the work ‘is a study for artists and poets’ (10) and such studies have no place in the book. By responding to ‘the music,’ those who ‘take pleasure in truth beautifully and distinctively set forth’ (7) help to promote the poet, who helps to promote the country by writing beautiful and distinctive things.

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Watson’s stance is a profound expression of his theosophical leanings. As Lacombe explains, theosophists believed that it was their responsibility ‘to promote universal brotherhood between men and women of different creeds and nationalities’ (100) and to advance ‘the concept of dharma or destiny, which postulates that not only individuals but cultures, nations and races play their particular roles in the process of cosmic evolution’ (101). Because theosophists saw Canada as a special region of North America that would contribute to the evolution of the human race, they could support ‘the economic and cultural imperialism of the United States’ and ‘the equally prevalent call for a strong Canadian nationalism’ (104). In short, the theosophists felt that ‘continentalism was not incompatible with but rather an expression of their Canadian identity’ and that ‘internationalism and nationalism were not in conflict’ (114). Watson’s invocation of a ‘whole race’ whose response to poetry could ‘reach around the world’ was one version of ‘the everpopular Hegelian dialectic which allowed for the prospect of Canada’s destiny as a great nation without at the same time denying the appearance of internationalism and the importance of global unity’ (115). The invocation of this dialectic anticipates the native-cosmopolitan dichotomy that later became so central to the aesthetics of another influential Canadian editor – A.J.M. Smith. As an anthologist, Watson thought he could contribute to this global unity by repeatedly selecting ‘some jewel of a song not yet fully appreciated’ (7). However, when he focused on the Canadian poetry before him, it did not always strike him as timeless or jewel-like. He found that the distinctly Canadian poetry he was collecting often described ‘the canoe, the dog-train and the toboggan,’ and that the people in the poems were, of course, Canadians, whom Watson pictured as ‘a people of high resistance – dependable folk, resourceful and competent, blithe and reasonably aggressive’ (8). Watson’s challenge was to turn these ‘competent’ people and their ‘dog-trains’ into rare and exotic jewels. One gets the sense that Watson stands before this literature of the dog-train and wants it to go away, mainly because it is not immortal; it is too preoccupied with what Watson calls ‘the physical effort of conquering nature,’ an activity that strikes him as crassly functional. He writes, ‘the practice of industrial art leaves little time for engagement in finer expression’ (8). Watson requires a concept that will rationalize this ‘industrial art.’ The concept he falls back on is imperialism. Just thinking about material things – about property – calls up for Watson the imperial idea that sustains him, mainly because imperialism provides

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an intellectual framework through which he can rationalize ownership and capital as the means to spiritual and national advancement. In evoking this framework, Watson aligns himself with many other imperialists of his time. As Berger observes in The Sense of Power, these imperialists ‘believed that a weak or diminished empire meant the subversion of Canadian nationalism because the imperial system was the vehicle through which she would attain nationhood’ (260). Berger goes on to show that this argument for imperial unity was also religious in inspiration. It was rooted in the assumption that ‘the character of nations and individuals was shaped by obeying the Christian injunction to self-sacrifice and work’ (262). The correlation between Christianity and imperialism appears in Watson’s ‘A Hymn for Canada,’ which he included in the anthology. Watson prays that God will protect Canada and the Empire: Lord of the worlds, with strong eternal hand, Hold us in honour, truth, and self-command; The loyal heart, the constant mind, The courage to be true, Our wide-extending Empire bind, And all the earth renew. Thy name be known through every zone; Lord of the world, make all the lands Thine own!

(117)

For Watson, imperialism becomes the material equivalent of globalized poetic value. This may explain why he argues that ‘there is in our literature a fine imperial quality – not too imperious we trust – which insists upon what we call “British fair play”’ (9). This imperial quality demonstrates ‘the heroism of sacrifice’ (9). In a passage from the typescript version of Watson’s introduction – a passage excised in the printed version – Watson explains that one of his aims is to ‘show most effectively our true allegiance to that great Empire of which it should be our highest endeavour to be worthy.’ Watson sees ample evidence of such allegiance in Canadian poetry, which becomes a means of extending the imperialist message, even to French Canadians. He observes that ‘there is ample room among our Saxon population for that fine chivalry in which our fellow-citizens of French extraction have a tradition so glorious’ (9). Like a true imperialist, he displays generosity towards the colonized: ‘There should be nothing but the best good-will, either latent or manifest, between the

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representatives of these or any other sections of our people’ (9). In this context, the differences between races and languages amount to ‘negligible minor distinctions’ (9). The imperial gesture – combined with the theosophical idea of global evolution – erases otherness. Watson found it difficult to define what he meant by poetic value, caught as he was between the desire to treat Canada as a proto-mystical stage and as a material colonial presence. After a long digression in which he attempts to clarify the distinction between poetry, prose, and verse, Watson concludes that there really isn’t that much of true poetic value in Canada after all: ‘While our young nation is striving to find its soul,’ he observes, ‘there is sure to be much uncouth gesturing’ (12). He equates this ‘uncouth gesturing’ with the ‘new age’ and with ‘art in the new land,’ which he sees as a product of contemporary society. A great deal of the ‘world’s unrest in these days,’ he explains, is the result of such gesturing, and it needs to be stopped, just as recent poetry that employs ‘uncouth or intolerable forms’ needs to be suppressed (12). If you argue, as Watson does, that it is valuable for new nations to speak, but you find what they say or how they say it intolerable and uncouth, you have little choice but to seize this unruliness and civilize it. The poetry section of Our Canadian Literature is this civilizing act. This may be one reason why Watson refers to ‘the unspeakable beauty of reality’ (13). In the end, Watson’s poetry selections could not acknowledge everyday reality, simply because such an acknowledgment would position the idea of representativeness in relation to particular material conditions that flew in the face of the spiritized, ethereal, imperial universe Watson wanted to inhabit. Watson had to do more than rationalize his involvement in a representative anthology in which the very word ‘representative’ seemed to clash with the special, heightened status of individuals and psychics involved in mystical pursuits. He had to come to terms with his involvement with Pierce, who saw the older Watson as a potentially embarrassing father figure whose experience he nevertheless embraced. Watson’s preoccupation with mysticism was matched by Pierce’s profound interest in Methodist teaching. Watson’s interests undoubtedly influenced Pierce, who actually knew very little about Canadian literature when he assumed the editorship at Ryerson in 1920; his initial responsibility at Ryerson as the firm’s literary critic was to advise other ministers on appropriate reading material. The Pierce Papers do not help clarify whether the idea of the anthology was originally Watson’s or Pierce’s. What is clear, however, is that when Pierce began to work on Our Cana-

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dian Literature in 1921, he had no solid grounding in the scope of the material he was collecting. His first forays into Canadian literature appeared in late 1921. Like many of his generation, he seems mainly to have been inspired by his belief in the relation between spiritual and cultural development, a notion grounded in nineteenth-century European Romantic nationalism. In an interview with Ronald Hambleton, he recalled that when he began at Ryerson his ‘own literary interests could scarcely have been less attuned to Canada’s own literary needs.’ ‘All my chief interests were non-Canadian’ (qtd. in Campbell, ‘Nationalism,’ 137). It must have been difficult for Pierce to make the fiction selections. Ten years after he completed the anthology, in a survey of EnglishCanadian literature, he argued that ‘regarding our novelists and short story writers there is little to say … Knister’s anthology preserves the best of our stories. They are nearly all regionalist and superficial’ (English Canadian Literature, 60). Pierce’s comment suggests why he was so determined to celebrate the national (a trope of the universal) at the expense of the local (an expression of the materially based particular). His introduction begins in words that hark back to Dewart: ‘Great literatures,’ he says, ‘have grown out of the national consciousness of peoples and have developed around national ideals’ (123). Pierce then reviews the ideals around which great cultures have cohered and asks whether Canada can be defined in relation to a specific national ideal. But no sooner does he pose this question than he finds himself in a conundrum, for if the answer is no, Canada has not developed around a national ideal, then how can it produce great literature? Pierce claims that ‘we have achieved a sense of full nationhood,’ but he is reluctant to align it with any ideal, choosing instead to speak of ‘a subtle spiritual centre around which our new life is integrating’ (124), or about ‘an individuality still undefined’ (124), or about an identity that is ‘changing yet unchanged’ (124). Although these descriptions of the so-called spiritual centre sound like definitions of ambiguity and shift, Pierce wants to claim that it is precisely this centre that ‘gives to our national life permanence, direction and force’ (124) and thrusts us out ‘into characteristic expressions of national life and thought,’ which ‘we call the spirit of Canada’ (124). The concept of a coherent national ideal is thus subtly displaced by the rhetoric of spirit, which is itself defined as a force that is both fixed and in flux. Like Watson, Pierce finds himself arguing in favour of European ideals that he cannot locate in Canada, and like Watson, he finds

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himself involved in contorted arguments designed to mask the absence of such ideals. Although he knows that the aim of his anthology is to justify the status of English-Canadian poetry and prose as forces that are representatively Canadian, he cannot finally think of Canada in self-sufficient terms, so whenever a definition of something Canadian is proffered, it is always proffered in relation to its European origins. He writes: ‘The political traditions of Canada are lost in the dim dawnings of the histories of England and France. The roots of Canadian culture are buried in the soil that produced Caedmon, the songs of the Nibelungs, the sagas of Ossian and Cuchulain and the chansons of Gaul’ (124). Claims such as these pose a problem. The more Pierce aligns Canadian literature with non-Canadian influences, the more he undermines his ability to claim that Canadian literature is the expression of a national ideal. How will he resolve this dilemma? The first response is to argue that Canada is unique because of its cosmopolitanism, because it is built on French and English literary sources; as Pierce says, ‘a real history of the literature of Canada must include an appreciation of the contribution of the French’ (125). Although Pierce sees Confederation as the turning point that marked ‘the solidification of the political life of Canada’ (127) and ‘the crystallization of her spiritual life’ (127), he has trouble reconciling the French presence in Canada (a presence barely mentioned by Watson) and soon drops the claim to French importance, omitting all French authors from the prose section except Louis Hémon and Louis Fréchette, a gesture that repeats Watson’s implicit claim that Canada means English Canada, and that English Canada is fundamentally British. By presenting Hémon and Fréchette in this light, Watson and Pierce were initiating a stance adopted by many anthologists of Canadian literature. In a survey of French-Canadian writers appearing in EnglishCanadian literary anthologies, Cynthia Sugars observes that ‘many anthology editors bluntly state that they do not include any French selections, yet when the contents of the anthology are examined, one finds that they do. The editors’ overlooking of this fact, particularly in instances where the anthology is overtly identified as an English Canadian collection only, suggests that they consider the translated or “Englished” texts to be just that, English and hence part of the English Canadian canon’ (‘Reading,’ 11). At this point in his career, Pierce was unable to conceive of Canada as a bicultural entity. He was having enough difficulties thinking of it as a cultural entity. Instead, his

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vision of the country is one of a nation formed by dependence and inheritance. He reminds us again that ‘there is not yet in our literature a national epic like that of Ossian, the Nibelungenlied or the Chanson de Roland. We are rather the heirs of these’ (127). As it turns out, we are the heirs of everybody, including the Americans. Pierce writes: ‘It is no idle statement that the literature of the United States was at one time and still is the literature of Canada’ (128). The effect of such a multifaceted inheritance might be, as Pierce says, to create a literature that is as ‘colorless as water’ (128). But Canadian literature avoided this problem, because ‘the Canadian soul’ came into existence at Confederation, and ‘from that date our literature took on a distinctive form’ and began to ‘think for itself’ (128). By articulating this thought, the nation can ‘instruct its citizens in the spiritual ideas of race’ (128). No doubt, the anthology serves a similar function – that of transmitting ‘ideas of race,’ which necessarily involves the conceptualization of what racial ideals are worth transmitting, and the even scarier idea that instruction in racial ideals is an innocent task that an editor might consciously pursue. By the end of his introduction to the prose section of Our Canadian Literature, Pierce seems to have forgotten the implications of his anthology’s title. It is ‘our’ literature only insofar as it is owned by white Anglo-Saxons; it is ‘representative’ only insofar as it represents the views of people like Watson and Pierce, people who ‘may listen rapturously to those who have mastered the meaning of our life and thought, who have discerned with unclouded eye the inner meaning of our spirit and who alone, of all those within our borders, are qualified to explain us to ourselves and to interpret us to others’ (128). In this closing vision of national purpose, Pierce undermines the collective terminology of his title and the idea that ‘only by gathering together, carefully and critically, the best we have produced, may the outline of our greatness be imagined’ (128). The democratic image of a community working together to determine its best literature turns into a canonical activity to be pursued, not by the population, not even by a broad group of educated readers, but by the select few whose unclouded eyes can discern inner meaning and who are qualified to understand and interpret, and especially by anthologists, who are implicitly cast in the role of privileged arbiters of culture and taste, whose activity is crucial to the formation of national identity. All anthologists engage in exclusionary activities. In Watson and Pierce’s hands, this exclusion means that the ‘essential spirit of Cana-

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dian literature’ is not just the result of loving one’s native heritage, or ‘living in the spirit of fraternity,’ or pursuing a ‘devotion to truth, beauty and goodness,’ or devoting oneself to ‘an unquenchable passion for freedom’ (129). Above all, it is the result of what Pierce calls ‘reverence for the religious and political traditions of our race’ (129). It is his unshakeable respect for these traditions that guides Pierce in writing his introduction. For him, the editorial act was almost inescapably a theological act, especially when it came to writing about national literatures, which could provide a means to salvation. Many cultural nationalists in the 1920s saw their mission as similarly redemptive. From this perspective, the country becomes a church, a community to be celebrated, and above all a body that must never be seen as banal. This explains why Pierce is able to conclude his introduction in words that would certainly confuse the attentive reader, so far are they in meaning from his opening assertions. Because the act of writing an ending for this introduction is essentially a devotional form of religious activity, it can only end on a note of jubilant celebration that rings out the sublime richness of Canada and its literature: ‘Amid the richness of its variety of cadences and colors, amid the teeming wealth of its imaginative splendor, and the triumphant joyousness of its throbbing, expanding, up-soaring life and thought, stand out splendid mountain peaks, some of which are entitled to be accorded a place among the masterpieces of the literature of the world’ (129). This hyperbolic language may owe a debt to W.J. Alexander, perhaps the most prominent English professor at the University of Toronto between 1890 and 1925. Alexander was heavily influenced by Arnold, and he taught his students to read the ‘living and throbbing’ texts for themselves (Jasen, 558–9). These terms reinforce the masculinist drive behind the anthology and allow it to be seen as a story about phallic mastery conferred by the very act of masterpiece making. In this case, the phallic symbolism is complicated by the father-son positioning of the editors themselves, and by the necessary struggle for power that accompanies any father-son dynamic. Ultimately, the struggle is about inheritance and the control of wealth. In literary terms, the phallic power of the editor is bound up with his canonical force. Although Pierce does not mention Watson in his introduction, his preoccupation with mastery, combined with his attempt to claim new literary territory – that of Canadian prose – allows the narrative to be read as a story that links Canada’s growing independence to Pierce’s own desire for personal territory, a sublimated sexual urge to possess

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a new body. In other words, the implicit struggle is as much between Pierce and Watson as it is between Canada and England. Perhaps this is why Watson’s introduction to the poetry section connects patriotism with influence and inheritance, while Pierce’s introduction to the prose section focuses on the conflict between tradition and youth: he contrasts the spirit of ‘fraternity’ and ‘an unquenchable passion for freedom’ with ‘reverence for the religious and political traditions of our race’ and concludes that ‘we discover no absolute, sustained and deliberate search for ordered beauty and “the endless glories of art”’ (129). Pierce’s repudiation of history is conflicted, to be sure, for he was struggling not only with the concepts advanced by the man he admired, but also with the very notion of fatherhood and inheritance so crucial to his Methodist training. He wanted historical grounding, and he wanted to escape it. Although Our Canadian Literature was completely new in its double focus on poetry and prose, the material chosen for these two sections reveals the problems faced by the editors in negotiating their two-sided editorial form. Watson and Pierce were operating on very different assumptions when it came to determining the kind of literary values they wanted to endorse. Caught within the covers of Our Canadian Literature is a conflicted narrative about the nature of literary appreciation and the social function of art. While Pierce finally (and with difficulty) endorsed a model that was pro-modern and sometimes even radical in its engagement with political and material questions about Canada as a real place that was named, particularized, regionally focused, and open to celebration, tension, and doubt (even as he worried about the moral values implicit in this model), Watson’s selections were warm, fuzzy, sentimental outpourings about love and loss and potential, most of which were inspired by romantic, spiritual, and theosophical leanings that prompted him to choose the elevated expression over the mundane, eternity before the here and now. For example, Frederick George Scott describes ‘realms beyond our mortal reach’ and speaks of how his soul ‘hath pastured with the stars’ (‘Dawn’). Beatrice Redpath tells us that ‘I think God sang when He had made / A bough of apple bloom, and placed it close against the sky / To whiten in the gloom’ (‘The Star’). Isabel Ecclestone Mackay follows ‘the curving sky’s blue hollow, / Those thought too fleet / For any save the soul’s swift feet!’ (‘When As a Lad’). D.C. Scott’s unadorned, sparse poems are ignored in favour of the more romantic diction to be found in his ‘Ecstasy’: ‘Mount, my soul, and sing at the height / Of thy clear flight in the light

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and the air.’ For Katherine Hale, the pursuit of God allows her to realize that ‘heaven was one vibrating call’ (‘The Answer’). Virna Sheard discovers that ‘in peace, comes that great Lord of / rest / Who crowneth men with amaranthine / flowers; / Who telleth them the truths they have but / guessed, / Who giveth them the things they love the best, / Beyond this restless, rocking world of ours’ (‘The Slumber Angel’). Watson’s selections were inspired by his desire to escape this ‘restless, rocking world’ and to find a more stable spiritual centre. He wanted to create a volume that enlarged Canadians’ ‘patriotism to universal dimensions’ (10), but he was working with an up-and-coming editor who was thirty years his junior; he had to make the appropriate gestures in favour of renewal and youth. This may be why he claimed, in his introduction, that they ‘desired the expression of a youthful spirit’ (10), and why he insisted that the aim of the poet is ‘to visualize the truth’ (13). For Watson, ‘the actual poet is he who presents reality in the beautiful garments of revealing art,’ just so long as that beautiful reality is ‘vivid,’ ‘wholesome,’ not grubby or industrial, and lived by the educated readers constituting the anthology’s white middle-class audience (11). If these assertions are true, one is naturally led to wonder about Watson’s understanding of the term ‘representative,’ especially because it is in Our Canadian Literature that the term is used for the first time within a Canadian anthology’s title or subtitle. Did Watson think of his anthology as fulfilling some kind of democratic function, in which case its representative agency would be to describe the reality of his day – one that confronted many different types of people throughout the country? Did he think of ‘representative’ in historical terms, meaning that the anthology would collect poems that were representative of different poets writing in different periods? Or did he mean that the works gathered in the anthology were the best examples of many like them, and that together they gave voice to a relation between the country’s peoples? None of these descriptions seems to fit the idea of representativeness endorsed in the poetry section of the anthology, which is a derivative collection of verse by middle-aged and older writers who were reluctant to engage in new forms of poetry or to explore new ideas. Our Canadian Literature selected shorter poems over longer ones because they were cheaper to produce. It omitted well-known older poems while admitting less-well-known ones, mainly in response to issues concerning length and permissions costs. (A prefatory note to the volume com-

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plains about copyright restrictions imposed on the editors by – ‘in most cases’ – non-Canadian firms, while in his introduction Watson notes: ‘we have not stressed the older poets’ and ‘C.G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman and others are not represented here in their greatest works as these are too lengthy for our purpose’ [10].) In the poetry section of the anthology, then, ‘representative’ meant this: very few experimental poems, no long poems, no costly poems, no very old poems, no unwholesome poems, no working-class poems, no poems by immigrants, few poems by women, no poems in French, no political poems, no poems of social critique, no poems about science, no poems about money, no poems in which the self is not subordinated to the idea of spirit or God. The effect of these exclusions was to homogenize Canadian poetry, to present it as a body of work written by a group of poets who appeared to be both timeless and ageless (none of the poems are dated and no dates are provided for any of the authors selected for inclusion, even though this had been the practice in many earlier anthologies). In Our Canadian Literature, then, ‘representative’ seems to mean ‘generally recent,’ but the collection is reluctant to admit the fact. ‘Representative’ seems to mean conservative and preferably spiritual, just like Watson. He was sixty-three years old when the book was published. Two years before the anthology’s publication, he edited another anthology – of psychic writings – entitled Birth through Death: Ethics of the Twentieth Plane. Actually, Watson did not edit the anthology. He presented himself as one who ‘reported’ the ‘revelation’ received through the ‘psychic consciousness’ of another. As Watson the recorder put it: ‘The matter contained in this book was received psychically. It was spoken in a trance by one whose own thought did not direct his speech’ (10). Watson explains that the material was recorded stenographically ‘by two members of the Inner Circle’ (10). Then ‘the reporter read the chapters aloud, in the presence, usually, of some members of the Inner Circle, and the entranced Instrument whose voice was the medium of correction, as it had previously been the medium of dictation’ (10). Watson then explains that he employs these psychic revelations in his medical practice with notable results, so notable that ‘many letters from all over the world earnestly praying for further teaching from the same source have led the reporter to believe that this is by far the most important work of his life’ (2–3). The reporter’s testimony indicates a strong relation between his psychic and editorial pursuits at the time he was working on Our Canadian Literature. What was Watson thinking about when he was selecting this

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representative verse? Birth through Death provides some answers to this question. Watson reports that his concept of the twentieth plane is connected with such recurring terms as ‘love,’ ‘illumination,’ ‘light,’ ‘path,’ ‘God,’ ‘physical plane,’ ‘earth plane,’ ‘astral body,’ and so on. He called for ‘a reallegiance of the finite personal soul to the Infinite Mind who is God’ (3). He was distressed by the evils brought on by what he called ‘the industrial age’ (by which he meant the contemporary) and sought an answer to those evils through religious faith, which he regarded as ‘the most precious heritage of the race’ (10). Because Watson believed that ‘the materialism of the nineteenth century brought the world-tragedy to our doors,’ he argued that such materialism had to be repudiated and replaced by the healing intervention of ‘a new divine voice’ (9). Or as he put it just two years before Our Canadian Literature appeared: ‘The Mother-God took humanity by the hand, and is now leading her child into a more spacious house of life – into a spiritual age’ (9). As the allusion to Dante Gabriel Rossetti makes clear, this spiritual age had little to do with the twentieth century. Watson’s selections were the product of his desire to advance this spiritual age, which was grounded in another era. His reluctance to choose so-called industrial poems grew out of his belief that non-spiritual poetry led to the kind of capitalist urges that were responsible for the events leading up to the First World War. In many ways, his spiritual selections were balm to sensibilities damaged by death, tragedy, and destruction. Because he saw his values anchored in a spiritual past that he wanted to recreate, Watson shied away from new poetry and from the depiction of social conflict. He was especially resistant to poems that referred to class and capital. No wonder the poetry section of the anthology was so derivative. A comparison of the poetry selections in Our Canadian Literature and those in the two most influential anthologies to immediately precede it – John Garvin’s Canadian Poets (1916) and Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918) – demonstrates Garvin’s profound influence: Watson adds eleven poets to the earlier anthologist’s selections, but very tentatively, since he admits only one of each newcomer’s poems (with the exception of Hilda Hooke, whose work is selected twice). The poets added by Watson are J.K. Bathurst, James David Edgar, Helen M. Egerton, John J. Ferguson, Hilda Mary Hooke, J.E.H. MacDonald, Wilson MacDonald, Arthur Phelps, E.J. Pratt, Theodore Rand, and Robert Stead. These ‘new’ poets tend to reinforce the preference for elevated dic-

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tion and inflated imagery noted earlier. Bathurst’s ‘Love’s Pilgrim’ is a sentimental romantic–religious salvation poem. Edgar translates Fréchette, who writes about ‘peaks that are gilded by Heaven’ (‘Saguenay’). Egerton listens to the ‘mellow music of the morn’ (‘Bluebirds’). Ferguson likens God to a potter who controls ‘the wheels unnumbered of immensity’ (‘Till the Day Breaks’). Hooke invokes ‘a dream of a friendly face / And a far off June’ (‘Autumn’) and ‘the unseen volumes of the spheres’ (‘The Vagabond’). MacDonald, best known as a painter, shared Watson’s profound interest in hermeticism and the occult. In some cases, the newcomers are quite old. For example, Theodore Rand was born in 1835 and would have been eighty-seven had he been alive in 1922 (he died in 1900). Edgar died in 1899. This leaves three other poets not represented by Garvin, the youngest of whom – Phelps – was thirty-four when the volume was published. But even these newcomers were unwilling to challenge accepted poetic norms, or the selection of their poems in the anthology constructs them as being unwilling to initiate such a challenge. Each of their selections is about peace or the pain of war. Stead’s poem is about the death of Kitchener. Meanwhile, writing with elevated diction and inflated imagery, H.T. Miller asks for ‘men to match our mountains,’ men with ‘empires in their purpose / And new eras in their brains’ (‘Give Us Men’). Robert Norwood tells us that ‘My God had need / Of one more reed / Had need of me / To make the perfect harmony’ (‘The Piper and the Reed’). Most of the poetry selections in this anthology were preoccupied either with romantic visions of love and spiritual awakening or with healing visions of peace in response to the effects of the war. They were the product of an era marked by a preference for what Munro Beattie describes (in his own exclusionary terms) as ‘inflated diction, flights into the empyrean, pressure on the picturesque,’ included at the expense of poetry that developed ‘a more direct way of looking at and speaking about reality’ (238). Beattie sums up his view of the preoccupations of this period in these words: ‘Worst of all, the versifiers of this arid period, having nothing to say, kept up a constant jejune chatter about infinity, licit love, devotion to the Empire, death, Beauty, God, and Nature. Sweet singers of the Canadian out-of-doors, they peered into flowers, reported on the flittings of the birds, discerned mystic voices in the wind, descried elves among the poplars. They insisted upon being seen and overheard in poetic postures: watching for the will-o’-the-wisp, eavesdropping on “the forest streamlet’s noonday song,” lying like a mermaid on a bed of coral, examining a bird’s nest

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in winter, fluting for the fairies to dance, or “wandering through some silent forest’s aisles”’ (235). In many ways, literary taste in post-war Canada remained faithful to the ideals of the Victorian neoclassicism so prominent in Canadian poetry at the turn of the century. Claude Bissell observes that the widespread defence of these ideals made it clear ‘what in poetry the Canadian literary world mainly disliked: technical experimentation, the intellectual, any suggestion of the commonplace and the realistic’ (248). Yet there is evidence that some Canadians in 1920 and 1921 ‘were reading the new poetry and reacting to it’ (Beattie, 235). The Canadian Forum was founded in 1920, ‘at the right moment to be of service to new attitudes and new methods,’ and at least a few poets were aware of imagist experiments and of the work of such writers as e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stevens (Beattie, 235). E.J. Pratt got his imagism from these sources. Some Canadian writers – including Arthur Stringer and Frank Oliver Call – were acquainted with such anthologies as Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914), Lowell’s three-volume Some Imagist Poems (1915, 1916, 1917), and Alfred Kreymborg’s Others (1916, 1917, 1919). A.J.M. Smith read The New Poetry, edited by Harriett Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (1917), when he was in England in 1918. It contained works by Conrad Aiken, Eliot, H.D., Pound, Stevens, and William Butler Yeats. As Alan C. Golding observes, these anthologies shared a ‘central assumption … that has become almost a critical article of faith: that the best American poets react against rather than support the poetic and cultural values of their times’ (295). Therefore, ‘most modern anthologists were revisionists … all used their anthologies to propose a canon written in defiance of inherited poetic norms’ (296). This assessment of American wartime anthologies could hardly be applied to Our Canadian Literature. That anthology did include the work of Canadian poets who were challenging traditional poetic norms, but significantly, it did not include the specific poems that concretized this challenge. For example, in 1914 Stringer published Open Water, which contained a preface that called upon poets to adapt to a new era by freeing up rhythm and form and by replacing conventional poetic diction with more natural and direct free verse. Call, another poet included in Our Canadian Literature, also endorsed free verse, as did Phelps. Call and Phelps do not get much play, and what they do get remains sentimental; their more radical work is bypassed. Stringer has four poems in the anthology. Yet, of these, only one is in free verse, and the volume

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opens with a Stringer poem that is heavily and mechanically rhymed (‘I pass where the pines for Christmas / Stand thick in the crowded street, / Where the groves of Dream and Silence / Are paced by feverish feet’ [‘Northern Pines’]). Perhaps this was one way in which Watson expressed his disdain for free verse, which he described as ‘amorphous prose’ that could seldom, ‘by any euphemism, be called poetry’ (12). The effect of framing the volume with Stringer’s traditionally rhymed poem was to undercut his more experimental verse and to announce that free verse and social realism would be subordinated to conventional rhyme patterns and conventionally romantic conceptions of Canada, even at a time when the country was being politically, economically, and culturally reconfigured. For Watson, true Canadian poetry celebrated nature, spirit, or God. This is why the most prominently represented poets in the anthology (with five selections each) are Archibald Lampman (whose poetry is tinged with mysticism), Wilson MacDonald (who was immersed in spiritualism), Robert Norwood (an extremely liberal Anglican minister and practicing theosophist), and D.C. Scott (who also embraced ideas of the mystic north), followed closely by Watson himself (he included four of his own poems in the book). There are a few lines in Watson’s ‘To Worlds More Wide’ that sum up his belief in the relationship between God and nature that he sought to endorse in the post-war years: The Soul of All is beautiful, then why Should Nature anywhere in earth or sky Fall from her high estate? If it should be One wild flamingo by an unknown sea Found God unbeautiful, no God were He!

(80)

I emphasize the post-war period during which Our Canadian Literature was constructed because the poetry section of the anthology makes it so easy to forget that the book was a product of an era marked as much by sorrow and violence as by a renewed sense of national purpose. It includes a number of poems that make reference to the war, but there is no sense that Watson wanted to present a realistic view of the war’s carnage, no sense that poetry was an appropriate medium for such realism, no sense that poetry could focus on strife and violence and dissent, no sense that everything was changing. There were many such poems in print. Garvin’s collection of war poems had been out for three years, and Carrie Ellen Holman’s anthology, In the Day of

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Battle: Poems of the Great War, was published in 1916. It contained several poems by Canadian writers. For Watson, however, the poet remained divorced from contemporary, earthbound reality, for he or she had ‘subtle antennae’ that were ‘trembling outward to the mountains and the stars … startling the soul and kindling it to the life undying’ (Robert Norwood, 10). Most of these antennae were apparently possessed by men: 22.5 per cent of the authors in Our Canadian Literature were female, and their work occupied 25 per cent of the text; in contrast, 40.5 percent of the authors in Garvin’s earlier anthology were female, and their work occupied 34 per cent of the text (see Gerson, ‘Anthologies,’ 71). Unlike Watson, Pierce identified the post-war years with a new sense of national purpose that demanded new forms of literary expression. In An Editor’s Creed, he writes that ‘Canada had paid a terrible price for national sovereignty in the winnowing of the nations and never looked back. In 1920 there was born the Group of Seven, and in 1922 the Canadian Author’s Association [sic] … The whole country seemed to be outward bound, conscious of its emerging destiny’ (2–3). Pierce wanted to offer Canadians a print version of the nationalism that inspired the Group of Seven. Our Canadian Literature represents the first concerted post-war effort in this direction. Although nationalism was on the upswing and there was a great deal of national pride and a sense of self-determination, the population was also scarred by domestic and foreign events that had taken a terrific toll. In Canada, the economy was crippled. During the war years, prices had increased by 80 per cent, but wages had risen only 18 per cent. Labour unrest was on the rise. So was resistance to labour movements, which were identified with Bolshevism, alien activity, and the red scare in the United States. One year after the war ended, Canadians watched in horror as the single most important and devastating event in Canadian labour history unfolded in the forty-two days encompassing the Winnipeg General Strike. The strike was about many things – poverty, disease, exploitation, government policy, race, class, and culture – and in the end it permanently altered the country’s political landscape. It made headlines in every Canadian newspaper for six weeks. It ranks as ‘the greatest industrial upheaval that Canada ever witnessed, and in its complete tie-up of public activity as the most remarkable industrial occurrence on the continent’ (Magder, 11). There was no ignoring the strike and the attention it drew to the realities faced by working-class Canadians everywhere. Yet, within

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the poetry section of Our Canadian Literature, there is no sign of this momentous event, no recognition that the innocent days of peering into flowers or discerning mystic voices in the wind had been replaced by days of hunger, rioting, and bloodshed. Perhaps this is because experimentation in poetry was often seen as a sign of subversive political activity; as the literary editor of the Globe put it at the time, ‘We usually write in metre and dislike poetical as well as other kinds of Bolshevism’ (qtd. in Beattie, 236). Because the media also equated the Winnipeg General Strike and the labour movement with Bolshevism, the rejection of experimentation in poetry was linked to the public perception that such poetry was a threat to social order. What was ‘representative’ in 1921 was verse that reinforced the idea that certain forms of poetry – those not concerned with social and political issues of the day – were more worthy than others. It is precisely because publishers and editors supported this idea that so few examples of social and political poetry can be found in books published during this period, although there were some revealing poems in labour newspapers such as the Western Star, Western Labor News, the Searchlight, and the Industrial Banner. Many of these poems are about the Winnipeg General Strike or other labour struggles. For example, H. Corinth was the author of the following opening lines in ‘The Time to Strike’: My God! I am weary of waiting for the year of jubilee. I know that the cycle of man is a moment only to thee. They have worn me out with preaching what the patience of God is like, But the world is weary of waiting, will it never be time to strike? When my hot heart rose in rebellion at the wrong my fellows bore, It was ‘wait till prudent saving has gathered you up a store,’ Or, ‘wait till a higher station gives value in men’s eyes,’ Or, ‘wait until the grey-streaked hair shall argue your counsel wise.’ (Davis, 269 [1976])

Other poets wrote anonymously about the ‘alien question’ raised by the strike:

Representations of Nation Our alien is one – of class, not race – he has drawn the line for himself; His roots drink life from inhuman soil, from garbage of pomp and pelf; His heart beats not with the common beat, he has changed his life-stream’s hue; He deems his flesh to be finer flesh, he boasts that his blood is blue: Politician, aristocrat, tory – whatever his age or name, To the people’s rights and liberties, a traitor ever the same. The natural crowd is a mob to him, their prayer a vulgar rhyme; The freeman’s speech is sedition, and the patriot’s deed a crime. Whatever the race, the law, the land – whatever the time or throne, The tory is always a traitor to every class but his own.

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(Davis, 275)

In addition to these poems about the Winnipeg General Strike, there are many earlier examples of poetry about working conditions, labour, and the spread of socialism in Canada (a selection appears in Davis’s anthology). If they missed these earlier poems in books and periodicals, Watson and Pierce might well have encountered a book of poetry published closer to their time: Wilfred Gribble’s Rhymes of Revolt (1913) compares favourably with much of the poetry collected in Our Canadian Literature. But Gribble’s verse and earlier working-class poetry going back to Alexander McLachlan were never represented in Watson and Pierce’s work (see both Doyle and Watt for discussions of this poetry). The more one dwells on the collective and democratic title of their anthology – Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse – the more one realizes how unrepresentative it is. While the poetry section of the anthology valued what was established and unreal, Pierce’s prose section drew the reader into a completely different world. Although his introduction to this section did make it sound as though the reader would be entering a blissful realm of rapturous spiritual cadences that testified to the country’s ‘teeming

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wealth’ (129), his selections served to undercut his own hyperbole, concerned as they were with the practical and material aspects of nation building and day-to-day Canadian life, or with historical accounts of the country’s development. Pierce had spent two summers as a teacher in Saskatchewan in 1909 and 1910, and he returned there in 1912 as a student minister. These western experiences brought him into contact with many immigrant communities and with the hardships of prairie life. Although he did not see the prairies as the north, he still equated it with the frontier, and was therefore able to connect his western experiences with those of early Canadian settlers who confronted their own frontier metaphors. He saw himself as a modern missionary whose literary work was a form of preaching. As Patricia Jasen shows, literary critics in Pierce’s time often held this evangelical perspective; they believed that ‘as purveyors of culture’ they were ‘performing a role analogous to that of the clergy and one which was equally worthy of respect’ (556). The contrast between Pierce’s missionary approach and Watson’s mystic fervour becomes evident in the very first prose piece that Pierce selects, an excerpt from R.G. MacBeth’s The Romance of Western Canada, originally published by Ryerson in 1920. It presents a brief, straightforward historical analysis of the origins and development of the Hudson’s Bay Company that is only slightly romanticized. MacBeth was a Presbyterian minister and an enormously popular writer whose detailed descriptions of Canadian expansion to the west had a messianic flavour. His influential volume, Our Task in Canada (1912), was published by the Home Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church. MacBeth saw the material conversion of the land through exploration and industry as a means of achieving spiritual conversion; the nation would provide the stage upon which this conversion would be enacted. But he also wrote about some of the historical events that threatened the stability of the nation, notably the Riel and Red River rebellions. Pierce’s identification with the western heroes of MacBeth’s accounts emerges in his opening anthology selection, which draws our attention to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s employees, who were explorers, writers, and readers. In MacBeth’s words, these men ‘made earnest investigation into the resources of the country’ and ‘sent specimens from the animal, vegetable and mineral world to enrich scientific institutions and to widen the scope of information for others’ (133). While Watson frames his poetry section with a romantic, sentimental poem about northern pines, Pierce frames his prose section with a document that emphasizes history, material resources, and scientific research, an

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emphasis that is explicitly tied to reading and writing. This same frame inevitably includes reader and writer Pierce, whose activities of exploring Canadian literature cast him in the missionary-nationalist light that would colour so many of his efforts as an editor and publisher. As Pierce’s prose selections unfold, it becomes clear that his editorial narrative is preoccupied not only with the difficulties of asserting formal realism, but also with his realization that the older, romantic models associated with Watson are inadequate to the presentation of a new country such as Canada. Yet the realism Pierce endorsed was also distasteful to him, mainly because he remained profoundly attached to the Arnoldian idea that poetry was the highest form of art, and to the belief that poetry and its interpretation provided the best means of promoting the spirit of a national culture. Part of him was drawn to Arnold’s idea that the literary critic who championed poetry served a social function by defending culture. But another part of him was drawn to the forces that Arnold saw as threatening poetry: religion, philosophy, science, fact, and the pursuit of empirical data. The question confronting Pierce confronted many postwar Methodists: Was a culture best served by critics who intervened in the political and practical life of the nation, or was it best served by creators who addressed higher, more abstract ends? Pierce saw literary criticism as a means of bridging the gap between secular and sacred epistemologies. As Chris Baldick explains, Arnold’s legacy encouraged the substitution of literary for religious discourse: The true extent of the substitution is greater than can be accounted for by the simple description of criticism as a ‘substitute religion.’ It is less religion as religion than religion as occupant of a privileged ‘pinnacle’ in relation to other kinds of ideology that Arnold and his followers tried to replace with literary discourse, creating a substitute moral philosophy and a substitute social analysis as much as a substitute religion. Poetry was to become a kind of linchpin for a whole range of other social habits, moral values, and assumptions, confirming them and reflecting them back in harmonized, self-consistent, and emotionally appealing form. If it could fill the gap vacated by religion, literature could offer its own principles of internal consistency, completeness, and regularity of form as a shaping and governing principle for all the conscious and unconscious affairs of society. (230)

Pierce’s religious training made it impossible for him to ignore the idea that poetry was a means of achieving these principles, tied as they

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were to the development of national consciousness. Beyond Arnold, however, and beyond the Methodists’ developing emphasis on practicality and social cohesion, there were other factors that encouraged Pierce to equate language, religion, and nation. Soon after the war there was a push in Britain for increased professionalism and education in English studies. The war victory was also seen as a victory for the English language, and politicians sought ways of preserving and promoting the language as an instrument of national consciousness. The Newbolt Report of 1921, entitled The Teaching of English in England, had a profound effect on this desire to further English studies as a means of asserting national consciousness and unity. The book became a bestseller in England and was widely quoted. It ‘helped to keep alive Arnold’s belief in the civilizing mission of literature during the interwar period’ by proposing ‘to counter the social disorder of post-war England by uniting the social classes in a shared pride in their literary heritage’ (Jasen, 562). It would have been very difficult for Pierce to ignore this influential document, published a year before he began work on Our Canadian Literature, his own attempt to promote English as a vehicle of national selfrecognition. And Pierce would likely have identified with Newbolt’s Arnoldian view that the educator was a missionary who had specific obligations: ‘propaganda work, organization and building up a staff of assistant missionaries’ (qtd. in Baldick, 96–7). When Pierce looked at English-Canadian writing in 1922, he inevitably equated it with this missionary perspective; he viewed the study of Canadian literature as a form of secular religion that could link morality and culture. As Campbell says, ‘Pierce brought to Ryerson a conviction that literature must be concerned with higher values – morality and patriotism – and that it ought to be a cultural force for national cohesion’ (‘Foundling,’ 68). Jasen points out that this equation between literature, morality, and patriotism remained a powerful force in Canada even at mid-century. She cites as an example Northrop Frye, who ‘remained in the Arnoldian tradition by linking literary education with the capacity for right conduct. His literary and social criticism constantly affirms his belief that culture is the force behind public order and rational reform, that without exposure to culture one is trapped by one’s ego and by the social environment, and that the purpose of higher education is to bring students in touch with “the bureau of standards where real time and space are kept”’ (563). English-Canadian literary anthologies are preoccupied with this ‘bureau of standards,’ which is Frye’s term for what I am call-

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ing an anthological code. The keepers of that code have understood that identity and culture are linked, that their job is to reinforce this connection, and that only by repeating the mantra of literature and nation can the actuality of Canada – ‘real time and space’ – be affirmed. This is not an affirmation that ends after the Second World War. It begins with John Simpson’s Canadian Forget Me Not in 1837 and continues to the present day. The belief that new forms of writing could embody and promote new countries inspired many of Pierce’s selections. For example, the narrator in the excerpts from J.G. Sime’s Our Little Life argues that the artist in ‘the Newer Worlds’ will ‘have to take his pleasure in feeling that he has attained the power of looking things straight in the face and so has got into truer relation with essentials’ (134). Here Sime emphasizes the alignment of mimetic value with the transformative power of the New World. To get into a ‘truer relation with essentials’ is a form of self-empowerment. In Our Canadian Literature, this kind of mimetic empowerment is linked to a shifting sense of the way in which the individual operates within a national culture, one of Pierce’s main interests as a young publisher. For him, as for Sime, to work in Canadian art is to ‘step over the chasm’ and to be ‘born again’ (135). Although the road to this new form of self-awareness is a difficult one, the artist who follows it ‘gains a sense of freedom in the New World, and in the escape from tradition and the routing of a narrow groove he also acquires a resourcefulness and a certain rough-and-ready adaptability that are of value’ (135). He ‘sets foot on that long road which passes through egoism and acquisitiveness and leads slowly to knowledge and mastery’ (134). Sime’s contribution highlights the relation between new art forms, mastery, and spiritual transformation. As she says at the end of her selection, the freedom of the New World produces a ‘spirit of assertion’ that ‘makes you only the more valuable servant of others’ because, ironically, it is a way back to ‘the old loyalty’ (135). By serving others through his spirit of assertion, Pierce was able to find his way back to the devotional loyalty that originally inspired him and to express that loyalty in new ways. Yet he remained conscious of a troubling question posed in Sime’s essay: ‘Can you be acutely self-conscious and happy at one and the same time – if your self-consciousness is being used by you only in order to further your own interests and assert your rights?’ (135). Sime’s question illuminates another aspect of the moral dilemma that

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confronted Pierce as he tried to understand the extent to which the pursuit of personal goals undermines democratic advancement. This issue is foregrounded in J.D. Logan’s essay ‘Genuine Democracy,’ which was included in the anthology. Logan was a prominent scholar in Canadian literature, so his meditations on the meaning of democracy and literature would certainly have affected Pierce (the two corresponded, and Pierce welcomed Logan’s advice on his anthology selections). Logan argues that Canadian democracy ‘creates the right of every individual to the highest positions, and secondly, by removing all such obstructing agencies as caste, privilege and preferment, assists even the lowliest in origin to pass to equal dignity with the highest’ (172). But then he maintains that ‘under genuine democracy men must consent to the necessary existence of social order and the unequal distribution of material goods,’ for if this distribution was not unequal, and all ‘obstructing agencies’ were removed, what incentive would there be for people ‘to achieve the most worthy and excellent career in their power’ (172)? Logan’s contradictions were the result of his desire to rationalize bourgeois ideology. Like Logan, Pierce faced the task of explaining, if only to himself, how an anthology that was ‘representative’ and ostensibly collective in intent could manage to exclude people on the basis of caste, class, and economic status. Perhaps he needed to understand how the anthology, which was conceptually democratic, was ultimately undemocratic in its final realization. Logan’s answer was that these selections provided models of what any person could achieve, so long as that person’s society provided him or her with the incentive to do so. Democracy was a function of maintaining the status quo, and the task of educators (and anthologists) was to promote this function. The irony at the heart of Our Canadian Literature is that its pursuit of individualism and social liberation is thwarted by its self-replicating bourgeois form, the same form that inspires most anthologies. Pierce bypassed many of the available prose accounts of the Winnipeg strike, just as Watson bypassed the protest poetry written in response to the same event. One explanation of why the editors ignored the strike is provided by Richard Allen, who observes that although ‘the social gospel movement had won the denominations to progressive social policies and to a new level of sympathy with organized labour, especially in the Methodist church … the progressive leadership in Methodism had by 1921 totally rejected the sectarian religion of labour … and had served notice that they could not give unqualified support to radical labour tactics such as the general sympathetic strike’ (175). Watson and

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Pierce were compiling their anthology at precisely the time that ‘the progressives of the social gospel were faced with an eruption of industrial conflict in the most compromising place possible – the church printing establishments’ (R. Allen, 175). In June, 1921, the printing trade unions called a strike against Toronto printers. The largest of these was the Methodist Book and Publishing Company. When S.W. Fallis, the new head of the book and publishing department, agreed to chair the Employers’ Defence Committee, his acceptance seemed to imply an alignment between Methodist interests and capitalism (an alignment the Methodists had formally rejected) at the expense of labourers. The contradiction undermined the progressivist, social gospel ideology of post-war Methodism and ensured that the subject of labour discontent would remain anathema to Methodist critics, who, like Pierce, were formally and informally associated with the publishing houses. For the editors, and especially for Pierce, the anthology raised a central question: Was it possible to rationalize the exclusion of certain classes? One of Pierce’s selections, former Prime Minister Borden’s ‘The Future of Our Country,’ dwells on some of these issues in the context of the First World War and shows that Pierce was anxious to acquaint his readers with the differing concepts of nationalism being vigorously debated at the time. Kenneth McNaught observes that the ‘renewed Canadian nationalism’ that emerged after the war ‘was loosely defined – if indeed it had been defined at all’: ‘To some it was reasserting Canada’s right not to be American, while to others it was almost a question of Canada’s right to be American. Sometimes the new spirit demanded a flowering of provincial rights and powers. For French Canadians nationalism was French-speaking and a matter once again of survival. To the broad mass of English-speaking workers and farmers nationalism was expressed in daring demands for new modes of social justice. To federal Liberals, particularly sensitive to the political isolation of Quebec, nationalism meant a growing independence of London. To English-speaking Conservatives it means seeking Canadian status well within the empire’ (219). Pierce was determined to show that similar issues regarding nationalism had been debated over time; to this end, he included political commentary by earlier figures, including Lord Dufferin, Lord Lorne, George Monro Grant, and Edward Blake, each of whom presented a different version of how Canada evolved, and what promises it held for its citizens. While many of Pierce’s prose selections were excerpts from formal documents that focused on the material and political circumstances

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accounting for the idea of Canada, the fiction selections reveal a turn away from the standard diction of conventional prose and an interest in local idiom and colloquial language, further evidence of Pierce’s willingness to emphasize the concrete to the exclusion of the formulaic universal. I think here in particular of the fiction excerpts from works by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Norman Duncan, Marian Keith, Peter McArthur, Nellie McClung, Anison North, and E.W. Thomson. Each of these excerpts focuses on the customs of distinct Canadian regions. Pierce promoted the sketch form and local-colour depictions by introducing works by such authors as Anna Jameson, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, and S.T. Wood, the first time their works had appeared in any anthology. He also included the muscular Christian fiction of Ralph Connor (Charles Gordon) and the humour of Stephen Leacock. Because Pierce was determined to represent fiction written in different parts of the country, he may also take credit for legitimizing Canadian regionalism. Pierce’s selections gave new value to realist pursuits, and authorized the shift towards realism that would characterize Canadian fiction for the next fifty years, although the impact of Pierce’s work emerged within the decade. After Our Canadian Literature was published, it became acceptable to anthologize realistic fiction. Editors such as E.K. Broadus and A.M. Stephen included fiction in their 1923 and 1926 anthologies. By the time Raymond Knister edited the first anthology devoted exclusively to Canadian short stories in 1928, he noted that ‘many thousands of Canadians are learning to see their own daily life, and to demand its presentment with a degree of realism’ (xviii). The realism originally endorsed by Pierce was largely responsible for this growing demand and contributed enormously to the learning process that Knister describes. Although Pierce’s contribution to Our Canadian Literature established the link between nationalism and realism that would colour the canonization of Canadian literature, his conception of fiction was, finally, a troubled one. He believed that his mission as an editor and publisher was to promote the nation, and he felt that the fidelity to local and particular experience provided one of the best means of achieving this objective. But at the same time, he recognized that there was a tension between regional and national consciousness, a tension that his anthologizing desire to represent region and nation could not logically resolve. No one has resolved this tension; perhaps it doesn’t need to be resolved.

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While he supported fiction as a genre that was suited to the realistic depiction of the country, Pierce felt uneasy about the moral qualities embodied in realism, which often focused on amoral characters and acts. His decision to anthologize fiction represented a profound leap of faith and an about-face in his aesthetic-religious stance. As Sandra Campbell notes, ‘early in his career he urged ministers to avoid much of current fiction or else “sin wilfully,” as “there is no philosophy of life there that will bear scrutiny”’ (‘Nationalism,’ 143). In his biographical profile of Pierce, C.H. Dickinson remarks that ‘Lorne’s heart was with the poets’ (42). Ten years after Our Canadian Literature appeared, Pierce published a critical overview entitled English Canadian Literature, 1882–1932, in which he argued that early Canadian realism reflected ‘doubt, disillusionment, and the universal unrest’ (61). He concluded that ‘the best of our poetry challenges comparison with the best in the world; our fiction is far below in artistry, ideas and truth to life. It shows lack of care and discipline. It is satisfied with picturesque aspects of the surface of our frontier life’ (61). Could these words have been written by the same man who, ten years earlier, had described the prose section of his anthology as ‘a mansion of the mind’ in which ‘we may listen rapturously to those who have mastered the meaning of our life and thought, who have discerned with unclouded eye the inner meaning of our spirit and who alone, of all those within our borders, are qualified to explain us to ourselves and to interpret us to others’ (128)? Throughout his career, Pierce continued to have ambivalent feelings about the value of fiction. For Pierce, the very act of selecting fiction for inclusion in the anthology was both inviting and distasteful, an act that forced him to reach a compromise between his staunch Methodist morality and his profound desire to promote Canadian nationalism through the selection of strong Canadian examples of what he saw as a fundamentally amoral genre. This act of compromise, which lies at the very heart of Pierce’s selections, is also an expression of his need to mediate between the past and the present, to negotiate a settlement between traditional forms of poetry aligned with religion and empire and new forms of prose aligned with realism and nation. Because this pull between the established and the new was simultaneously a tension between genres, Pierce’s attempt to resolve his involvement with prose must be seen as one aspect of his desire to promote a new vision of Canadian distinctiveness while remaining acutely conscious of ‘the imperious sweep of

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our colossal heritage’ (129). To remain aligned with this heritage – centred in conventional poetry – was to remain constant to his Methodist traditions. To align himself with the new world – generically associated with fiction – was to break with tradition and to commit a symbolic act of religious renunciation. It is not surprising to find this conflict embedded in the narrative comprising the prose section of Our Canadian Literature, for it embodies the tension between spirituality and secularity that Pierce confronted throughout his career, and especially in his early years at Ryerson. The tensions between old and new that Pierce faced in making his anthology selections were not limited strictly to his section. The coedited anthology in its entirety recasts the old-new tension as a pull between poetry and prose, the mystically inspired romantic poetry selected by the older Watson confronting the predominantly realistic prose selected by the younger Pierce. In this context, the figurative father occupies the civilized territory aligned with history, literary tradition, and imperial power. The figurative son inhabits a newer, rougher narrative land that is divorced from ancestry and spiritual connection. The anthology’s guiding narrative is about the editors’ attempt to negotiate a passage between these antithetical domains. In Our Canadian Literature, the father still precedes the son. Watson’s poetry section is placed before Pierce’s collection of prose. The poetry section invokes empire, eternity, transcendence, the baggage of Victorianism. Britain is there before Canada, which struggles to assert itself as a realistic, verifiable, New World force. The spokesman for this force – Lorne Pierce – paradoxically desires everything he has abandoned through his anthology making, everything that Watson represents. Through its very structure and modes of selection, Our Canadian Literature enacts a love-hate relationship between authority and liberation, poetry and prose, genesis and evolution, faith and doubt, played out by two editors whose differing ages and values frame them as cooperative antagonists, struggling with themselves and with each other in the confines of their two-sided book.

Chapter Three

Anthologies between the Wars, 1922–1943

Watson and Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature reflects an editorial perspective rooted in conceptions of nation, empire, and identity that predate the war. Like their predecessors, Watson and Pierce complained about the ‘rarity’ of ‘artistic appreciation’ in ‘new lands’ such as Canada and about how it was ‘the physical effort of conquering nature’ (8) that explained this kind of aesthetic neglect. They could still point to the ‘fine imperial quality’ (9) of Canadian literature and trace the development of Canadian poetry without ever mentioning the global and domestic conflicts that had transformed the country over the previous eight years. By 1920, as Roy Daniells has observed, ‘new lines of thought, sceptical, divergent, and centrifugal were now appearing; the centralizing impulse of Confederation had spent its force’ (‘Minor Poets,’ 446). In this sense, Watson and Pierce’s 1922 selections seemed out of step with their times. But how out of step were they? F.W. Watt argues that ‘the spirit of patriotism which arose in Canada during the “boom” era of the earlier 1900’s and culminated in the wartime jingoism of the 1914–18 struggle, still flourished in various forms during the 1920’s’ (‘Climate of Unrest,’ 15). To illustrate one of these forms, Watt quotes a passage from an article by C.F. Lloyd on the subject of current standards of taste, published in the conservative and nationalist Willison’s Monthly magazine for 1927: ‘To be able to appreciate keenly and with a sureness of instinct, akin to the homing instinct of birds, all the finest and grandest production of human genius in every department or in one or two, and at the same time to be able on all occasions, the most trying as well as the commonest, to act and speak with the dignity and delicacy expected

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of a courtier in the presence of his sovereign is to tickle the palate with the finest flavor of life, to enjoy the fragrance and beauty of a rose that does not fade but rather grows sweeter with the wearing’ (‘Climate of Unrest,’16). Lloyd seems to be speaking from another century, but he was addressing an audience who shared his sense of taste. As Brian Trehearne notes, even though Queen Victoria had died in 1901, ‘Victorian Canada had lived on’ from 1900 to 1925, when the first modernist challenges to the ‘The Maple Leaf School’ began to appear (Aestheticism, 315). These challenges reflected a growing sense of national self-confidence that emerged after the war. Yet, this was a self-confidence defined by what Trehearne calls the ‘attachment to Britain’s sustaining breast through thick and thin’ (Aestheticism, 315). It was often aligned with the nationalist values of the Canadian Authors Association, founded in 1921. With the election of Mackenzie King’s Liberals in the same year, however, a new direction emerged. King put Canada’s interests before imperial concerns and argued relentlessly for Canadian autonomy in its foreign and domestic affairs. Carl Berger explains this shift: ‘Canadian foreign policy after 1921 stressed status rather than responsibilities and guarded autonomy against any kind of imperial co-operation. In the 1920s, even the history of the movement for imperial unity came to be regarded as a struggle of subservience against autonomy, a conflict noteworthy only to illustrate the follies of the Victorian past and to underline the inevitability of what had come to pass’ (Sense, 264). As Mary Vipond has shown, the years following the First World War were also marked by intense domestic debates about several questions related to nationalist values: ‘What did those thoughtful English Canadians mean by the term “Canadian nationalism”; what did they think should be Canada’s relationship with Britain, with the United States, with the League of Nations; what did they mean when they talked of national unity, of national literature, of national art?’ (32). These questions were eagerly debated by the English-Canadian intelligentsia of the 1920s, by the ‘creative artists, the writers, the university professors – the intellectual elite’ (33). Their role was, in Vipond’s words, ‘to create a national feeling and to focus and direct it’ (44). As Margery Fee observes, the 1920s ‘were precisely the years when Romantic nationalist critics had the greatest influence. Indeed, even those who were challenging the Romantic nationalists for institutional control – the modernist and realist writers themselves – used Romantic nationalist ideas in their writing’ (‘Literary Criticism,’ 273–4). The 1920s were marked by a parallel eagerness to recognize the

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distinctness of Canadian literature in the classroom. William Douw Lighthall’s anthological devotion to the British Empire was gradually supplanted by a new sense of literary nationalism, which itself would soon be challenged by the advent of Canadian modernism. The Group of Seven established themselves in 1920. In their inaugural catalogue they argued that ‘art must grow and flower in the land before the country will be a real home for its people’ (Reid, 149). A.Y. Jackson encouraged fellow artists to ‘replace the Dutch cow with the northern bull moose’ (Thompson and Seager, 162). The Canadian Forum, also founded in 1920, promoted the Group and supported a new literary nationalism, as did the Canadian Authors Association, founded the following year. In its first editorial, the Forum identified national self-consciousness as a spiritual pursuit: ‘Too often our convictions are borrowed from London, Paris, or New York. Real independence is not the product of tariffs and treaties. It is a spiritual thing. No country has reached its full stature, which makes its goods at home, but not its faith and philosophy’ (‘Editorial,’ 3). This rise in national self-consciousness led to a call for more emphasis on the teaching of Canadian literature. Lorne Pierce spoke about the curriculum of the ‘little red school house’ as the ‘cement to bind us as a people to one another’ and argued that ‘we must build our texts on literature, history and service … In this way, the very best of all that we have produced may be related, at the proper time and in the right manner, and its beautiful flowering in a higher national citizenship’ (qtd. in Campbell, ‘From Romantic History,’ 95). The pursuit of this kind of ‘higher’ citizenship demanded primary texts and secondary material to go with it. Literary critics were quick to emerge, with six critical histories appearing between 1920 and 1930 alone: Ray Palmer Baker’s A History of English-Canadian Literature (1920), J.D. Logan and D.G. French’s Highways of Canadian Literature (1924), Archibald MacMechan’s HeadWaters of Canadian Literature (1924), Lionel Stevenson’s Appraisals of Canadian Literature (1926), Lorne Pierce’s An Outline of Canadian Literature (1927), and V.B. Rhodenizer’s A Handbook of Canadian Literature (1930). Teachers also needed primary material. To this end, more than seventy anthologies of Canadian poetry and fiction were published between 1920 and 1940, a number of them designed for school adoption. Finding the courses in which to use those books, however, was a continuing challenge. Although Canadian history courses had been introduced successfully into elementary schools, high schools, and universities by 1918,

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the teaching of Canadian literature did not gain the same footing. There were sporadic attempts to introduce courses in Canadian literature in the years leading up to the war. John Daniel Logan was lecturing on the subject at Acadia University in 1915. When he returned from the war in 1919 he was named ‘Special Lecturer in Canadian Literature without Salary,’ an appointment recognized by the Globe and Mail as ‘an innovation of national importance’ (qtd. in McDougall, 1020), even though this importance was still not worth a salary. The same year, Vernon B. Rhodenizer began teaching a Canadian literature course (also at Acadia) and Alexander Crawford offered a course on Canadian poetry at the University of Manitoba. As courses in Canadian literature were gradually added to school curricula, the demand for anthologies designed for classroom use increased. A number of prominent anthologies produced in the 1920s – including those by Watson and Pierce, Broadus and Broadus, and A.M. Stephen – were specifically designed for schools. While it would take decades for Canadian literature to establish itself as a viable curricular topic throughout the country, there were several new factors contributing to its advancement during the 1920s and 1930s. Restrictive copyright laws that had hampered the protection of Canadian authors’ works were revised in 1911 when the United Kingdom passed a new law allowing self-governing dominions to enact their own copyright legislation. By 1924, Canada had established its own copyright laws, which gave new protection to Canadian authors. However, distribution methods developed in response to earlier legislation continued to favour books published in the United States or Great Britain and imported into Canada. Most of the anthologies produced in this period display a self-consciousness about their role in envisioning a post-war Canada, but some are more willing than others to depart from earlier anthological models built on the imperial ideal. As editorial narratives, they enact their own sense of instability in an era when attitudes towards that ideal were shifting. The selections made by these editors, and the structures of their collections, reflect a profound sense of shift. That shift was catalysed through the intervention of Canadian publishers who were determined to establish a Canadian-based industry. The dominant players were Hugh Eayrs of Macmillan Canada, John McClelland of McClelland and Stewart, and Lorne Pierce, whose long career with Ryerson Press was defined by his attempt to find and promote Canadian writers and artists. These three companies embarked

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on a number of projects designed to support Canadian literature and to bring it into the schools. McClelland began a program of reprinting the works of early Canadian writers and of pursuing new Canadian authors. At Ryerson, the indefatigable Pierce developed the Makers of Canadian Literature series, which brought together writers working in English and French, as well as the Ryerson Poetry chapbooks, the Treasury Readers, and the Canada Books of Prose and Verse. Eayrs also supported new Canadian writers through several initiatives at Macmillan. The combined output of these publishing houses during the 1920s created an environment that accounted for the first real flowering of Canadian literature in terms of its public presence, a flowering that lasted until the Depression began to take its toll at the end of the decade. Hugh Eayrs became the publisher at Macmillan in 1921. When he took over, the company was languishing under the direction of Frank Wise. Eayrs’s first publication was the English translation of Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, a book that proved highly popular and convinced Eayrs that Canadian authors could be successful. Under his direction, the company built up a roster of Canadian authors that included Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove, E.J. Pratt, Grey Owl, and Morley Callaghan. In part, the success of Eayrs’s program was aided by the prosperity brought on by the war years. As he observed, ‘the war did to Canadian letters what years of academic study might never have done. It taught us our place as a distinct national entity and so awoke national consciousness which found expression through a national literature’ (27). Eayrs’s first attempt to promote Canadian literature in an anthology led him to Edmund Kemper Broadus and his wife, Eleanor Hammond Broadus, who was the noted English translator of Giovanni Papini’s Life of Dante. Their collection A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse was published by Macmillan in 1923. Edmund Broadus was a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He and Eleanor were well known as compilers. Macmillan had already published one of their anthologies – English Prose from Bacon to Hardy – and Eayrs felt comfortable approaching them for the new Canadian collection. Broadus was an American from Virginia who had received his PhD from Harvard and been appointed at Alberta in 1908. His move to Canada was prompted by a medical condition. In her collection of alumni stories about the University of Alberta, Ellen Schoeck records that ‘he was diagnosed with a tubercular gland in his neck, put in a sanatorium, and told he had to live in the West’ (54). The president

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of the not-yet-established University of Alberta, Hugh Marshall Tory, was in Boston recruiting new professors ‘and the match was made’ (54). Schoeck continues: ‘Broadus recalls that “on a day in June 1908, the president of a university not yet in being, in a province which I had never heard of, in a country which I had never visited, came to Harvard and offered me the professorship of English. The offer sounded like midsummer madness.” But Broadus accepted it’ (54). By the time he and Eleanor produced their anthology in 1923, they had been in Canada for fifteen years. Clearly Edmund had been absorbed in the study of Canadian literature for some time; he was getting involved in current questions about how Canadian literature should be judged. In an article published in the Canadian Forum a year before his anthology appeared, Broadus complained that literary critics of the day fell into two camps: ‘the boosters and the knockers’ (‘Criticism,’ 20). Anticipating A.J.M. Smith’s ‘Wanted: Canadian Criticism’ (1928) and the general critique of flag-waving literary nationalism provided by the McGill group of poets in mid-decade, Broadus argued that ‘the idea seems to prevail that literary criticism, or at least printed comment on Canadian books, must be a boost’ (‘Criticism,’ 20). He distinguished himself from critics in the ‘effete East,’ who would call a ‘boost’ a ‘bouquet,’ but the effect was the same: ‘if the critic dares to speak with a nice sense of justice, he incurs the risk of being called a knocker, and his fellow Canadians, inspired by the conviction that anything Canadian must be tophole because it is Canadian, will turn upon him’ (‘Criticism’ 20). Broadus goes on to critique a previous anthologist for his boosterism. He doesn’t name names, but his references are clearly to the first edition of John Garvin’s Canadian Poets, published in 1916. Broadus takes issue with Garvin’s hyperbolic introductions to the authors included in his collection and says that Garvin’s use of language is sloppy and amateurish. The attack is interesting as one of the first examples of a twentieth-century Canadian anthologist taking issue with one of his predecessors. It seems likely that Broadus’s attack on Garvin was published in the Forum at exactly the time he was compiling his own book; it provides a good indication of the standards he set for himself. However, while Broadus wanted to depart from literary boosterism, he was no radical. He was a conservative teacher and critic who valued clear, direct prose and who had little interest in the kinds of poetic experimentation taking place in Canada at the time. In another article in the Forum, published in 1923, he objected to free verse and imagism (which he con-

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joined) because ‘in their search for the image, in their desire that each thing shall be sharply etched, even the best of the free verse poets often neglect what is surely of equal importance in the art of poetry: they neglect to build. Most of their work, it seems to me, is like broken glass, sparkling in every facet, but unassimilated to any larger purpose. The architectonic element, which can be found alike in the towering citadel of Paradise Lost or in the tiny structure of one of Wordsworth’s sonnets, is simply not there’ (‘Lunatic,’ 243). In these words Broadus essentially dismissed one of the major currents in American poetry over the previous decade and indicated that his anthology would not be one to promote new poetic forms. His antipathy towards formal experimentation marked his critical commentary: ‘I knew a man once who went mad. He had been meticulously careful in manners and dress. The first symptom of his mental disintegration was a progressive slouchiness. His dress grew unseemly. Then it became disgusting. Then he was incarcerated, and I lost track of him; but I am persuaded that if he is still alive he is a writer and publisher of free verse’ (‘Lunatic,’ 242). Broadus worried that ‘with all these old sanctions thrown overboard, with all these traditional restraints removed, nine out of ten would-be poets, who might have been discouraged into silence by the old regimen come skipping and somersaulting blithely into print’ (‘Lunatic,’ 245). Broadus and Broadus were unwilling to invest in such ‘would-be poets.’ They produced an anthology that was entirely safe, although, like Watson and Pierce, they departed from previous anthology models by including fiction and French literature in translation. They also added a selection of influential Canadian political speeches. Yet, in fairness to Broadus and Broadus, they had little in the way of Canadian experimentation to draw on when it came to poetry and fiction. Although the ‘free-versists’ had not made a strong impact in Canada at the time, Arthur Stringer’s Open Water (1914), Wilson MacDonald’s The Song of the Prairie Land (1918), Frank Oliver Call’s Acanthus and Wild Grape (1920), and Lawren Harris’s Contrasts (1922) stood as four books of poetry that embraced formal innovation before the publication of the Broaduses’ anthology, and Raymond Knister had been publishing modernist-inspired poetry since 1922. It wouldn’t have been so risky to include Call, since, as the title of his book suggests, he was drawn both to tradition and to modernity and used the form of his book to mediate between a poetic past and present, often tending towards the former. Harris was a member of the Group of Seven, so his inclusion might

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have given the volume currency and credibility. There is a single poem by Stringer included, entitled ‘Canada to England,’ which celebrates the imperial tie: And we among the northland plains and lakes, We youthful dwellers on a younger land, Turn eastward to the wide Atlantic waste, And feel the clasp of England’s outstretched hand.

(92)

The Broaduses make no mention of Open Water in their note on Stringer, even though it had been published nine years earlier. In bypassing that work, the Broaduses participated in the general Canadian rejection of free verse in the first half of the decade, mainly because they saw in it a challenge to the idealized past connected with ‘England’s outstretched hand’ (92). Among critics, there was considerable hostility to experimentation at the time. Modernism was described as ‘the foetid breath of decadence’ aligned with the perverse ideas of Freud, whose writing ‘besmirched the minds of school-girls and boys’ (Glynn-Ward, 64). Writing in the eminently conservative Canadian Bookman in 1919, Ramsay Traquair said that ‘Ezra Pound does not care for the beat of the metronome’ and advised Pound to ‘listen to the beating of his own heart and he will find that he is a human metronome. A very slight variation in his own rhythm and he would write poetry no more’ (26). In an article entitled ‘Bolshevism in Modern Poetry’ (1925), Crawford Irving parodied an imaginary free-verse manifesto: ‘Our thoughts are too magnificent, too dynamic to be confined in rhyme and meter any longer. For over three thousand years the poets have slavishly followed the poetic laws. Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, laws that Homer followed. We, my brothers, must have freedom’ (64). The Broaduses were not interested in this kind of freedom. For them, the ‘new’ figures were Marjorie Pickthall, born in 1883, and Bernard Freeman Trotter, born in 1890 (he died in the war). Therefore, the youngest poet in Canadian Prose and Verse, Trotter, would have been thirty-three at the time of its publication, followed by Pickthall, who would have been forty (she died in 1922). The omission of E.J. Pratt is surprising given that Pratt was publishing in the Rebel (which mutated into the Canadian Forum) as early as 1918 and had several appearances in the Forum after its founding in 1920. As a contributor to the Forum, Broadus must have been familiar with Pratt’s work. But Pratt had also

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embraced modernism, and his depiction of the brutality of nature, combined with his attraction to science, might not have sat well with an editorial team that emphasized a more traditionally romantic view of the relation between people and their environment. Perhaps most surprising is the omission of the poetry of Robert Stead, one of the most popular writers to emerge from western Canada in the early twentieth century. He had published three books of poetry before 1923, most of them heavily invested in depictions of the prairies or in patriotic verse. Considering the Broaduses were from the west, it is surprising that they did not include more of Stead’s poetry, although they did select a passage from Neighbours, a novel published in 1922. While the Broaduses seemed up to date in their reading, they excluded recent poetry or fiction that challenged norms. The Broaduses created an anthology that was determined to freeze history, to promote the myth of ‘representativeness’ originally proposed by Watson and Pierce. What did this concept of ‘representative’ prose and verse really mean? It meant falling back on a canon that was beginning to emerge. It meant glorifying history and Canadian nation building. It meant promoting the myth that French and English Canadians were bound together on the national trajectory and that the rifts of the past had been healed through their now-common project called Canada. But most of all, it meant valuing a mimetic model that equated quality with the reproduction of a perceived external reality, as if the anthologist’s main task was to affirm again and again, through the selection process, the palpable presence of a stable world grounded in history. The anthology reflected that world and by doing so affirmed its status. In their preface, Broadus and Broadus refer repeatedly to this mimetic ideal. They wanted to create a book that was ‘usable’ and ‘representative,’ one that would present, ‘with its proper setting, a picture of Canadian life, past and present.’ The emphasis is on literature that is functional and proper in its ability to represent ‘life.’ But what kind of ‘life’? For the editors, it meant that ‘lyric poetry that lacks the flavor of locality, and imaginative prose that transports the reader to other scenes than Canadian, have been with a few exceptions excluded’ (vii). Explicitly, then, the editors sought material that attested to what was local, mimetic, and historic. There would be no flights of fancy here because the anthologist’s job had a practical end: to remind the reader that Canada existed and that it had a past. The conception of this past ties the editors’ values directly to the belief in empire that marked the

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war years: ‘the editors have sought to make a representative selection of Canadian poems which reflect the love of country or of empire; which relate to Canadian history; or which depict or are inspired by the Canadian landscape’ (vii). Broadus and Broadus looked for ‘patriotic verse,’ but discovered that ‘the authentic muse is coy of flag-waving’ (vii). They concluded that ‘only in our poetry of nature have we justified ourselves’ (viii) and lamented the absence in Canadian poetry of writers who would match the power of many British poets. When it came to prose, the Broaduses sought to collect material that would provide a ‘panoramic view’ of the past and the present in order to depict ‘human nature responding to and moulded by a given environment’ (viii). This kind of environmental determinism was prominent at the time and had its basis in the new concept of ‘anthropogeography’ popularized by American writers Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, both of whom argued that climate and environment were the central factors accounting for human evolution. People did not act on the world; the world acted on them. And the geography and climate of their locale determined their state of mind as well as their physical attributes. Although this kind of determinism could easily be used to justify racism and imperialism (which it was), it seemed initially to provide a framework for the discussion of what made societies unique, an approach that would linger in Canadian literature well into the twentieth century in Northrop Frye’s theories of the garrison mentality and Margaret Atwood’s concept of survival as a defining feature of Canadian writing. Those ideas were by no means new; they were based on conceptions of geography and culture that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Even though the Broaduses were interested in demonstrating the relationship between Canadians and their locales, they were not always happy with the nature of this relationship, especially if it struck them as unconvincing, unreal, not up to the mimetic standards of their British counterparts. They complained: ‘We see the fisherman of the Atlantic coast, the fisherman of the Pacific coast, the lumberman, the farmer of the prairies: we see them, but they never become quite real in the sense that Hardy’s Wessex peasantry are real or Jane Austen’s villagers are real’ (ix). Why were the Canadians depicted in the selected literature so unreal? Broadus and Broadus explained that it was because Canadian writers were not ‘sincere’ enough; however, for the writer of the future ‘who will study his people with a single-hearted devotion, who will put out of his mind the popular “tricks of the trade,” and present his

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material with utter sincerity, there is a golden opportunity’ (ix). ‘Utter sincerity’ was clearly incompatible with ‘tricks of the trade,’ which seemed to mean experimentation, however innocent, in any form. After a section devoted to fiction (significantly entitled ‘The People’), the Broaduses turned to ‘The Nation Builders’ in section 3, which is made up of excerpts of political speeches by notable Canadian politicians. Yet the obsession with geography and identity is still there, from Joseph Howe’s ‘On Railways and Colonization’ (1851), to Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s ‘A Northern Nation’ (1860), to Robert Borden’s ‘Lessons of the War’ (1916). Although it was published in 1923, the book’s most current political selection is still caught in the war, as if time stopped for Broadus and Broadus seven years before their collection appeared. Where were Arthur Meighen and Mackenzie King? Surely these prime ministers had something to offer Canadian readers in the way of inspiration, particularly because they were so intimately involved in the war or its aftermath. Their exclusion explains, in part, how the Broaduses understood Canadian history: for them, it was still located in a time when Canada was aligned with the British Empire rather than in 1923, when Canada was seeking to take its place as an independent nation. Although they came to Canada from the United States in 1908, the Broaduses remained more attached to England than they did to America and continued to look overseas for influence. This explains, in part, how they managed to bypass the beginnings of modernism in North America. Broadus and Broadus’s Canadian Prose and Verse did not move Canadian literature forward. Although change was all around them at the time they made their selections, and although a new government that promised a reformulation of Canada’s role on the international stage had been elected in 1921, the anthology they produced two years after Mackenzie King’s election was static. Centred as it was in mimesis and history, the anthology showed no interest in breaking new ground or in recognizing the challenges to nineteenth-century aesthetics embraced by American and British writers over the previous decade. It embodied no anxiety about its formal assumptions, no uneasiness with its nostalgic attention to the past, no concern about its colonial deference to the British canon. Still, it must have been successful, because Macmillan encouraged the Broaduses to undertake a revised edition, which appeared in 1934. However, its success should not be seen as any indication of the anthology’s ability to move Canadian literature in different directions or to open up possibilities for its readers.

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One might expect that anthologists following the Broaduses would explore some of these possibilities, particularly if they were given a second chance to do so. That was the situation enjoyed by John Garvin, who edited Canadian Poets, published by McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart in 1916 and revised in 1926. Broadus had complained about the hyperbolic claims made by Garvin in the first edition, with good reason. Garvin presented Bliss Carman as ‘a poet of preeminent genius’ and as an ‘Infinite Poet’ because Carman was ‘eternally seeking media for expression’ (5 [1916]). Garvin wrote that Canada possessed poets who would ‘reflect distinction on the literary genius of any civilized people’ (6). For Garvin, the ‘chief source of inspiration’ for these poets was ‘Love of Nature,’ but he also pointed to how writers concerned with ‘man’s kinship with the Infinite Life’ had ‘gained of late in number and potency, and the Great War must [have] necessarily arouse[d] a more intense interest in human and divine relationships’ (6). Garvin must have believed that an acquaintance with these poets would be of physical and spiritual benefit to his readers, since as many as thirty of his author commentaries had already been published in the Public Health Journal of Toronto. His articles in that magazine provide a glimpse of Garvin’s theosophical leanings. A year before his anthology appeared, Garvin was asked by the editor of the Journal to provide a ‘synopsis of his original and profound theories of Life and Being’ (Garvin, ‘Canadian Philosopher,’ 568). Garvin’s essay, entitled ‘A Canadian Philosopher,’ discusses eleven points that form the centre of his philosophical stance. The following three-point excerpt provides an overall sense of that stance: (a) Matter, reduced infinitely to its ultimate reduction, and thoughtenergy, are identical in substance and character. It follows from this that all Objective Appearance is but Manifestation of the Eternal, Infinite, Universal Mind, Intelligence, Thought. (b) Life, or Consciousness, is just as infinitely extended and universal as Matter and Motion. They are three phases, or a Trinity, of one and the same Manifestation. Every living entity is a finite, personal example of this Trinity. (c) Every finite intelligence is but an eternal, individualized concept, made manifest in the Universal Mind, or Consciousness, of God. Its manifestations are infinite in number, in infinite planes of matter, as it evolved through ever-lasting time. This power of manifestation is an

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expression of the Eternal Will. God develops in this way the personality of every one of His concepts. (568)

In these words, Garvin gave voice to his belief that divine inspiration lay at the heart of all intelligence. By extension, literature was also the product of ‘the Eternal, Infinite, Universal Mind,’ a connection that allowed the anthologist to imagine himself as a spokesman for God, a finite intelligence whose editorial work was a manifestation of ‘Eternal Will.’ In the revised anthology he recognizes that the war created a shift in poetic values: ‘Words regarded as especially “poetic” are now rarely used by the best poets,’ who were employing ‘simple, strong diction that the everyday man can read and understand’ (vii). Garvin seems almost willing to accept this shift, but then he backtracks to his theosophical base: these writers are ‘striving to get personality and human interest into their verse, – in other words, to give us reality, ennobled and spiritualized into permanent beauty’ (vii). Now he’s lost the original argument and begins to quote approvingly from the introduction to Alice Meynell’s anthology of selected poems by Shelley. Meynell differentiates between the ordinary poet who never reaches ‘a region of poetry on the yonder side of imagery which is transcendentally great’ and ‘the greatest’ poets, who ‘go beyond and touch realities with a miraculous touch. For if exquisite secondary poetry is magical, supreme poetry is miraculous’ (vii). Garvin comes back to earth in the concluding paragraph of his introduction, where he mentions that ‘Canadian poets are not much given to the writing of “free verse” but what they have written in this form is good’ (vii). He says that ‘Canada is making progress in poetic development’ (vii). As a result, he is able to add twenty-eight poets to the original selection and 212 new poems. One might expect Garvin to provide some selections of poets working in contemporary styles. Pratt is there (at the age of forty-four), but there are practically no selections by a number of poets who were experimenting with modernist forms. Garvin had to be aware of these poets, some of whom had been publishing for more than a decade. Stringer’s Open Water had appeared in 1914. Its preface was a rallying point for the cause of free verse and a call to free Canadian poetry from the conventions of end-rhyme. It appeared the year following Ezra Pound’s elaboration of the imagiste aesthetic in Poetry (Chicago). Stringer gave voice to the uncertainties of his age when he wrote that the poet should not be ‘shackled by the

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prosodian of the past’ because ‘his predecessors have fashioned many rhythms that are pretty, many accentual forms that are cunningly intricate, but at a time when his manner of singing has lost its vital swing it is well for man to forget these formal prettinesses and equally well to remember that poetry is not an intellectual exercise but the immortal soul of perplexed mortality seeking expression’ (17). In an issue of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, John Murray Gibbon pointed explicitly to the anthology entitled The New Poetry (1917), edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, and provided a good historical summary of the origins of free verse. Gibbon observes that the revival of free verse was ‘due to intense emotion which bursts the bonds of moribund rite and tradition’ (27). He summarizes the imagist credo and notes that the only Canadian included in the anthology is Constance Lindsay Skinner. In quoting from Skinner’s poem, Gibbon expresses his scorn for Garvin’s editorial values: ‘They are “free verse,” and to me are fine verse – even though they do not rhyme like Mr. Garvin’s galaxy of the stars’ (18). Gibbon also mentions the work of other Canadian poets working in free verse, including D.C. Scott and Marjorie Pickthall. Frank Oliver Call’s preface to Acanthus and Wild Grape (1920) also called for the rejection of poetic convention: ‘The modern poet has joined the great army of seekers after freedom, that is, he refuses to observe the old conventions in regard to his subjects and his method of treating them’ (21). Call was one of a number of poets, including Louise Morey Bowman, who were exploring modernist ideas in the Eastern Townships in Quebec. Garvin does include selections from Bowman and some of Call’s work, but all of the poems except the selections by Call are sonnets because they best display how ‘his artistry is classical in its finish’ (482). Garvin also includes some poetry by John Crichton (Norman Gregor Guthrie). Garvin considers him young (at forty-nine), and offers some advice: ‘He should lift his eyes oftener to the horizon, and to the eternal stars’ (488). Garvin himself was sixty-seven years old when this anthology was published. He might have looked towards an even younger group of poets who were the initiators of modernism in Canadian poetry, including W.W.E. Ross, R.G. Everson, Raymond Knister, and Dorothy Livesay. It is hard to imagine how such a conservative anthology could have been produced in Toronto at exactly the same time that the McGill group of poets (A.J.M. Smith, A.P.R. Coulborn, F.R. Scott, A.B. Latham, Leon Edel, and Leo Kennedy, who was a student at the University of Mon-

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treal) were making it their business to challenge everything editors such as Garvin and the Broaduses stood for. Patricia Morley puts their objections into perspective when she says that ‘Leon Edel recalls the group’s delight “in needling the stuffed shirts, the Victorians.” Smith contrasts the vagueness and verbosity he sees in “most poetry of the Victorian period” with the simplicity and sincerity of his ideal moderns. Actually, one would look far to find a greater simplicity and sincerity than in many of the sonnets written by Lampman and Roberts in the nineteenth century. But the Young Turks judged by what they saw in anthologies such as J.W. Garvin’s Canadian Poets and Poetry [sic] (1916), in its 1926 revised edition. A look into some of Garvin’s bathetic selections quickly moves one into the Young Turks’ camp. At least temporarily’ (70). Although the forces against ‘the Victorians’ were organizing themselves in Montreal, it seems unlikely that an editor such as Garvin would have been aware of their complaints. After all, they were publishing in the McGill Fortnightly Review, established in 1925. The most influential member of the group – Smith – was only twenty-three years old. Despite the quality of the material that appeared in the Fortnightly’s pages over the next two years, it remained a student publication that had little circulation or currency outside the university community. It would take years until the group’s calls for change were heard by a wider audience. Yet, it was clear that by the mid-1920s the values that informed the anthologies prepared by Watson and Pierce, Broadus and Broadus, and Garvin had come under serious attack. How long could editors continue to assemble anthologies that studiously ignored these concerns? For quite some time, it appears. Publishers and editors continued to produce anthologies of Canadian poetry that were both out of step and in step with their times. They were out of step in the sense that they exhibited very little awareness of the changes taking place in American and British poetry during the 1920s, and in step in the sense that they continued to reflect the all-embracing conservatism that defined Canadian poetry during this period. One looks in vain through the poetry anthologies of the 1920s to find an editor who was willing to break out of the mould, and the more one looks, the more it becomes apparent that even the most successful anthologists made their name by reproducing, rather than challenging, existing values. Garvin himself had conceived the uber-canonical Master-Works of Canadian Authors series, which was aimed at the luxury market; individual volumes could be purchased with Morocco leather binding. The money was in the status quo.

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The publishers involved in the production and marketing of anthologies in the post-war years – Macmillan had published Broadus and Broadus; McClelland and Stewart stood behind Garvin’s anthology – were soon joined by J.M. Dent, the British firm that produced the Everyman’s Library series, which made classic works available in cheap editions. Dent was founded by Joseph Malaby Dent in 1888. By the 1920s, the company had set up offices in several foreign markets, including Canada. Dent established itself in Toronto in 1913. Dent’s involvement with Canadian literature became profitable through the efforts of A.M. Stephen, who published a number of his own books of poetry with Dent and also edited two successful anthologies: The Voice of Canada: Canadian Prose and Poetry for Schools (1926) and The Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse (1928). Alexander Maitland Stephen grew up in Ontario but went west as a young man. Before turning to literature, he pursued various occupations including cattle ranching, logging, and mining. After serving overseas in the war, he settled in Vancouver and took up a position teaching at the Vancouver School, but he was eventually fired because of his anti-conservative views and his support for educational and social reform, especially in his capacity as president of the Child Welfare Association of British Columbia. Stephen’s career took off after he left the school. He got involved in founding and supporting various cultural organizations, including the BC Art League, the Little Theatre, and the Vancouver Poetry Society. He was a well-known reader of poetry on the radio. He was also a member of the Society of Authors, the Canadian Authors Association, the League of Western Writers, the Julian Lodge of the Theosophy Society, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the League against War and Fascism, and the Canadian League for Peace and Democracy. This was a busy man. All of his activity attracted the attention of the Associated Canadian Clubs, which sent Stephen on a countrywide tour to lecture on Canadian literature. One of the founding members of that association was Henry Marshall Tory, the University of Alberta president who had hired E.K. Broadus in 1908. Tory was an ardent Canadian nationalist, a prominent advocate of Canadian citizenship, and a relentless supporter of educational training for young Canadians. His involvement with both Broadus and Stephen suggests that, as editors and educators, they shared his nationalist perspective and, in particular, his commitment to western Canadian culture. But it was Stephen, much more than Broadus, who took the message on the road, lecturing to audiences

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throughout the country about the value of supporting Canadian literature and bringing it into the classroom. Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of British Columbia Library preserves the scrapbook of newspaper clippings kept by Stephen’s wife, Irene. Those clippings attest to Stephen’s messianic devotion to his subject in dozens of lectures throughout the country, regardless of the size or make-up or location of his audience. He was on a mission. He argued in speech after speech that the study of Canadian literature should be compulsory. Newspapers around the country gave his tour detailed coverage, quoting his arguments for the advancement of Canadian literature in the schools. ‘Canada’s poet of the new age’ was described as a Christlike figure whose oratorical skills mesmerized his audiences: ‘Those who have seen this Canadian poet will not easily forget the slim, lithe figure and the grey-blue eyes which hold the hint of tragedy and sorrow in them but are, nevertheless, lighted by unflinching courage and great tenderness. But most of all they will remember his voice – the voice of a Forbes Robertson or a Martin Harvey. Of it someone on the staff of the Victoria Times once wrote, after hearing Stephen reading in public, “His voice has a rich, deep tone, flexible and sympathetic, which imparts to his work the essential qualities of an interpretive reader of outstanding genius”’ (Nasmith). Stephen’s enthusiasm was evangelical, as was Lorne Pierce’s. Both men believed that a familiarity with Canadian literature would provide a sound foundation for citizenship and that without such familiarity a distinct Canadian identity could never evolve. Their cultural nationalism was simply a post-war expression of the sentiments expressed by Edward Hartley Dewart in 1864 and by William Douw Lighthall in 1889: literature and citizenship were inseparable. As Rhodenizer put it in 1930, ‘national consciousness is a great stimulus to the creation of literature. Great literature is produced in periods when peoples are profoundly moved, and for such creative activity due to public emotion there has been no more fruitful source than national sentiment aroused by concentration on a national cause’ (265–6). In addition to his reputation as a public speaker, Stephen was known as an accomplished novelist and poet. Writing in the Canadian Bookman in 1929, Lionel Stevenson said that ‘within the past five or six years several Canadian writers of distinction have gone through the process of gaining the public attention and establishing themselves as permanent contributors to the nation’s literature, but none has advanced more rapidly, or shown a greater versatility of talent, than Alexander

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M. Stephen, of Vancouver’ (203). Stephen’s poetry was conservative, although in Brown Earth and Bunch Grass (1931) he turned towards free verse and a much more colloquial idiom. In the foreword to his novel, Verendrye (1935), he argued that ‘the rhythm of life peculiar to … the elemental vastness and beauty of our wide open spaces in Canada and the United States will often find its most fitting expression … in organic rhythms and the freedom of irregular verse’ (viii). He was aware of new trends in poetry and knew the Canadian practitioners (he praised Stringer’s ‘splendid introduction’ to Open Water). However, he was not primarily interested in formal innovation because he believed ‘content is that which determines the quality of a work of art. Form is incidental and will be in accordance with the character of the spiritual impulse behind the expression’ (Nasmith). Stephen’s two anthologies were adopted by the school boards in British Columbia. Perhaps school officials had been persuaded by Stephen’s arguments about the importance of bringing Canadian literature into the schools. The Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse sold close to 12,000 copies and went into multiple printings. Unlike the anthologies edited by Broadus and Garvin, Stephen’s books seemed made for class adoption. The Voice of Canada’s subtitle indicated explicitly that the selection had been made ‘for schools.’ In the spirit of Dent’s Everyman’s Library series, both anthologies were compact and elegantly designed, with woodcuts by Ernest Wallcousins, a well-known illustrator and painter. The preface to Voice of Canada expresses the same position that Stephen took in his many lectures: ‘The real builders of our Canadian Commonwealth are its writers and artists. Canadians, hitherto, have been so slightly acquainted with the achievements of those who have given them a national literature that native-born writers have been forced to find a market and a public abroad. This has been a most serious loss to our spiritual life. One generation of children taught to appreciate the work of their own authors will remedy this unfortunate state of affairs’ (v). Stephen is quite clear about his objectives: ‘This book is also designed to develop in Canadian children a patriotism based upon noble ideals of life and conduct and upon a just appreciation of beauty and truth’ (v). Stephen’s preface is followed by a short essay entitled ‘Literature in the Classroom,’ in which he argues that effective teaching of literature cannot take place without the enthusiasm of the instructor and ‘an extensive knowledge of the best in English prose and poetry, including the work being at present produced in England and on this continent’

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(vii). The anthology is divided into seven sections devoted to poetry, one to prose, and one to the speeches of ‘statesmen and orators.’ There are some very brief notes on the poems at the end of the volume, followed by one-sentence biographies of the writers. Stephen’s selections tend to reinforce the Canadian poetic canon that was emerging in the early twentieth century. The ‘Love of Country’ section opens with ‘O Canada’ and is followed by selections by Lighthall, Carman, Pickthall, Machar, and Stephen himself. But of those celebrating the country, no one was particularly young and none of the selections reflected ‘the work being at present produced in England and on this continent’ (vii). Next to Pickthall, who had died in 1922, the youngest writer in this section was Stephen himself, at forty-four years of age. The same pattern is repeated in the other sections of the anthology. Youth is nowhere to be found. I don’t think this means that Stephen was unaware of the shifts taking place in poetry. But his selections indicate that when it came to teaching students about Canadian literature and Canada, the established route was the preferred one to follow. The prose section embodies the same values. The youngest writer here is Laura Goodman Salverson at thirty-six years of age. With her, Stephen takes a chance. But where are Leacock, Ralph Connor, Grove, Knister, Martha Ostenso, or Stead? Stephen lists Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) as a title recommended for school libraries, but doesn’t seem to think it serious enough to excerpt in his anthologies. The omission of Grove, Ostenso, Knister, and Stead speaks to his resistance to new forms of literary realism. The most current political selection in the anthology is an address by Sir Lomer Gouin delivered in 1918, eight years before the book’s publication (Gouin is described in the table of contents as ‘still living,’ as if the editor had some reservations about whether his inclusion was appropriate). Stephen was a conservative nationalist critic who proved Lionel Stevenson correct in his 1926 assessment of the poetic taste in Canada: ‘It is improbable that any sudden shift will occur in the proportion of natural and artificial elements in Canadian life. So one may venture to predict that, for some time to come, Canadian literature will provide a refreshing haven of genuine romanticism to which the reader may retreat when he seeks an antidote to the intellectual tension imposed by the future progeny of “The Wasteland” [sic] and “Spoon River”’ (62). Golden Treasury bears out Stevenson’s prediction. Stephen’s introduction mentions the Imperial Conference that took place in 1926,

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which led to the Balfour Declaration, a document that recognized the autonomy of Canada and other dominions within the British Empire. As Stephen says, ‘we now stand possessors of the rights and responsibilities of nationhood under the flag which is the symbol of our race’ (vii). He then puts forward the identical Romantic nationalist argument voiced by Edward Hartley Dewart in 1864: ‘the soul of a country is embodied in its literature’ and ‘if it be true that Canadians are not familiar with the work of the writers who have given to them a national soul and spirit, then it is our immediate duty to correct this defect in our development’ (vii). Echoing Garvin’s hyperbolic claims, Stephen argues that Canada ‘has produced poets worthy to rank with those who are the glory of Britain’ (viii). Carman is right at the front of this list, and of course there is Charles G.D. Roberts, whose work could not be adequately represented because ‘the copyright of much of his finest work is owned by American publishers, who can only grant permission for its use under conditions that are too onerous for such a book as this’ (viii–ix). In other words, those American publishers wanted too much in the way of permissions fees. Here we see a concrete example of the way in which material conditions begin to affect the articulation and formation of a national literature. Prior to the Canadian Copyright Act of 1924, Canadian authors had little in the way of copyright protection. That act protected copyright for fifty years after the death of the author and provided copyright for Canadians in foreign countries. Some of the material in Stephen’s anthology – including the poetry by Roberts – would not have been covered by this new law. However, the issue of copyright protection is only one aspect of the question of permissions in general, for even if an author or publisher is willing to grant rights, it often comes down to money. As Canadian authors gained the right to manage and protect their works, they also became aware of the value of those works to the commercial market. And as the cost of securing the rights to those works rose, anthologists had to begin to make hard decisions about what they could actually afford. Therefore, what was ‘representative’ Canadian prose or poetry in an anthology started to become what was affordable. The more permissions fees increased, the more literary protectionism began to colour the kinds of selections that anthologists were able to make. They might start out with an ideal compilation, which would eventually be modified in relation to budgetary considerations. The presentation of a national literature would always be compromised by the extent to which certain material – whether it be written by Charles

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G.D. Roberts or any other author – was included or excluded from the anthology as a result of financial concerns. Despite the ways in which permissions fees hampered Stephen’s ability to include various poems or stories, his anthologies appeared during extraordinarily productive economic times that made the purchase of such books inviting. In An Outline of Canadian Literature, published in the same year as Stephen’s Voice of Canada (1927), Lorne Pierce remarked that in the post-war period, ‘book sales reached a height never before obtained. Easy money prompted many to fit up libraries in their homes. Everything patriotic sold. Publishers and authors did well’ (13). In such a hospitable economic environment, Stephen had the opportunity to shift the discourse of Canadian literature in a new direction. But in many ways he remained a turn-of-the-century anthologist who reinforced traditional values. In his Handbook of Canadian Literature (1930), V.B. Rhodenizer looked back on the past decade and described Stephen as ‘primarily a mystical poet with a message for mankind. He is a dreamer of dreams in which his deep and fervent imagination attains to cosmic vision, to the realization of “One Sublime Reality” that embraces all finite realities’ (240). In these words, Rhodenizer identified the theosophist principles behind Stephen’s writing, the same principles that encouraged him to shy away from recent fiction and from poetry that resisted mysticism, the natural world, and notions of cosmic reality. It is hard to believe that Stephen’s anthology, which opens with R. Stanley Weir’s ‘O Canada,’ was published a year after A.J.M. Smith’s imagistic ‘The Lonely Land.’ Stephen was still looking to nature as a source of harmony and transcendence. Meanwhile, Smith was introducing the entirely new paradigm that disharmony in the natural world was a potent source of beauty. In his essay entitled ‘Contemporary Poetry’ (1926), Smith drew attention to the increasing impact of science and technology on literature: ‘The whole movement, indeed, is a movement away from an erroneous but comfortable stability, towards a more truthful and sincere but certainly less comfortable state of flux’ (27). He argues that ‘poetry must be the result of the impingement of modern conditions upon the personality and temperament of the poet’ (28) and that the contemporary poet must deal ‘in the language of present-day speech with subjects of living interest’ (29). Smith felt that Stephen’s Golden Treasury was ‘mainly maple fudge, while the explanatory notes are on an appropriately puerile level’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 458).

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Although the full impact of Smith’s influence as a poet, critic, and anthologist was delayed by the Depression, there are important links between his early work and that of Raymond Knister, whose anthology, Canadian Short Stories, appeared in 1928. It represents a dramatic departure from Stephen’s approach to anthologizing Canadian fiction. Most anthologists prior to Knister seemed to believe either that fiction was secondary to poetry and could not really be seen as an authentic form of national self-expression or that great fiction was too difficult to achieve in a young country, so it was best to focus on poetry. This was the view advanced by Lionel Stevenson in his critical study entitled Appraisals of Canadian Literature (1926). Stevenson argued that ‘the writers of prose have almost without exception … been content with the superficial distinctiveness which Canadian settings and events provide. Accordingly, their work is negligible so far as the first half of this book is concerned, and bulks so largely in the other half only because they have hitherto monopolized the field, and must therefore be acknowledged until something better presents itself. There will be no great Canadian prose until the primitive narrative and descriptive types now prevalent can become imbued with the thought and feeling and imagination still confined to poetry. Prose is a complex art which comes to perfection late in the intellectual development of a civilization, and the complexity has not yet been mastered by many Canadians’ (xii). Knister took just the opposite approach. By editing the first Canadian anthology devoted exclusively to short fiction, he was making the bold statement that such fiction was valuable and that it could stand on its own. He was also validating the genre of the short story as a viable form in its own right, a departure from the prevailing tendency to include excerpts from longer works in anthologies, if and when prose representation was desired. By doing so, he signalled that his critical and aesthetic values had more to do with contemporary American realism and naturalism than they did with Stevenson’s idea of fiction as the home of ‘thought and feeling and imagination’ (Appraisals, xii). Through his editorial selections, Knister turned Canadian fiction towards modernism and encouraged Canadian writers to look outside Canada for sources of influence. It was in this sense that he shared A.J.M. Smith’s values, and it is no surprise to discover that they collaborated more often than is usually thought. Although Smith is often credited with being the first to support modernist principles in Canada in the mid-1920s, those principles were introduced by earlier writers. Yet, in his involvement with the McGill group, and through his essays and poems in the Fortnightly Review,

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Smith emerged as the most prominent spokesman for modernist poetry at a time when the country’s most influential critics – many of them associated with the Canadian Authors Association – were still painting the native maple, to use F.R. Scott’s phrase. Smith was aware of Knister’s poetry and short fiction (both had been published in Poetry). Knister came close to publishing his own book of imagist poems in 1926 when Lorne Pierce suggested Ryerson as a venue. But when Pierce decided that Knister should subsidize the printing costs, the project fell apart (Givens, 8). In 1927, Smith contacted Knister and proposed that they establish a journal devoted to modern Canadian writing, to ‘do for the country as you say, what the Group of Seven had done in its sphere’ (qtd. in Burke, 102). Knister had been contributing columns about contemporary poetry to New Outlook. Through their correspondence, Knister and Smith created links between modernist authors in Toronto and Montreal. As Anne Burke explains, Knister showed Smith’s letter to E.J. Pratt and Morley Callaghan in Toronto. (Knister was a member of the Canadian Authors’ Association and attended meetings in Toronto in order to make contact with other writers.) [Merrill] Denison was to pay a visit to Smith in Montreal. Knister invited Smith to Toronto. When Knister went to Montreal he met with Leo Kennedy, A.J.M. Smith, Frank Scott and went to McGill to meet Stephen Leacock. With dim prospects for their book publishing, self-publication seemed all the more important. Smith suggested that the journal be named ‘Revision’ in view of the need for higher literary standards in criticism (and, perhaps as a reflection of his own creative process of inveterate revising). (104)

Smith was also mulling over the idea of preparing his own anthology of Canadian poetry, and Knister was interested in becoming involved. In 1928 he wrote to Smith, saying, ‘Your scheme of an anthology of Canadian poetry is a good one. I had considered such a thing, but given up the idea of doing it alone; but if you would like to do it, there’s no one I’d rather be associated with it, and I think it is a case in which two editors would be better than one. My idea would be a small collection of pure poetry, old and new, a decided contrast with Garvin’s and other anthologies’ (qtd. in Burke, 106–7). Knister was clearly aware of the lineage of Canadian literary anthologies and was committed to doing something different. He convinced Hugh Eayrs at Macmillan that the time was right for a collection that focused exclusively on short stories. Watson and Pierce, and Stephen, had included fiction in their anthologies, but they had very little to say

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about the value of fiction itself. In his introduction to the prose section of Our Canadian Literature, for example, Pierce never really discusses the nature of fiction at all. He is mainly concerned with arriving at some vague definition of ‘this essential spirit of Canadian literature’ and in asking, ‘How may we hope to define it?’ (129). He wonders whether that definition is the product of Canadians’ ‘love of’ their ‘native heritage,’ or ‘the spirit of fraternity,’ or ‘reverence for the religious and political traditions of our race’ (129). Pierce gets swept away by his own passion and ends up lauding Canadian prose in terms of ‘the triumphant joyousness of its throbbing, expanding, up-soaring life and thought’ (129). There is little regard for realism here. Stephen’s Voice of Canada includes 30 pages of prose in a 142-page book, a good indication of its marginal status in the editor’s eyes. And in his introduction to the volume, he advises teachers about the merits of teaching poetry, but never says a word about the benefits of teaching prose. What is clear in looking at Knister’s predecessors is just how unfamiliar they felt with the forms of fiction, and how, despite including prose, they could think of fiction only in aesthetic terms usually applied to poetry. Perhaps this is why Pierce had arranged a position for Knister at Ryerson Press. But Knister died before he was able to take up the post. Knister was able to break out of the conventional perspective because he understood the changes that were taking place in American fiction and because he had read widely in European fiction as well. In addition, he was involved with John Frederick’s the Midland, a magazine that valued realistic fiction. As early as 1922, when he was twenty-three years old, Knister had published an essay on Canadian Book Week in which he commented on the state of Canadian fiction: ‘There are plenty of out-and-out detective and Wild West yarns, but in the supposedly more serious stories, which describe phases of life in various sections of every province of the Dominion and sometimes with considerable faithfulness, there is often an element of unreality due to the introduction of elements which as they are treated give the “lie” to the whole picture … Probably as time goes on a greater portion of the public will become interested in pictures of their life more or less as it really is’ (3). In another article entitled ‘The Canadian Short Story’ in the Canadian Bookman in 1923, he asked, ‘What, approximately, is the matter with the Canadian short story?’ (203). His answer was that in attempting to survive in the cut-throat world of magazine publication, the shortstory writer had to please editors who promoted commercial fiction

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that was safe and predictable, the kind of fiction that could easily be taught by correspondence courses. Those editors ‘did not know a short story from a bill of lading’ (204). Knister insisted that the true writer had to be schooled in life, and to read the masters. Yet in his view, no Canadian writers publishing in magazines had risen to the challenge: ‘I have never yet seen a good story by a Canadian author in a Canadian magazine’ (204). By the time his anthology appeared in 1928, Knister had obviously changed his views, for the acknowledgments reveal that he selected stories from a number of magazines, including Harper’s Magazine, Maclean’s, and the Midland. The introduction to his anthology begins with the recognition of a shifting literary landscape: ‘At the outset of a new era there is opportunity to look back upon the old; and in nothing have we more clearly passed an epoch than in the short story, here in Canada. Literature as a whole is changing, new fields are being broken, new crops are being raised in them, and the changes apparent in other countries show counterparts in our development’ (xi). Knister’s language – his very use of the term ‘short story’ – marks a significant departure. He understands that he is dealing with a distinct genre – not simply ‘prose’ – that has international roots. He argues that the development of the Canadian short story has been hampered by the desire of authors to please the masses, ‘with their appeals to mob feeling and vulgar interests’ (xiii). Serious fiction writers, however, understand that ‘realism is only a means to an end’ and that ‘in passing beyond realism, even while they employ it, the significant writers of our time are achieving a portion of evolution’ (xiv). If ‘most tale-spinners did not even achieve realism,’ it was because they were ‘willing to forego their possibilities in the interest of material rewards bestowed as a result of such a course in other countries’ (xiv). Meanwhile, Canadian editors did little to change these standards: ‘Magazines were being run with the avowed intention of discovering native talent; instead of which they were encouraging, in the main, third-rate imitators of thirdrate foreign models’ (xviii). Knister takes aim at writers who would sell out the short-story form to earn money, even as he understands the challenges facing those who try to survive through publishing. All the same, he encourages Canadian short-story writers to avoid historic cliché and archetype and to render their subject matter with an honesty and directness because ‘many thousands of Canadians are learning to see their own daily life, and to demand its presentment with a degree of realism’ (xviii). State-

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ments such as this are pivotal. Knister is validating Canadian experience as Canadian experience and focusing his readers’ attention on the value of mimesis without any apology. In his introduction to the anthology, and through his selections, Knister recognizes the relation between form and ideology. Editorially, he was authorizing a new form that challenged conventional concepts of what the short story could legitimately focus on; that challenge was posed through innovations in language, subject matter, and plot. Knister understood that he was deliberately moving away from what Gerald Lynch calls the ‘almost exclusively romantic’ (1043) mode that characterized Canadian short stories and sketches of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and engaging in an act of political resistance by supporting what W.H. New describes as a subversive, cultural-ideological stance identified with the short-story genre itself (Dreams, 180). However, while Knister saw realism as a form of resistance, he was reluctant to include material that was explicitly concerned with social and political protest. The shift this anthology marks in the approach to fiction can be seen in the tone and subject matter of the stories Knister selects. Morley Callaghan’s ‘Last Spring They Came Over’ immediately introduces us to Alfred Bowles, a character ‘with clear blue eyes and heavy pimples on the lower part of his face’ (3). Merrill Denison’s ‘The Weather Breeder’ displays crisp, unadorned descriptions of a farm that was ‘mosquitoinfested low-land; in summer something like a gigantic fireless cooker with its surrounding hills of rock, burnt bare by succeeding fires’ (16). Will E. Ingersoll’s ‘The Man Who Slept Till Noon’ opens with a deliberately quotidian scene: ‘Dave Duncan broke his egg over his potatoes, mixed the two constituents in his dish into a kind of paste with the blade of a table-knife, and took a generous mouthful – off the knife-blade’ (67). Thomas Murtha’s ‘Susie and Perce’ also begins with a daily scene: Susie lights the gas plate under a kettle (‘the tube carrying the gas was arched up the wall to a socket’ [145]). Like Murtha, Knister is interested in mechanical details, in the way technology intersects with daily life. But at the same time, he selects stories about characters who are believable in their imperfection: ‘Susie’s nose was not too long, nor did her chin recede, like Perce’s. She had no buck-teeth like he had’ (145). At the back of his anthology, Knister includes a ‘List of Canadian Short Stories in Books and Magazines.’ He includes 280 stories by 112 writers who had published their work in books and magazines and 47 authors who had authored 91 collections under their own names. Knister places an asterisk next to those titles which for him ‘had unusual interest or

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merit, in many cases a value comparable to that of the stories reprinted in the anthology’ (329). Although Knister does not provide publication dates for all of the asterisked items, he does for the majority of them. The average publication date for those 68 items is 1920, and for many of them the publication date is 1926 or 1927. The anthology itself contains 17 stories, and the average age of the authors is forty-eight, with a number of them (Murtha, Callaghan, and Leslie McFarlane) in their twenties. Clearly Knister was attracted to very recent fiction and was drawing his readers’ attention to material that was published just a year or two prior to his collection. In contrast, Stephen’s selection of prose, like Watson and Pierce’s, was much more oriented towards the past, with a number of selections from the nineteenth century. Even so, Callaghan objected to some of Knister’s selections because there were, in his view, too many oldsters in the anthology, including D.C. Scott, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Gilbert Parker. In a letter he sent to Knister the year the anthology was published, Callaghan wrote, ‘Today I got a copy of the Canadian stories. I read the Introduction and then I read D.C. Scott’s story in the book. What is the matter with you? Though it will come as a relief to many schoolmarms throughout the country to learn that the venerable Duncan is a great writer, since they have always suspected it, you know better. Then why do you do it? Are you thinking of retiring definitely? You had a chance to point the way in that introduction, and you merely arrived at the old values that have been accepted here for the past fifty years; id est, Duncan C. Scott, G.D. Roberts and Gilbert Parker are great prose writers’ (qtd. in Lynch and Robbeson, 76). Callaghan misunderstood Knister’s intentions. He was drawn to Roberts’s animal stories and saw them as experiments in a new form, not to mention Roberts’s own work having appeared under the Macmillan imprint; it would have been politically difficult for Knister to leave him out. Knister included ‘A Gentleman in Feathers,’ an animal story by Roberts that turned the traditional relation between animals and humans upside down. In Knister’s view, it was the reformulation of this relation that made Roberts a modern innovator who achieved ‘a poetry of the real’: ‘In the literature of older lands, animals were regarded as domestic servants, even as comrades, or simply as quarry. It remained for Canadian writers to visualize wild beasts as individuals, motivated by sense appeals and reasoning intelligence; and the result has been not a new form, but a hybrid of subject-matter. The freshened point of view made possible by the use of animals (or household furniture, if you will) as character was in the main neglected, and

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reactions were shown in fixed patterns dictated by sentiment or moral prejudice. And this when the freedom should have permitted a naturalistic acceptance and a poetry of the real, or a phantastic humorous or satirical expression’ (xvii). By the same token, he dedicated the anthology to D.C. Scott because Scott’s collection of stories In the Village of Viger represented ‘a perfect flowering of art’ which ‘stands out after thirty years as the most satisfying individual contribution to the Canadian short story’ (xix). Scott’s story in Knister’s anthology – ‘Labrie’s Wife’ – reflects his interest in Native culture. As Stan Dragland notes, it is one of the first examples in Canada of a story that is ‘a telling critique of Eurocentrism’ (152). It also marked a departure through its use of psychological realism and its focus on distinct locales. As Michelle Gadpaille observes in her history of the Canadian short story, ‘Scott moved towards what has been called the “great modern subject,” the disintegration of the human personality and consciousness,’ by ‘presenting character as dynamic rather than static, as something shaped by social, temporal, and geographical realities’ (15). In looking back to writers such as Parker, Roberts, and Scott, while at the same time including new figures such as Callaghan, Murtha, and McFarlane, Knister began to map out a line of influence. He began to invent a short-story tradition in the modern vein. It is this kind of invention and the risk taking it involves (witness Callaghan’s reaction) that begin to turn a national literature in a new direction. To borrow Pound’s expression, Knister really was ‘making it new.’ Although Knister’s anthology was followed a decade later by May Lamberton Becker’s Golden Tales of Canada (1938), the latter is a throwback to a much earlier age rather than a step forward. The youngest writer it included was John Beames, born in 1889. The parallel emergence of modernist poetry and realistic fiction in the mid-1920s had reached a focal point by the end of the decade. Knister’s anthology appeared in 1929. Smith had already published his polemical essay entitled ‘Contemporary Poetry’ in 1926, which was followed by the well-known ‘Wanted: Canadian Criticism’ in 1928. The same year, Leo Kennedy published ‘The Future of Canadian Literature’ in the Canadian Mercury. In his 1926 essay, Smith mentions the experimentation aligned with post-Impressionism, cubism, and Vorticism and argues that many writers were ‘deeply disturbed by the civilization of a machine-made age’ (28). Those who sought to find ‘a new and more direct expression, to perfect a finer technique’ (28) in response to the

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times were involved in what Smith called the ‘New Poetry,’ which was more than a rejection of traditional rhyme schemes, or tired diction, or the ‘rhetorical excesses’ associated with Victorian poetry; it meant creating works that ‘spoke to people in their own language’ (28–9) and that used ‘present-day speech’ to depict ‘subjects of living interest’ (29). Knister was promoting similar values when it came to fiction. Anyone who reads Smith’s work will know that he did not always achieve these objectives; much of his poetry is obscure and clotted with language that reveals his attachment to the metaphysical poets, the British aesthetes, and several practitioners of modernism who did not always speak to people in their own language. Smith understood this. In the 1926 essay he argued that if something sounded new, it could be beautiful, even if it did not make sense (‘what you say is less important than how you say it’ [30]). Whether the poet was attracted to the metaphysical or the moderns was secondary to the ‘preoccupation with form’ (30). In ‘Wanted: Canadian Criticism’ (1928), Smith continued his attack on the ‘mixture of blind optimism and materialistic patriotism’ (31) that had subdued artistic expression. A young country preoccupied with its material advancement held little regard for the ‘necessity of artists’ (31). Smith says that although ‘literature as an art has fought a losing battle with commerce … reinforcements are on the way’ (32). Significantly, he sees those reinforcements as fiction writers and poets united in a common aim: to create work ‘that is at once successful and obscene’ (33). Such writing would use realistic methods to resist a pervading puritanism. But despite the presence of these soldier writers, they are still members of a ‘leaderless army’ (32). The ‘critic-militant’ would have to become that leader; meanwhile, the ‘critic contemplative’ would examine ‘the fundamental position of the artist in a new community’ (33). Smith and Knister are aligned – as poets, as critics, and as editors. Their work legitimized a new set of questions that could be particularly useful to Canadian anthologists: To what extent was a writer working in new forms? How did the poetry or fiction deal with ‘subjects of living interest’ in the modern world? Was it a product of its times? Where was a work set and to what extent was the setting appropriate? How was the natural world treated? What were the regional and local qualities of a work that made it unique? How much was the critic or anthologist responsible to a perceived literary tradition or canon? Could the value of an anthology be judged by the extent to which it sought to redefine or reject tradition and canon?

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Such questions would inevitably prove both frustrating and motivating for future anthologists of Canadian literature, but the interrogative impact was down the road. History made the delay inevitable. Knister’s anthology came out just in time for the Depression. Smith’s articles, even if they had appeared in such prominent journals as the Canadian Forum, were still the product of a young man who was relatively unknown; it would take years for people to focus on his ideas, which had emerged at the historic moment that publishing was coming to a standstill. As Roy MacSkimming says, ‘The Depression and the Second World War cast Canadian publishing into a state of suspended animation … McClelland and Stewart, after issuing twenty-nine Canadian titles in 1929, reduced its output to an average of seven a year during the Depression’ (30–1). Publishers cut back on Canadian titles. Some went bankrupt, like Graphic Publishers in Ottawa and Louis Carrier in Montreal. Some merged in order to avoid the same fate. Even ten years later, in 1939, Hugh Eayrs at Macmillan received more than two thousand manuscripts but published only thirty-six titles. Given the economic downturn, publishers had to be very careful about the kinds of books they published; anthologies of Canadian literature were no exception. The first Depression-era anthology was Nathaniel Benson’s Modern Canadian Poetry, published in 1930. Benson’s introduction to the book is dated 27 March 1930, yet the editor gives no indication that he is inhabiting an altered landscape. Before the Depression, Canada had the fastest growing economy in the world. But by June 1929, Canada was reeling from multiple economic disasters: the price of wheat had collapsed, destroying the livelihood of prairie farmers; manufacturing in central Canada came to a standstill and thousands lost their jobs; industrial production was cut in half. By July 1930, Mackenzie King’s Liberals had been defeated by R.B. Bennett’s Conservatives. Bennett had campaigned on a platform devoted almost exclusively to dealing with the effects of the Depression. Canada was a changed place. However, Benson adopts a stance that reveals the full extent to which an editor can blissfully ignore his times and still get published. A.J.M. Smith argued that Benson’s anthology was ‘corrupted by gentility’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 459). In his introduction, Benson says that he doesn’t want to ‘woo fame by virtue of an illustrious introduction’ (10). His anthology ‘might conceivably be the first utterance of a new Romantic Movement in Canadian Literature’ and therefore ‘must, like Cyrano de Bergerac, “have all its elegances within”’ because he wants to ‘Make Truth ring bravely out like clashing spurs’ (10). Benson is clear about his aims and strategies:

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This book is not intended in any way to be another anthology of Canadian poetry, of which one good and a myriad of mediocre specimens exist. Its aim is diametrically opposed to that of a gentleman who has recently collected the work of five hundred and sixty-three ‘poets’ and intends to issue them in a Gargantuan tome. Two other attractive features of this anthology might be pointed out to reviewers and readers without the necessity of their having to peruse the entire volume: (1) the majority of the poems that follow are short, and (2) there are no examples of wildly ‘modern’ free verse to be found lurching through these pages. Thus the brevity of each poet gives all a chance for self-expression, and this quality will also please a lady of my acquaintance who, like a thousand other sufferers, refuses to read long poems because of the eye-strain which they impose for so little reward. (10)

The formula for Benson’s new Romantic Movement is simple: keep it short and keep it sweet and please the ladies. He assured his readers that ‘of bizarre and grotesque affectations and practice of the ultramodern “isms,” a present-day mask and mockery worn by pseudo-poetry, there is no trace’ (14). He dismissed the ‘fiercely modern, distinctly American type of free verse, so often dignified by algebra, printer’s pie, and paresis’ (11). To those who might object to his claims that he was collecting ‘modern’ Canadian poetry (as his title indicates), he answers that ‘all of the twenty poets included here are still writing, that only two of them are over thirty years of age, and that they at present reside from Halifax to Nanaimo’ (11). He adds that ‘a curious geographical fact is that ten of the twenty reside in Toronto, one of the most unromantic and self-consciously cultural places on earth … Verily, there shall be light in dark spaces and sweetness in a particularly desert air’ (1). Benson’s anthology offers a kind of protection to these young modern poets because ‘they are invariably safer en masse than in individual presentation’ (12). This is because ‘the young poet has been the unprotesting prey of the brilliant or academic critic … he is a figure doomed in this raucous and prosperous age to column-bottoms which the space-writers have lacked the stamina to fill, to the corners of the latter pages of literary reviews, or to the ignominy of companionship with the diurnal droolings of columnists’ (12). Benson wrote these words and celebrated this ‘prosperous age’ four months after the October 1929 stock market crash. By March, 1930, it was clear that Canada would be dragged into the Great Depression, despite the buoyant optimism that characterized the previous year. Benson seemed oblivious to the changes taking place around him. But he was not really alone in this

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regard. The most popular songs in 1930 were ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ and ‘Putting on the Ritz.’ Benson’s literary landscape belonged in another age, an imaginary age untouched by any sense of shift in poetic sensibility. While A.J.M. Smith was writing his polemical essays and publishing the sparse and haunting ‘The Lonely Land,’ Benson was anthologizing poems like ‘Requiem for a Dead Warrior’ by Edgar McInnis: Sleep on, brave heart, thy broken sword beside thee! The last red breach is stormed, the last foe slain.

(18)

He included ‘Cradle Song’ by Norman Hainsworth: Ten o’clock, Ten o’clock, Rocking and weeping: Ten o’clock, Ten o’clock – Time I were sleeping.

(45)

And ‘The Tapping,’ by Joseph Easton McDougall: ‘Who’s there?’ cried the woman, And she ran to the door. But only a leaf Stirred on the floor.

(85)

Benson also included a selection of his own poems in the anthology, which must mean that he considered himself a modern, like the other poets in his collection. The closing poem is entitled ‘Canada.’ Here are the first two stanzas: I have seen her in the quiet of the evening in the fields, I have sensed her in the dusk-time that the star-decked prairie yields. She has poised on purple mountains when my lonely step drew near, And the North’s green fires at midnight were her altar-lights austere. Her voice is in the thunder of the raptured Falls of Bow, In the memory of Daulac dying greatly long ago. Her song is in the music of awakened April rills, She whose spirit walked with Lampman on his silent wooded hills. (226)

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D.M.R. Bentley’s comment on these lines pretty well sums things up. He says: ‘Benson’s poem, which marries the tune rhythm of the first three lines of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to a personified Northland, sings aloud the fact that mongrelism did not cease to exist in Canadian poetry with Confederation’ (‘New Dimension,’ 7). Few of the poets selected by Benson turned out to be keepers in subsequent anthologies; Benson faded from view. His publisher – Graphic – succumbed to the Depression and went bankrupt in 1932. Of the twenty poets selected by Benson in 1930, only one – Dorothy Livesay – had anthological staying power. Although Benson may have seen himself as a Young Turk promoting young writers (he was twentyseven years old when the anthology was published), he had essentially missed out on the trends that were contributing, however erratically, to the creation of a Canadian canon, both in poetry and fiction. The changes taking place around Benson were summed up by F.R. Scott in two articles he published in the Canadian Forum in 1931. In ‘New Poems for Old’ he wrote: ‘The old order of politics needed no consideration; the fact of the war was proof enough of its obsolescence. The old order of Deity was shown by anthropologists to be built not upon rock, but upon the sands of primitive social custom. Socialism and Communism cast overwhelming doubt upon the value of the economic order. Psychologists unearthed buried portions of the temple of the mind … The universe itself, after Einstein’s manipulations, ceased to be an easy movement of heavenly bodies through infinite space, and became a closed continuum as warped as the mind of man … Morality disappeared in mere behaviour. Amid the crash of systems, was Romantic Poetry to survive?’ (297). The extent to which a Canadian canon began to break away from ‘Romantic Poetry’ in the 1930s can be gauged by looking at the choices made by the editors of the few remaining literature anthologies (excluding school readers) to be published during that troubled decade: Bliss Carman and Lorne Pierce’s revised Our Canadian Literature (1935); Bliss Carman, Lorne Pierce, and V.B. Rhodenizer’s Canadian Poetry in English (1934); Broadus and Broadus’s revised A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse (1934); New Provinces (1936); and Alan Creighton and Hilda Ridley’s A New Canadian Anthology (1938). Carman died in 1929, so both of the revised anthologies bearing his name were actually completed by his co-editors. Our Canadian Literature looks back much more than it looks to the present. In his foreword, Pierce explains that Carman had been involved in the selections in

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the three years leading up to his death, which means that the poetry collected stops before the end of the decade. Pierce says that Carman wanted to create ‘a comprehensive anthology, covering the field of Canadian verse from the earliest times to the present, and interpreting both east and west’ (ix). Pierce adds that in making his selections, Carman was willing to welcome poems ‘representing days of change and experiment, provided there was substance in them, and music’ (ix). The anthology is broad in its selections, but it remains cautious about ‘change and experiment’ (ix). Carman includes one poem by Livesay and one poem by Leo Kennedy, but even those brief selections are in conventional rhyme and don’t represent the kind of chances both poets were taking in some of their early work. Carman is hesitant about allowing too much space for any poet born after 1885. For example, he includes eleven poems by Marjorie Pickthall (born in 1883). Pickthall’s poems are followed by the works of twenty younger writers. Only one, Cecil Francis Lloyd, gets three poems, while all of the others get one or two. Pierce claims that Carman would have wanted this anthology to be seen in the same light as his The Oxford Book of American Verse, which he offered ‘to that younger generation of poetry lovers, so many of whom [he had] had the pleasure of knowing in schools and universities’ (x). Since some of the younger poets in this anthology published their first books after Carman’s death, it remained for Pierce to make the volume a bit more up to date through the inclusion of Livesay and Kennedy. But because the book reflects Carman’s editorial sympathies, it is really an anthology that stops in the late 1920s. The Broaduses’ revised anthology reflected both the emergence of several new writers in the decade that had passed since their first edition in 1923 and their willingness to drop some names they now considered to be less valuable. Gone are Jonathan Odell, Joseph Stansbury, Oliver Goldsmith, and Charles Sangster. The Confederation poets, first anthologized as a group by Wetherell, emerge here as forerunners (along with William Henry Drummond) of a poetic tradition. Consider the first ten poets selected by Broadus and Broadus: Mair, Crawford, Drummond, Lampman, Carman, Roberts, Campbell, Johnson, Scott, MacDonald. This progression, which the Broaduses organize roughly in terms of the authors’ dates of birth, begins to resemble the canonical ordering that was adopted by most mainstream anthologies of Canadian literature in later decades, and unlike Benson, the Broaduses’ selections affirmed the reputation of authors who would remain in the canon, with the possible exception of MacDonald and, to a lesser extent, Campbell.

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To give the editors credit, they were willing in this 1934 revision to include some very young writers. Audrey Alexandra Brown was thirty years old, and Leo Kennedy was twenty-seven. Certainly by including a poem from Kennedy’s The Shrouding, which had only appeared the previous year, the Broaduses showed themselves to be aware of recent trends in Canadian poetry. They were also willing, in this revision, to embrace some recent fiction, including stories by Frederick Philip Grove, Frank Parker Day, Mazo de la Roche, and Morley Callaghan. But they entirely ignored contemporary short fiction that focused on Depression-era topics, even though there was considerable material available to them. Writers working in this area in the early 1930s and publishing in such journals as New Frontier, Masses, the Canadian Forum, and Queen’s Quarterly included Luella Bruce Creighton, Mary Quayle Innis, Maurice Lesser, Simon Marcson, Ruby Ronan, Leonard Spier, J.K. Thomas, and George Winslade, to name a few. Perhaps this is why the anthology feels tired and dated. The editors say nothing about the new material other than to explain that they have dropped older selections ‘to make room for more recent – and valuable – material’ (vii). In their view, poems that had been included in the first edition ‘were resuscitated for the sake of their historical interest rather than for the sake of their poetical merit’ (vii). One has little sense of how the editors’ values have shifted, how the Depression has changed the kind of literature being written in Canada, or how an anthology might push in entirely new directions, rather than simply tacking on some new material to what remained the basic body of the original text. The Broaduses were publishing this revised anthology in a period of massive social change, and they were living in Alberta, where farmers had been hard hit by the Depression. Across the country, new political parties were springing up in response to social and labour unrest. In Alberta, William Aberhart’s Social Credit Party came to power in 1935, but Aberhart had been promoting social credit ideology since 1932 and there were numerous study groups in the province devoted to his ideas. Radical journals contributed to the debate about the aims of art and the value of socialist realism. As an academic, Edmund Broadus must also have been aware of such works as Cecil Day-Lewis’s A Hope for Poetry (1934), which made a case for ‘impure’ poetry connected with everyday life, and of such then recent and influential British anthologies as New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933), both edited by Michael Roberts. Here were two radically different anthologies promoting the works of W.H. Auden, Day-Lewis,

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and Stephen Spender. They made it clear that poetry was undergoing a fundamental change. In New Signatures, Roberts insisted that the writer must be ‘abreast of his own times’ and must recognize how ‘the poetry of the machine age’ could be ‘abrupt, discordant, intellectual’ (8). He believed the poet’s function was ‘to make a new harmony out of strange and often apparently ugly material’ (10). It must have been difficult for Broadus to ignore Roberts’s influential anthologies, just as it must have been difficult for him to bypass the radical political climate that was emerging right around him, in Alberta. Watt notes that radicalism was especially prominent in the Canadian west, where ‘the leftward movement of Canadian intellectuals and the dialectic it entailed made a striking contrast to the conciliatory, conservative inclination of the cultivated milieu of late Victorian Canada. Conciliation had given way to angry debate, patriotic aspirations to the cry for social justice, defence of moral, social and spiritual absolutes to radical probings especially of the existing social order and its justification. If this was what it meant to have achieved nationhood, then the Victorian founding fathers might well have felt themselves fortunate not to have seen the working out of this phase in their great project’ (‘Climate of Unrest,’ 21). Could the Broaduses have truly ignored such literary and political shifts? And even if that were possible, what about the changes taking place outside their door? By the time the Depression hit in 1929, Broadus had been at the University of Alberta for twenty years. In order to understand more about how the university community responded to the Depression, I went to the university’s own account of this period: Alberta’s wheat pools suffered from plummeting prices. In 1929, Premier Brownlee’s government rescued the Alberta Wheat Pool from bankruptcy and garnered the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) a 1930 election victory. Railways and coal mines cut back operations. Masses of workers were laid off. Protest marches, communist-organized demonstrations, boycotts, labour unrest, hunger marches, family breakdowns, suicides, bankruptcies, riots, police conflict, and violence between strikers and supporters were living manifestations of a society that was in deep trouble. Alberta’s drought in the early 1920s paled in comparison to Alberta’s 1930s Armageddon-like world. Drought, hordes of grasshopper infestations, wind storms, and fires left much of southern Alberta a barren landscape. When rain did fall, the eroded or fire-scorched land could not absorb the water, which caused major flooding. People abandoned their

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homes. Towns disappeared. People living hand-to-mouth were on the move. (‘Depression Years,’ University of Alberta Centenary)

The Broaduses were living in the midst of an apocalypse. Yet, their anthology says not a word about how these drastic conditions might have altered their perception of the country or its literature. There is no sense of protest here, no sense of upheaval, no expressions of dismay. To what extent should an anthology respond to the conditions surrounding its production? Canon-shifting anthologies are inextricably linked to those conditions; they reflect political change. These are the anthologies that thrive on their own anxieties, that try to alter the landscape, that are born from discontent. In one way or another, those shape-shifting anthologies want to reconfigure their world. They embody an interrogation. But most of all, they set out to repudiate the status quo. Despite their inclusion of new writers, the Broaduses were fundamentally removed from their times. Their anthology exists in a bubble. One continues to search for the twentieth-century editor who will come along and burst it. That radical act was undertaken by the editors of New Provinces in 1936. The title of the anthology provides a clear link to Roberts’s two British anthologies with similar titles, an indication that, unlike Broadus and Broadus, the poets involved in New Provinces were aware of the modernist values expressed in the British collections. With the exception of A.J.M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), no other Canadian anthology has received as much critical attention as New Provinces. The circumstances leading to its creation are well known. In his introduction to the reprint edition of New Provinces published in 1976, Michael Gnarowski notes that the anthology had been in preparation for four years, since 1932, but that its roots went back to the mid-1920s, when A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Leon Edel, and Leo Kennedy were students in Montreal. The period of organizing the anthology was ‘a period of soul-searching, of a growing sense of social responsibility and concrete political action’ (ix–x). Although the anthology brought together the poetry of six authors (Robert Finch, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith), and although it presented itself as a manifesto about new writing, it did not express a consistent aesthetic. The preface itself was the subject of disagreement and compromise, with Smith’s original preface finally being rejected in favour of Scott’s, which was short, more diplomatic, and to the point. In different ways, however, both prefaces express a political stance

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that had never been seen in a Canadian anthology: the belief that poets had to ‘vividly express the world around them’ (v) and participate in ‘the need to restore order out of social chaos’ (v), in Scott’s words. He identifies ‘the economic depression’ as the cause of this chaos and sees it as a source of potential energy that links the work in the anthology to ‘contemporary English and American verse’ (v). Smith’s rejected preface is a more polemical document, in the spirit of ‘Wanted: Canadian Criticism.’ Although the preface remained unpublished until the 1960s, it provides a good indication of Smith’s thinking at the time, and of the values informing his editorial contribution to the selection process. Smith objects to just about everything he sees in Canadian poetry. It is ‘romantic in conception and conventional in form’; it is ‘sentimental’; ‘its rhythms are definite, mechanically correct, and obvious; its rhymes are commonplace’ (‘Rejected Preface,’ 274). He had little respect for what he saw as the usual subject matter either: ‘pine trees, the open road, God, snowshoes or Pan’ (‘Rejected Preface,’ 274). Because the poetry lacked ‘intensity,’ ‘compression,’ and ‘discipline,’ it could never be ‘vitally concerned with real experience’ (‘Rejected Preface,’ 275). Smith took previous anthologists such as John Garvin and William Wilfred Campbell to task for promoting this kind of poetry and for presenting the Canadian poet as ‘a half-baked, hyper-sensitive, poorly adjusted, and frequently neurotic individual that no one in his senses would trust to drive a car or light a furnace’ (‘Rejected Preface,’ 275). Smith’s understanding of this problem leads him to formulate the binary that would govern his own The Book of Canadian Poetry selections seven years later: the distinction between ‘native’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ poetry. Smith argued that a good poem did not have to be recognizably Canadian because ‘poetry today is written for the most part by people whose emotional and intellectual heritage is not a national one; it is either cosmopolitan or provincial, and, for good or evil, the forces of civilization are rapidly making the latter scarce’ (‘Rejected Preface,’ 275). He encouraged the creation of ‘pure poetry’ that was ‘objective, impersonal, and in a sense timeless and absolute’ (‘Rejected Preface,’ 276). Smith concludes his preface by pointing to some of the influences he sees in the poetry in New Provinces: an attraction to imagist aesthetics, metaphysical verse, and satire. He believed that the poet of intensity and honesty could ‘facilitate the creation of a more practical social system’ (‘Rejected Preface,’ 277), even though his poems were not required to have any kind of mimetic relation to that system. Form in

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itself would be political, and a shift in form would provide a means of interrogating the status quo. Smith’s preface was ultimately vetoed by Pratt, who encouraged Scott to prepare a less strident piece. Hugh Eayrs of Macmillan was also uncomfortable with Smith’s work. He told Pratt that ‘it is unwise, and would stir up unnecessary antagonisms. Let the Scott-Roberts group alone and let the volume stand on its own feet without the initial “nose-tweaking” as he describes it’ (qtd. in New Provinces, xvii [1976]). However, the direction of both prefaces was clear: a group of poets had emerged who would publicly challenge convention and who were aware that the anthology was a political instrument that could promote dissent. In retrospect, it seems surprising that Leo Kennedy’s name is not more prominent when it comes to explaining the values influencing the New Provinces group. In 1936, the same year the anthology appeared, he published an essay entitled ‘New Direction for Canadian Poetry’ in New Frontier. This piece, which is easily the most provocative essay of the period, does an excellent job of articulating the aesthetic shared by several, if not all, members of the group. Kennedy writes: ‘In this time of impending war and incipient fascism, when the mode and standards of living of great numbers of middle class persons (from whose ranks Canadian poets hail) are being violently disrupted, our poets blithely comb their wooley wits for stanzas to clarify intimate, subjective reactions to Love, Beauty, the First Crocus, Snow in April, and similar graceful but immediately irrelevant bubbles’ (12). Kennedy argued that the writer’s task was to respond to his times: ‘It is my thesis that the function of poetry is to interpret the contemporary scene faithfully; to interpret especially the progressive forces in modern life which alone stand for cultural survival’ (12). He wanted to get away from the ‘placid flatness’ of Canadian poetry: ‘Jingo utterances from mental vacua; stereotyped descriptions of loons, lakes, pine trees, prairies and other natural Canadian phenomena; kindly and saccharine encomiums on fairies and dreams – especially dreams! – which might conceivably please children of tender and credulous years; smug and safe sonnets with an obvious clinch in their concluding couplets; ill-phrased effusions on Rembrandt portraits or Beethoven sonatas which daub their original subjects with a dreadful treacle’ (13). Kennedy concluded that ‘we need poetry that reflects the lives of our people, working, loving, fighting, groping for clarity’ (19). How effective was New Provinces at finding this kind of clarity? Was

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it a ‘landmark publication that signalled the demise of the old school of Canadian poetry,’ as Trehearne argues (Aestheticism, 115)? Or was it simply a collection of poems by younger writers who had more of a connection with established norms than the contributors cared to admit? If sales are any indication of impact, the book made hardly a ripple. In a letter to Pratt, Scott wrote: ‘I have now something to report as to the sales of NEW PROVINCES. From May 9th, 1936 to March 31st, 1937 the magnificent number of 82 copies was sold, of which I purchased 10 … So I take it that we do not retire to a life of poetry and ease’ (qtd. in New Provinces, xxi [1976]). W.J. Keith notes that the anthology did not present a ‘united front’ in terms of displaying a modernist aesthetic, and that more often than not it expressed ‘the continuities that exist between the old and new’ rather than a radical break with tradition (123). Dermot McCarthy concurs: ‘The contributors did not form a coherent party and New Provinces was not a manifesto. It was, rather, an informative anthology showing a variety of modern styles in transition – and in Pratt’s case, a transitional style hesitating to be modern’ (Poetics of Place, 280). New Provinces did not have much of an influence when it was first published. It received few reviews, and those that did appear were generally dismissive. The sales figures testify to the fact that the book was not in demand. Fee notes that although ‘modernism had become the official opposition’ by 1930, the younger critics and poets ‘were almost completely inaudible to the contemporary audience’ because ‘control of all the significant literary institutions and media was held until the Second World War, and sometimes after, by men who could be accurately described as Romantic Nationalists’ (‘Literary Criticism,’ 3). Given the anthology’s tepid reception, one can logically ask whether the claim usually made for New Provinces – that it announced the advent of modernist poetry in Canada – really bears scrutiny. But does the verdict matter? I can think of several reasons why New Provinces marked a crucial departure point in the anthologizing of Canadian literature, even if it did not have an immediate impact in its own time, and even if it did not become the perfect vehicle of modernism. No previous anthology of Canadian literature was the product of such intense collaboration. The subtitle, Poems of Several Authors, points to the collaborative nature of the undertaking, a process that had never been employed in the preparation of any Canadian anthology. Although the collection was clearly meant to showcase Canadian poetry and to challenge existing assumptions about the values of that

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poetry, the word ‘Canadian’ is nowhere in the book’s title. The authors were saying that one did not need to wave the term ‘Canada’ in order to be Canadian. While other anthologies bore the names of two or even three editors, New Provinces was the first collection to emerge as the result of debate, of give and take among a number of individuals who understood that they had a common project despite differences in their own subject matter and aesthetic principles. The effect of this collaboration was to empower the contributors as members of a group that believed in change. Whether the public participated in this empowerment is immaterial; what matters is that the anthology gave its contributors a sense of purpose and value, and this in itself permitted the contributors to take the next step in their careers. It fuelled them. For example, Smith might not have gone on to edit the undoubtedly influential The Book of Canadian Poetry if he did not feel the need to defend some of the principles he had articulated in his rejected preface. Similarly, Scott began to see his poetry as part of a larger involvement in political ideologies, a factor that necessarily influenced his career as a lawyer, professor, and poet. Here was a group of Canadian poets saying that poetry could look to foreign models without fear of being called unpatriotic. It didn’t matter whether each of the six poets was a modernist, even if one could agree on the meaning of that term. Many of them were exploring subject matter that had never been seen in Canadian poetry and importing values that allowed them to change the idea of what was permissible and valid in terms of form and content. In this sense, New Provinces valorized difference. It said that subject matter could undermine the expected and that the contributors did not have to sing a similar tune. New Provinces authorized the idea of newness, even if it was not entirely new. While the book might have been unfamiliar to readers at the time, it would have been hard for other anthologists to ignore it. Anthologists are always looking uneasily at their predecessors and wondering how they should modify their own collections in response to previous models. As innovation enters the anthological field, the stakes get higher. When Broadus and Broadus published their revised anthology in 1934, there were no real threats to the established order. No books challenging the authority of their volume existed. It was easy for them to include a few contemporary authors and call the book up to date. But could they have done the same thing if their anthology had followed New Provinces? They would hardly have been able to ignore it, since they had the same publisher (Macmillan). Similarly,

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future anthologists could not pretend that this anthology, coming from a major house, had no influence. Whether they rejected its aesthetic or embraced it, they would have to take it into account. The success or failure of anthology projects that followed New Provinces can in some ways be judged by the extent to which they recognized the changes it embodied. New Provinces was not only new because it celebrated difference; in some ways, it celebrated the marginal as well. A.M. Klein became such an important figure in Canadian writing that it is easy to forget that New Provinces was the first Canadian anthology to include the poetry of a Jew. The Depression made it difficult for Klein to find a publisher for his poetry. His work had appeared in Poetry (Chicago) as early as 1928 and in the Canadian Forum and the Canadian Mercury, but he had no book exposure. While Klein’s poetry showed his debt to Dante, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Joyce, Auden, and Eliot, it departed from traditional lines of influence through its use of Talmudic sources and dialectical modes of inquiry. By including Klein’s poems, New Provinces became the first Canadian anthology to represent a radical departure from conventional Christian epistemology. At the same time, it valued other kinds of poetry that had never been seen in a Canadian anthology: the dandyism of Robert Finch, the comic extravagance of E.J. Pratt, Leo Kennedy’s morbid preoccupations with death, the satirical wit of F.R. Scott, and the metaphysical and imagist leanings of A.J.M. Smith. There was simply nothing like it. Three years after the publication of New Provinces, Smith looked back on the period leading up to its creation. While repeating some of the charges he had made in his earlier polemical essays, Smith also took aim at anthologists who had shied away from making tough choices. He said there were two factors accounting for ‘the isolation of our poets’: The first is the fact that our anthologies do not represent our poetry as effectively as they might. This is due partly to copyright difficulties, but more to the artificial (non-poetic) standards set up by the estimable persons who compiled them. The result is that collections like The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1912) and Garvin’s Canadian Poets contain, in addition to a rather small minority of living poems, a ‘great majority’ made up of the worst poems of the best poets and the best poems of the worst poets, in such abundance that the stranger is distracted and dismayed. The one test that the anthologists never fail to make is the test for ‘Canadianism.’ If

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a poem does not exhibit some obvious and often superficial manifestation of being Canadian, it must treat the grand, serious themes with solemnity and unction. But if it is unmistakably Canadian, it may be as trivial as it likes. (‘Canadian Poetry,’ 176)

Smith concludes that ‘discrimination has never been an essential part of a Canadian anthologist’s equipment’ (‘Canadian Poetry,’ 177). He didn’t think Garvin’s selections would keep readers awake: ‘The influence of Garvin’s anthology more than anything else is responsible for the outrageous over-estimate of the “genius” of Canadian poets which passes for orthodox opinion in the meeting rooms of the C.A.A.’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 470). Smith proposes several questions that the editor should ask in determining whether a poem is successful: ‘We want to know whether the poem is alive or dead. Can it speak to us in language we recognize as that of a man, not of a bird or a book. Can we accept it without putting half of our personality – the mind – to sleep? Has it ever been, or can it become again, a part of life?’ (‘Canadian Poetry,’ 176). When it comes to New Provinces, the answer to these questions is mixed. While the poems in the collection are eclectic in their subject matter, many of them focus on the act of perception through the eyes of self-conscious speakers who reflect – directly or indirectly – upon the poetry-making act. Implicit in many of these poems is an intellectual preoccupation with the role of the poet and his language. Although not all the contributors are successful in exploring this role, their selfreflective attraction to the poetic stance itself is remarkable and signals a departure from the outlook of their predecessors, whose poetry displays little in the way of self-interrogation. As intellectual exercises, then, many of the poems break new ground, but at the same time, this breaking betrays an obsession with form and precision that often makes it difficult to find ‘language we recognize as that of a man’ (‘Canadian Poetry,’ 176) rather than the language of a book. The authors in New Provinces are presented in alphabetical order, beginning with Robert Finch. Although Finch was the most senior of the poets, his work had not been widely published. He was a formalist who was drawn to the French symbolists and the aesthetics of dandyism, as Smith later observed in his The Book of Canadian Poetry. In ‘Finch’s Early Poetry and the Dandy Manner,’ Trehearne says that Finch’s dandyism followed two lines of influence: John Betjeman’s notion of a decadent aestheticism that was drawn to spiritual emptiness, and the irony of

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Edith Sitwell’s ‘quirky artificiality’ of image and language. For Trehearne, the chief features of Finch’s early poems are ‘the perceptions of the child, the elegant and refined interiors, the flashing of artificial imagery, the playing of Art over the appearance of things,’ and his central question is, ‘How may artistic form be used to reflect the meaning the poet wished to relate or to create and yet remain “pure,” free of morality and philosophy and tending primarily towards beauty and wonder?’ (Aestheticism, 107). The opening poem in New Provinces, Finch’s ‘The Five Kine,’ is an allegorical meditation on the creative process that sets up a contrast between the old and the new. The kine represent the poetic elements that the speaker has pent up and refused to release. Now, walled in by his refusal, the kine are no longer productive, and like them, the speaker is ‘a famished parody of beauty’ (1). Content in his leisure, the poet/drover has attended neither to his pasture nor to the kine, which represent his poetic powers gone to seed: Their eyes are dim, their udders drop no milk, their hooves are splayed, their flanks, sunken and sooty, augur a dearth of inauspicious ilk …

(1)

Now the poet realizes that he missed the fertile potential before him: ‘The soil was there, long, long ago, alas / so long’ (1). But it is too late for him to restore the pasture, or the symbolic power of the kine. He is poetically barren, and they are caught in ‘a famished parody of beauty,’ waiting listlessly for the ‘faithless drover’s goad’ that will not move them because the leisure he allowed them has ‘become a desert road’ (1). The ‘exuberant’ soil was never tilled. The poet has been inactive, and now he is paying the price. There will be no growth here, but the drover will be left with his starved animals, his empty poems, which have languished due to his pursuit of ease. As the opening poem in New Provinces, ‘The Five Kine’ presents a cautionary message that is appropriate to the collection as a whole. The message is straightforward, even if the language is symbolic, stylized, indirect: the poet must take responsibility for his actions and must till the poetic soil or face impotence. In some ways, the poem is similar to another New Provinces poem, Smith’s ‘Like an Old Proud King in a Parable,’ in which the speaker wants to ‘die / From this fat royal life’ (66). But the desired death is not so easy to achieve; it requires poetic vigilance and a commitment to making ‘difficult, lonely music’ (66). One thing is certain: the kine in Finch’s poem present the reader with a

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symbolic landscape that was new in its aestheticism and in its implicit statement about the role of the poet in these new provinces. By extension, the poem called upon the reader to perceive in a different way, and to reconsider the demands placed upon the poet and his subject matter in a new age. Finch’s most successful poems in the collection challenge conventional assumptions about poetic convention and subject matter. In ‘Beauty My Fond Fine Care,’ the speaker strives to define his relation to beauty. The intensity of the relationship is reflected in the compression of the language and its obsessive desire to represent beauty through conventionally unbeautiful juxtaposition, ellipsis, and counterpoint. The final lines draw us back to the self-referential tone that characterizes many of the poems in the anthology: beauty my fond fine care, no vaunt collapses the promise made though sworn perforce in laughter, memory, beauty, in a unique ellipsis modulate fact to faith, now, and for after.

(3)

Finch works through inversion and irony. His landscapes are haunting, decadent, formalized, sartorial. Edith Sitwell’s influence abounds. To appreciate the contrast between the kind of material included in New Provinces and, say, the Broaduses’ anthology, which had appeared just two years earlier, one might compare lines from Finch’s ‘WindowPiece’ with Audrey Alexandra Brown’s ‘A Dryad in Nanaimo,’ since she was one of the most contemporary poets (excluding Leo Kennedy) the Broaduses included in their collection. Here is Brown in A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse: At the end of the glimmering street – Pale in the summer twilight, leading away To the wine-red heart of the day – There is a place untrodden by human feet, A little knoll of ancient enduring trees, Veiled in a delicate mist of meadow-sweet, Haunted of bees.

And here is Finch in New Provinces: Trees; hands upthrust in tattered black lace mitts, enormous broom stuck handle down in snow,

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the nervous roots of giant buried flowers. Old willows in spun copper periwigs, and many-fingered firs smoothing white stoles beside the drained rococo lily-pool whose shuddering cherub wrings an icicle from the bronze gullet of his frozen swan. .

(4)

Finch was forcing his readers to see familiar landscapes in a different way. The same could be said of Leo Kennedy, whose first and only book, The Shrouding, had appeared in 1933. That book collected poems written in earlier years, poetry that Kennedy later rejected as being too self-absorbed. By the time New Provinces appeared in 1936, Kennedy had turned to writing political poetry as well as conventional lyrics in established forms. As Francis Zichy points out, ‘at this time Kennedy was leading a kind of double life as a poet, devoting himself both to social polemics and to personal, lyrical writing’ (71). However, the poetry in New Provinces does not display those doppelgänger aspects of Kennedy’s career. Instead, what we find are poems that express his metaphysical interests in sex, birth, and death – as in ‘Epithalamium’ and ‘Prophecy for Icarus’ – along with more experimental imagist poems such as ‘Shore.’ The reader who follows the narrative line of New Provinces is brought into a redefined natural world that is often coupled with thoughts of death. But it is not only the death of family members (as in ‘Epithalamium’) or even the figurative death of the poet (as in ‘The Five Kine’); it is the death and continuing presence of ancestors. The selection of Kennedy’s poems ends with ‘Testament,’ a meditation on heritage and influence that suggests the tension he felt between tradition and the present: ‘progenitors walking the pavement with me, observing sumach / in the close Ontario woods, thinking in a new country / that breath is breath anywhere’ (24). Kennedy’s awareness of how these ‘progenitors’ are ‘under’ his ‘hand in the fall of ’34’ speaks to another mood in New Provinces: the desire to investigate the meaning and power of influence. In this context, A.M. Klein’s two poems are perfectly at home, focused as they are on the interplay of faith and doubt, tradition and modernity. ‘Soirée of Velvel Kleinburger’ is ultimately a protest poem that aligns Velvel (and the ‘Klein’ implicit in Velvel’s surname) with Eliot’s impoverished modern landscapes. ‘Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens’ presents Spinoza as the outcast, an exile Klein identifies with his own

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desire to embrace the modern world within the framework of Jewish tradition. As Noreen Golfman says, Klein ‘struggled successfully to accommodate a committed dependence on traditional forms to a world undergoing radical upheaval’ (147). Other poems in the volume also negotiate the uncertain space between past and present. While the subject matter may be conventional, the best poems in the volume focus on doubting the contemporary effectiveness of those conventions. Scott’s ‘Trees in Ice’ may be explicit it its imagism, but it is not as interesting to me as ‘Overture,’ which is both sensuous and self-questioning: But how shall I hear old music? This is an hour Of new beginnings, concepts warring for power, Decay of systems – the tissue of art is torn With overtures of an era being born.

(6)

The most self-conscious poems in the volume are Smith’s. He is haunted by shadows but can’t make them out (‘Shadows There Are’). He wants to escape ‘fawning courtier and doting queen’ but can’t quite make the break (‘Like an Old Proud King in a Parable’). He walks into the wilderness ‘with a young pedantic eye’ and ‘observes how still the dead do lie’ (‘In the Wilderness’). And, at the end of New Provinces, we find him wearing the ‘Romantic unnecessary cape of the naked heart’ (‘The Offices of the First and Second Hour’). In many ways, New Provinces is a critique of its own desire to shed that unnecessary cape, and to bare a naked heart – the new. The anthology is a long poem about the uneasy relationship between history and the present, parents and children, tradition and experimentation, security and nakedness. And, like any good long poem, its power comes from its uncertainties rather than its affirmations. This is why I think W.J. Keith is not entirely on the mark when he criticizes the volume for straddling the line between old and new, for getting caught in what he calls the ‘traffic between past and present’ (122). It is precisely because most of the poets in the volume are trying to mediate this relationship that their work occupies that charged, in-between space where change is filled with doubt and where the bold movement forward is creatively hampered by uncertainty and fear. But which would we rather see: unquestioned allegiance to the past, or a conflicted step in a new direction that is energized by its own reluctance to take that step?

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It is not too difficult to see what happens in the absence of this conflict. New Provinces was followed by two poetry anthologies that appeared in 1938: Ethel Hume Bennett’s New Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918–1938, published by Macmillan, and Allan Creighton and Hilda M. Ridley’s A New Canadian Anthology, published by Crucible Press. The emphasis on newness in these titles prompts one to ask exactly how they were new. The appearance of Bennett’s anthology testified to the range of editorial perspectives supported by Hugh Eayrs at Macmillan. Within four years the company had released the revised Broadus collection, New Provinces, and the Bennett anthology, which in reality presented itself as a mediator between the traditional and the new. Although it did include poems by such figures as Finch, Kennedy, Scott, and Smith, there was no real sense of the contemporary here. Bennett defined ‘new’ as ‘living’; her collection was meant ‘to focus attention on what is alive and vital in Canadian poetry today’ (vii). She says the poems ‘reflect the contemporary Canadian scene and are, therefore, of special interest and importance to us’ (vii). Many of Bennett’s selections (e.g., Sara E. Carsley, Mary Elizabeth Colman, Doris Ferne, Ellen Fulton, Anna Henderson, Olive Primrose, Joseph Schull, Constance Woodrow) do not seem to have made an impression on later editors, and perhaps with good reason. Two years after New Provinces, Bennett can still include poems such as Margot Osborn’s ‘Prairie Impression’: The world is a silver penny Impossibly large And I am in the middle of it, A penny reaching from rim to dull grey rim of sky That curves above my head, a lustreless bowl.

(108)

It’s strange to see lines like these between the covers of a book that also holds Livesay’s ‘Day and Night’ and Smith’s ‘The Lonely Land.’ But Bennett was no radical, and she had no political agenda. She was the author of Judy of York Hill, Camp Conqueror, Camp Ken-Jockety, and A Treasure Ship of Old Quebec, all books for young readers. Perhaps this is why the anthology, illustrated by J.M. Donald, has a juvenile feel to it. Alan Creighton and Hilda M. Ridley’s A New Canadian Anthology feels even less new than Bennett’s collection. It contains the work of ninety-nine poets in 236 pages, allotting an average of 2 pages per poet, but because each author is introduced with a biographical page that includes a photo, the real space devoted to the poems amounts to about

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1.5 pages per author. This book is more of a compendium than anything else. Its selections seem indiscriminate. How did Creighton manage to convince Toronto’s Crucible Press to publish the work? Perhaps Creighton’s position as assistant editor of the Canadian Forum gave him a certain amount of clout, and he had published his own book of poetry, Earth-Call, in 1936. But it seems more likely that the answer lies in the role played by the person who ‘assisted’ Creighton: Hilda M. Ridley. Ridley was best known as a biographer of Lucy Maud Montgomery, but she had published stories and poems in many magazines and was a contributing editor to Saturday Night magazine, where she worked with Creighton. Ridley was also the editor of the small magazine the Crucible, which gave rise to Crucible Press, which she managed with her sister, Laura. The magazine ran from 1932 to 1943 and was dedicated to supporting writing by women. As Dean Irvine notes, ‘If only by name, the Crucible connotes the revolutionary and experimental intent of its leftist and modernist contemporaries’ (203). But this was in name only. As Irvine explains, Laura and Hilda Ridley were conservative editors and writers: ‘Both poets … are equally nationalist in their choice of Canadian subjects and conservative in their use of conventional closed forms. These tendencies in terms of form and content are predominant not only in the selections for the magazine but also in the Crucible anthology. Just as the appellation “new” is a misnomer for the anthology, so the connotation “experimental” is, if restricted to the magazine’s poetry and its editors’ poetics, misrepresentative of the Crucible’ (207). Although Creighton’s name comes first in the anthology, Ridley’s support of women’s writing is what makes the book unique. It is ‘new’ in the sense that of the ninety-nine authors included in the volume, seventy-seven are women. Yet the introduction, written by Creighton, virtually erases this fact and Ridley’s influence, offering instead a vague justification for the anthology’s aims. According to Creighton, the ‘average Canadian’ of the time knew little about Canadian poetry and thought that ‘the national mind did not rise above farming, lumbering, fishing, hydro-power and pulp’ (1). The editors would correct this misperception by offering poetry that was not merely concerned with ‘inert little pools reflecting maple leaves; the moon, snowflakes’ (1). Instead, they wanted to open themselves to innovation, because ‘certain environmental changes ha[d] taken place’ (2). There was the imminent risk of war, economic unrest, and the introduction of new technology: ‘The radio and the talkies have become influences, beneficial or otherwise, in

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the lives of most people. The swift moving aeroplane overhead grows increasingly familiar’ (2). Despite this claim to change, the anthology suffers from its own constraints. The editors would accept no poem longer than thirty-two lines, and they restricted themselves to selections that would appeal to ‘the general reader’ (the same ‘general reader’ who so often shows up as a euphemism for poetic illiteracy in anthologies). This format necessarily excluded the documentary, leftist poems that Livesay and others were publishing in the 1930s, as well as Pratt’s long poems, which had been in print for more than ten years. Livesay recognized this deficiency. In 1939 she was still objecting to the absence of modern criticism and searching for poetry that came from ‘some genuine expression of experience, related to the way people live and struggle in Canada’ (34–5). Perhaps it was his own ignorance of anthological history that allowed Creighton to think of his collection as ‘new.’ In the introduction, he refers to ‘several earlier anthologies of Canadian poetry’ (2 [1938]) and says that ‘the best known is probably that of John Garvin, published in 1926’ (2). Creighton made this claim in 1938. Either he was unaware of, or had chosen to ignore, some of the influential anthologies that appeared in the intervening twelve years, including those edited by Broadus and Broadus and New Provinces, which were published by Macmillan – the publisher of Creighton’s own poetry book. Equally, the editors ignored some of the poets most prominently associated with modernism since the publication of Garvin’s anthology. Of the New Provinces group, only Pratt is represented by three poems. While anthologies need to be judged in terms of their overall content, they are also narratives that take the reader on a journey, and that journey begins on the very first page. Because the opening selection sets the tone for the voyage, it has to be chosen with great care. The anthologist may decide to challenge the reader, or to open the door with a selection that is recognizable and safe. Consider the opening lines of New Provinces, from Finch’s ‘The Five Kine’: Down from the distant pasture of my ease their lean flanks scarred against the wall of duty come the five kine I never sought to please, come in a famished parody of beauty.

(1)

The opening lines of A New Canadian Anthology, from Helen Maude Adams’s ‘The Song Triumphant,’ present a very different picture:

Anthologies between the Wars Oh, how can I sing? The song that has ever dwelt high in my heart Is silenced forever, like swift-flowing river, Whose waters are suddenly dried at its head, Leaving nothing but silt and a bare, stony bed.

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(5)

Adams is taking no chances here, in contrast to Finch, who brings the reader into the anthology on a note of starkness, famine, distance, and dis-ease, as if the world one might have expected to find in a book called New Provinces is going to be a strange and desperate place, threatening in its sparsity and beautiful in its ironic attraction to what is hungry, wanting, unfulfilled. What Finch shows us is how limited Creighton and Ridley were in their conception of the ‘new’ as something ‘beautiful and true of Canadian life’ (2). It’s hard to think of them defining beauty in this way more than two decades after Rilke was exploring the idea that ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror’ (21). Despite Creighton and Ridley’s claims to the contrary, the majority of poems in their collection are good examples of what Leo Kennedy called ‘meretricious mellifluence’ (‘Canadian Writers,’ 460). They were sentimental, romantic, clichéd, and unwilling to challenge convention. This explains why so few of the voices captured here could be heard in later anthologies. Of the close to one hundred poets in A New Canadian Anthology, only two – Charles G.D. Roberts and E.J. Pratt – survive in subsequent collections. History’s judgment of the Creighton-Ridley collection has indeed been harsh. The beginning of the war was bound to change the focus of Canadian literature. By the time Ralph Gustafson published his Pelican Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English) in 1942, the assumptions regarding the meaning and value of a national literature had come under increased scrutiny, as had the Canadian literary canon. Challenges to that canon were appearing from several directions. In Vancouver, Alan Crawley had established the magazine Contemporary Verse in 1941. And in Montreal, the mimeographed journals Preview and First Statement appeared in 1942, featuring writers influenced by the aesthetics of Auden and Spender (in the case of Preview) and Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (in the case of First Statement). Gustafson was fully aware of the shift in mood introduced by these new publications and included the work of a number of poets who had appeared in their pages. In making his selections, Gustafson said, ‘I have measured and judged my material not by historical significance

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nor by “Canadianism,” but in terms of vitality: is it alive or dead?’ To be ‘alive,’ the poem had to ‘deepen’ experience and have ‘nothing to do with static conventionality, apings and “poetics,” cliché and acrobatics’ (v). Gustafson argued that the contemporary Canadian poet ‘has a critical familiarity with poetic advances in the United States and England’ and ‘a kinetic sensitivity to his social environment’ (v). But he also noted that, in the current environment, ‘no Canadian editor would touch such poems as Knister’s’ or ‘W.W.E. Ross in the Dial’ (‘Story,’ 74). These were bold statements for the time. Like the New Provinces poets, Gustafson was openly recommending the influence of foreign models, a move that would have been considered anathema a decade earlier. The difference between his anthology and New Provinces is that it did not seek to represent the poetry of a partisan group so much as it claimed to represent the English poetry of the nation. And, unlike New Provinces, Gustafson’s Anthology of Canadian Poetry was eminently successful, at least in financial terms. In 1983 he noted that 60,000 copies of the initial Pelican edition were printed, an enormous run for 1942. The book has seen several revised editions since that time. Yet Gustafson complained that the anthology had never been given the credit it was due: A Penguin title is given, and is only feasible in, an edition in the thousands. The original Pelican edition reproduced 60,000 times every poem it presented; the subsequent editions were of like quantity and even more ubiquitous – found by its editor in the civilized centres of the world. What a book of Canadian poetry accomplished in Cairo, Athens, in Rio de Janeiro, must be left to the diviners. What it accomplished in London, Sydney, Auckland and Paris is less conjectural. What seminal, profound and shattering effect it had in Canada and the United States is calculable, continuing and undoubted. Citizens of no connection to official Canadian established criticism continually, verbally, acknowledge their initiation and exploration in the area of Canadian poetry to the Penguin anthology. Those of sufficient age recall with grateful memory the holding, and often the possession still, of the bluish war-paper production, the first ‘Pelican.’ Never has the book been published in Canada; not yet has it been historically acknowledged. (‘Story,’ 71–2)

Like Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry, which appeared the following year, Gustafson’s anthology originated outside Canada, and it was also the product of an expatriate editor. Five years after graduating from Oxford University, Gustafson was in New York, working for the British

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Information Services. His job was to cable London daily with information about American attitudes towards the war, gathered from various media sources. His activities brought him into contact with Allen Lane, the founder and publisher of Penguin Books. Lane hired Gustafson to put together the anthology. It was originally conceived by the Canadian Armed Services as a small book that could be distributed to Canadian soldiers – poetry for their knapsacks. It was not published early enough for them to read during the raid on Dieppe, but it was available to them during the invasion of Sicily in 1943, and of course, on D-Day. I say this with some scepticism. The idea of Canadian soldiers turning to Gustafson’s inclusion of John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ in the height of battle seems as unlikely as the idea of them feeling uplifted by these lines from Henry Noyes’s ‘Ritual for War’: From every town and village Brown marchers come; No sound of bugle blowing Or roll of drum; The hills re-echo nothing But throb of marching feet Eastward into darkness Down an unlit street. They march in silent funeral For men who die tomorrow, For hope buried today In woman’s heart of sorrow.

(111)

In his self-congratulatory essay on the origins of the Pelican collection, Gustafson recalls that he began his assignment by reading other anthologies of Canadian poetry: He read the anthologies current and widely commended in Canada. He was appalled. Repelled pencillings with exclamation marks circle line after line in Wilfred Campbell’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse: Mrs. R.A. Faulkner’s ‘In tracery romantic’; John E. Logan’s ‘The early morn, ah me! ah me!’; William E. Marshall’s ‘Yonder lovely vale, sweet trystingplace for fairies.’ John W. Garvin’s heavy 1916 Canadian Poets was extant. Poems in it were hardly less awful. He studied the pictures of the poets which accompanied the verses. Big hats were worn by the poetesses and celluloid collars by the poets. But he remembered that Tennyson wore a

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big hat; Carman’s was wide-brimmed too but he wore a widely-flourishing cravat. Charles G.D. Robert’s pince-nez (which he met through the Authors Association) suspended a wide black ribbon. (‘Story,’ 73)

Gustafson wanted a different sense of style. In New York, he looked for Canadian poetry in contemporary journals such as the Literary Digest, the Dial, the Midland, Poetry (Chicago) (‘all American magazines, no Canadian editor would touch’) and embraced the work of A.J.M. Smith, Raymond Knister, W.W.E. Ross, A.M. Klein, and E.J. Pratt. He also included new voices: Earle Birney, Anne Marriott, P.K. Page, and Ronald Hambleton. The aim was clear: ‘to overthrow the established anthologies in Canada and the extra-mural ignorance’ (‘Story’ 75). It is odd, however, that even in his retrospective account of the anthology’s evolution Gustafson makes no mention of New Provinces, even though so many of the poets he adopted made their first appearance there six years earlier. While Gustafson’s anthology was not historically influential in terms of shifting the Canadian canon, it has enjoyed financial success over many editions, which in itself suggests that Gustafson did something different, that he got it right from a business perspective. What made his anthology so desirable? Design was an important part of its success. Paperback printing technology was new at the time. Penguin exploited the new format, leading some readers to charge that the books looked thin and flimsy. True enough. But Penguin was able to offer its paperbacks at a much cheaper price than a hardback, which made them accessible to a wide range of readers. That the book was bought by the Canadian Army certainly did not hurt sales. And this kind of ‘adoption,’ like the widespread curricular adoption of texts that is more familiar to us today, gave the book currency and value. It stands as the first and only instance of a Canadian anthology explicitly solicited and supported by the military. The paperback format was also combined with two other features that gave this anthology power: compression and an appeal to consumer savvy. Gustafson managed to squeeze fifty-five poets and 129 poems into 115 pages, along with an index to first lines and brief biographies of the poets. The back cover lists all the poets, which gives the volume a sense of inclusiveness that is still containable within the small, thin format of the book. It emanates control. While the back cover stresses its widespread coverage, the front cover makes use of a blurb by William Arthur Deacon: ‘If only one book is to be chosen as an investment, or

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experiment in the national literature, it should be a volume illustrating the quantity, variety and quality of Canadian poetry.’ This is the first time an authoritative critic provided a front cover blurb for a Canadian poetry book in words that conjoin the experience of reading Canadian poetry with the idea of investment. Reading the book will provide a good return on that investment, rather than an experience of nature, beauty, or truth. So in its design, and in the way it presents the value of poetry as currency, Gustafson’s anthology shifts the parameters of the Canadian anthology towards consumerism, and specifically towards the wartime consumer, who wanted value for money, in portable form. Penguin targeted this consumer more than any other publisher, and pursued the technologies necessary to connect customers with books. To this end, Penguin invented the Penguincubator, a vending machine that dispensed paperbacks in London streets. The ‘dispensable’ form of Gustafson’s anthology was eminently appropriate to this increasingly consumer-driven age. It was sold by a machine, just like a package of cigarettes, and it cost the same amount. Conscious of its contemporary audience, Penguin sold advertisements that appeared in the anthology: Pears ‘Jif’ shaving stick, Cadbury’s chocolate factory at Bournville, and Chappie Dog Food. The inclusion of this kind of advertising altered the status of the book itself, bringing it closer to a magazine format and diluting its authority as a self-contained literary work divorced from consumer culture. The advertisements also reinforced the connection between poetry, consumerism, and the war. Although Gustafson’s anthology was designed to break with anthological tradition, the advertising subtexts provided multiple reminders about the constancy of tradition, domestic life, England, cookies, gardens, pets, chocolate – home. Gustafson’s anthology of Canadian poetry was paradoxically placed in the midst of reminders about a British homeland. It also gained credibility in Canada through its foreign imprimatur. While the book did list Toronto as the place of publication, along with Harmondsworth and New York, Penguin had no offices in Canada. However, Penguin books had gained such international recognition since the company’s founding in 1936 that the appearance of an anthology of Canadian poetry sporting the Pelican imprint gave it immediate authority. And, unlike indigenous Canadian publishing companies, Penguin had an established international distribution network. According to Gustafson, ‘only the exhaustion of paper in Britain prevented the extension of Canadian writing into the world via the Penguins’ (‘Story,’ 75). Beyond its physical packaging, the book felt modern. Gustafson

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organized the book chronologically by the authors’ dates of birth. The youngest poet in the anthology – Alan Brown – was twenty-two. Ronald Hambleton was twenty-five. P.K. Page was twenty-six. For many readers, this would be their first exposure to the work of poets who would come to prominence over the decade: Birney, Marriott, Page, and Gustafson himself (he was thirty-three when the book was published). Yet its contemporaneity had limits. Although it was designed for soldiers, it conveys little sense of the editor’s desire to include poetry written in response to the war. A.J.M. Smith suggests one reason why: ‘Canada had not yet come close enough to the smell of blood for it to enter the brains of her poets, and we can find here as yet little but vicarious emotion’ (‘Canadian Anthologies,’ 474). The anthology opens with a contemporary gesture: the selection of a Haida poem in translation, a framing device that serves to authorize Native literature and to present it – as had then become the custom – within the context of Canadian writing at large. Undoubtedly, Gustafson understood the symbolism of this gesture and made the selections with good intention. But if literature in translation was to be included in an anthology of English Canadian poetry, why stop there? The translation of the two Haida songs was a way of announcing that somehow they introduced the English-Canadian tradition, a strangely unproblematized choice that would be made by other editors in the future. In choosing the Haida songs, Gustafson seemed to be following the lead of Mark van Doren, the American anthologist who included three translations from the Haida in his American and British Literature Since 1890 (1939). Gustafson’s reliance on van Doren’s lead is odd, because Gustafson complained elsewhere that in making their selections of Canadian material, critics abroad had relied ‘mainly on material offered in Canadian collections’ (‘Anthology,’ 230). Now Gustafson was relying on Canadian material offered in an American collection. The Haida songs occupy less than a page, and then there is a selection of work that consolidates canonical selections from the past and introduces new voices that will join that canon. The Confederation poets are here, along with Isabella Valancy Crawford. While they are represented by several poems each, a number of writers active in the early twentieth century are reduced to only one selection each: Tom MacInnes, John McCrae, Theodore Goodrich Roberts, Marjorie Pickthall, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, and J.E.H. MacDonald. Then we come to the modernists, and Gustafson’s enthusiasm returns through the selection of multiple poems by Arthur Stringer, Frank Oliver Call (one of Gustafson’s men-

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tors), Wilson MacDonald, and the New Provinces group. The youngest poets in the volume are represented by one poem each. Although Gustafson claimed that the criteria inspiring his selections were new, he made little effort to change the ways in which female authors were included in the Canadian canon. As Carole Gerson has shown, Gustafson’s anthology initiated a trend towards choosing ‘the best,’ thereby replacing an ‘accessible canon’ with a ‘selective canon’ that limited the representation of women. Only 23.5 per cent of the authors included in his anthology were women, and six of these women were born in or before 1875. Women fared worse in Gustafson’s anthology than they did in the anthologies of Dewart, Lighthall, Wetherell, Garvin, Stephen, and Carman and Pierce (see Gerson, ‘Anthologies,’ 151). Which poets did Gustafson value most among the fifty-five figures he included? One way of answering this question lies in recognizing that space was in short supply in this anthology and Gustafson had to make every selection count. He wasn’t willing to invest more than a page in the newcomers, and he was also reluctant to give space to figures from the past. The largest space went to E.J. Pratt, A.M. Klein, A.J.M. Smith, and Gustafson himself, with substantial representations (given the space limitations) by Raymond Knister, W.W.E. Ross, F.R. Scott, Robert Finch, and Leo Kennedy. Gustafson was obviously influenced by the New Provinces group (even though he never acknowledged the fact), and saw his anthology as a means of continuing and reinforcing their efforts. Gustafson’s anthology was a financial success. But how influential was it? While Gustafson’s poetry has received some critical attention, even his own loyal critics paid scant attention to the anthology. Wendy Keitner says it is his ‘single most important critical contribution to the development of Canadian literature’ (25) but does not say why. Dermot McCarthy spends less than a page on the anthology in his essay on Gustafson in Canadian Writers and Their Works, and even in his fulllength book on Gustafson, discussion of the anthology is practically non-existent. In a footnote in his book, McCarthy complains that Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski’s The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada is ‘seriously flawed’ because of their ‘failure to include any articles that discuss this anthology’ (156). However, those articles have eluded me as well. I wrote to McCarthy about this, to ask him what I had missed. He replied: ‘Reading the footnote today [his study was published in 1991], I can only surmise that my actual complaint was the lack of critical discussion per se of Gustafson’s role in the “making of modern

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poetry in Canada,” but clearly what the note suggests, and your query sniffs out, is that there are articles that discuss the Penguin Anthology in a way relevant to Dudek and Gnarowski’s project but that they have ignored or rejected them. I did and do not want to suggest that, however’ (Letter to the author, 5 November 2008). McCarthy is right: Gustafson has been ignored, and his anthology is usually bypassed. In The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997), William Toye and Eugene Benson say vaguely that ‘it contributed to the formation of a canon of good and great poets that has had a long and important influence’ (505), while the entry on Gustafson in Margery Fee and Leslie Monkman’s Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) makes no mention of the anthology. Clearly the financial success of the book had no bearing upon its reception by later anthologists and critics. Perhaps this was because his introduction was not explicitly polemical; like other anthologists, Gustafson drew attention to the way in which he was addressing tradition and innovation, but he did not make the tension between old and new the centre of his preface, nor did he try to classify the poets he included into specific camps, favouring one group over the other. Ultimately, Gustafson was a Canadian literary nationalist working in a new consumer-oriented format, but his fundamental values demonstrated that he was keeping the Canadian anthologist’s code. He believed that literature and nation supported each other, and that a viable nation could not exist in the absence of a literary culture. The author’s task was to interpret life around him, to bear witness to the country. The editor’s task was to encourage this mimetic activity. If anything, the war only heightened Gustafson’s literary nationalism. When he edited another anthology for Penguin in 1944 (Canadian Accent: A Collection of Stories and Poems by Contemporary Writers from Canada), Gustafson seemed even more conservative in his approach, falling back on the outspoken anthological values aligned with his predecessors. Like Edward Hartley Dewart and William Douw Lighthall in the previous century and virtually every other national literature anthologist before him, Gustafson maintained that ‘if a nation is to endure there must also be self-recognition’ and that ‘the spirit of a nation is nowhere more secure than in its literature’ (7). This ‘spirit’ was essential to ‘great literature’ because ‘the writer is the product of the nation in which he exists’ and ‘the quotient of a poet is his division into the society he interprets’ (8). For Fee, Gustafson’s aims as an anthologist are consistent: ‘His main purpose in producing these anthologies is

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to revise the Romantic nationalist canon, rather than to overthrow the Romantic nationalist theory’ (‘Literary Criticism,’ 361). When war broke out in 1939, it was possible to identify several schools of poetry and fiction in Canada, but the conservatives still held sway. The founding of Contemporary Verse (1940), Preview (1942), and First Statement (1942) began to challenge that hegemony, but it took some pointed literary criticism to really shake things loose. That criticism emerged in the first anthology to shift Canadian poetry towards its post-war trajectory: A.J.M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry. Although Smith’s anthology was published in 1943, before the war ended, it set up the conditions for a debate about Canadian literature that would define the post-war literary ethos. Smith’s transformative book is considered in the following chapter.

Chapter Four

From The Book of Canadian Poetry to New Wave Canada, 1943–1966

A.J.M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry has long held canonical status in the repertoire of Canadian anthologies. Since its publication by the University of Chicago Press in 1943, the anthology has prompted a series of responses and counter-responses that define the tone of postwar discussions of Canadian poetry; the values promoted in Smith’s anthology affected the development of fiction as well. We can trace the response to Smith’s collection through several documents appearing in the years immediately following the anthology’s publication, but its impact extends right into the 1990s, and perhaps beyond, mainly because the central influence of the collection was the introduction of a binary conception of the forces accounting for the evolution of Canadian literature. Eli Mandel provides a concise description of the extent of Smith’s anthological influence: The Book of Canadian Poetry in its first version of 1943 remains, quite probably along with Ralph Gustafson’s anthologies, a landmark collection, a sort of watershed; on the one side of it, stretching back to E.H. Dewart’s pioneering Selections from Canadian Poets in 1864, the introduction to which Smith returns often, on that side we find an unweeded garden of ‘songs,’ ‘wreaths,’ ‘treasures,’ ‘flowers,’ titles presumably influenced by the etymology of anthology and by genteel taste, and on the other side, from 1943 to the present a sort of mad numerology of proliferating collections reminding us of regional diversity, ethnic differentiation, urbanization as a social reality, class structure, changing taste and preference, Maoism, Sexism, and Saskatoon. (20–1)

Binary structures are implicit in every anthology, because the very act of editorial selection implies an editor-reader dichotomy. The edi-

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tor must obtain a certain level of identification with his or her readers. At the same time, the editor must be an arbiter of taste, someone who stands apart in pursuing a departure from accepted norms. The editor’s role inevitably embodies a conflicted stance. One aspect of this conflicted stance, as it appears in The Book of Canadian Poetry, is so well known that it has achieved mythical status: the distinction between what Smith called the ‘native’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ schools of Canadian poetry. This is the critical distinction that is Smith’s central legacy. It introduced a convenient structuring device that allowed future critics to explain the nation’s literature through a variety of related binaries. The original binary emerges with this statement in Smith’s introduction: ‘Some of the poets have concentrated on what is individual and unique in Canadian life and others upon what it has in common with life everywhere. The one group has attempted to describe and interpret whatever is essentially and distinctively Canadian and thus come to terms with an environment that is only now ceasing to be colonial. The other, from the very beginning, has made a heroic effort to transcend colonialism by entering into the universal, civilizing culture of ideas’ (5). Although Smith’s controversial statement appeared in 1943, he had in fact been developing a dualistic model since 1939, when he published ‘Canadian Poetry – A Minority Report.’ In that essay, he expressed a general sense of disillusionment with the state of critical commentary on Canadian poetry and argued that ‘Canadian poetry is lost, or it has not found itself; new vistas are opening ahead of it, or it has come to a dead end. It is either up a tree or it has slipped from its high state, and it needs somebody to give it a fresh direction. It should mirror the aspirations of the struggling masses; or it should return to the grand manner and high morals of our fathers’ (174). This is a poetics of either/or. Smith’s arguments consistently develop in terms of oppositional pairings, as if every idea he proposes cannot proceed without its linked antagonist. Smith sets out to critique the ‘undiscriminating praise bestowed on our standard poets by our most influential critics’ (175), a complaint that soon leads him to consider the role of anthologists in creating this kind of undemanding critical environment. He faults earlier anthologists for selecting poems on the basis of their ‘Canadianism,’ which he defines as ‘some obvious and superficial manifestation of being Canadian’ (176). Smith would replace the Canadian criterion with a different set of standards: The work must have ‘poetic vitality’ (176); it has to be ‘a part of life’ (176); the anthologist has to exhibit ‘discrimination’ (177) and

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‘taste’ (176). In order to compete on the world stage, Canadian poets and editors would have to realize that ‘whether they like it or not, they are in open competition with the whole English-writing world. If they shrink from imposing on themselves standards as high as those of the literary world of England and the United States they will have to expect neglect and resign themselves to bask forever in the tempered airs of the native nursery’ (178). However, Smith argues that embracing these international standards will be difficult, because the Canadian public is a ‘colonial public’ that is ‘timid, eager to please, and stupid’ (179). In pursuit of some idealized vision of a Native Canadian literature, critics (‘mostly college professors or journalists’ [179]) focused on patriotism. They made it ‘their main business to look for, and find, some special quality, tone, or thing in the verse written in Canada which was uniquely expressive of the Canadian soil or of the Canadian landscape or of Canadian human nature’ (179). Smith complains that these critics have not looked at contemporary poetry outside Canada. He advises poets to send their verses ‘to the best English and American literary magazines’: ‘Until you are sure that your work is acceptable there, leave the Canadian magazines alone’ (185). It’s not difficult to imagine how Smith’s words must have upset those patriotic critics who had invested so much in trying to differentiate Canadian literature from foreign models, nor is it difficult to imagine the resentment felt by those poets who were pursuing a realist aesthetic that rejected romanticism and embraced the local and the particular over the metaphysical and the cosmopolitan. By the time Smith published his anthology in 1943, his militant support of international standards had been evident for years, most obviously in ‘Canadian Poetry – A Minority Report’ and in his rejected preface to New Provinces; however, Smith was advocating this stance as early as his essay ‘Wanted: Canadian Criticism,’ published in 1928. In order to understand some of the dynamics inherent in Smith’s distinction between ‘native’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ poetry, one has to examine the forces accounting for the anthology’s genesis. When The Book of Canadian Poetry was released in 1943, Smith had been living in the United States for many years. His first academic post was from 1930 to 1931 at Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, Indiana, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on the metaphysical poets. That position was followed by a two-year contract at Michigan State College. When that contract ended in 1933, Smith graded papers for a year. Then he moved to Crete, Nebraska, where he taught English at Doane College. In 1935 he took up a position at the University of South Dakota, and then in 1936

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he landed a post at Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science in East Lansing, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. Smith’s research for The Book of Canadian Poetry was funded by an American Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941–42, which allowed him to take a leave of absence from the college. Smith was teaching, writing, researching, and editing in an all-American context. By the time New Provinces was published in 1936, Smith had been out of Canada for six years, often on the move. When The Book of Canadian Poetry appeared in 1943, he had been absent from Canada for thirteen years. It is true that in preparing his anthology he returned to Canada in the summer of 1942 and spoke at length with writers in Montreal and Toronto. But interviewing writers on a brief visit is not the same as living in their community on a daily basis. To a certain extent, Smith had lost touch with the ethos that characterized wartime Canada, and he had not been in the country to witness the profound shift towards national self-consciousness that explained the popularity of books being published in the country at that time. Smith was advising poets and readers to seek out international standards in the very same year they were rushing to buy Bruce Hutchison’s best-selling The Unknown Country, which opened with these words: ‘No one knows my country, neither the stranger nor its own sons. My country is hidden in the dark and teeming brain of youth upon the eve of its manhood. My country has not found itself nor felt its power nor learned its true place’ (3). Hutchison called on his readers to express their patriotism and to celebrate the country’s nuances. Meanwhile, from his academic post in East Lansing, Michigan, Smith was telling Canadian readers to look overseas. He was a perceptive and engaged editor, but he had long left the community of writers and critics he had known as a student at McGill University. Although he had obviously established a reputation for himself in Canada, and although he continued to correspond with several Canadian writers, we have to remember that Smith left the country when he was twenty-eight years old. Regardless of the contribution he made to Canadian literature in the years leading up to his anthology, for many readers and critics, Smith might well have been an American academic who published his anthology with a well-known American university press. That could only send a negative signal to those writers and critics who had been working to create a new sense of poetic value in Canada. Some observers might have felt that the distinction Smith drew between native and cosmopolitan traditions was also rooted in an

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American model. As Philip Kokotailo observes, ‘Smith’s underlying distinction between the two traditions bears notable similarities to a division that was then gaining currency in the representation of American literary history. For Smith, the most recent statement of this division would have been Philip Rahv’s essay “Paleface and Redskin” (1939). Rahv distinguished between the “two polar types” of American authors identified in his title, associating experience, energy, and “life conceived as an opportunity” with redskin writers; consciousness, sensibility, and “life conceived as a discipline” with paleface writers’ (32). Kokotailo notes that the ‘paleface’ and ‘redskin’ dichotomy identified by Rahv may have even earlier roots in the ‘Highbrow’ and ‘Lowbrow’ antithesis described in an essay by Van Wyck Brooks published in 1915. In ‘The Confessions of a Compulsive Anthologist’ (1976), Smith did not directly acknowledge the influence of either Rahv or Brooks, but he did say that the native-cosmopolitan split ‘clearly exists in American poetry as well as Canadian’ (10). While there is no conclusive evidence supporting the idea that Smith read these American critics, their works would have been hard for him to ignore, especially because they were published in prominent American scholarly journals, with Rahv’s essay appearing in the prestigious Kenyon Review just a year before Smith began work on his anthology. As Kokotailo says, ‘the divisions expounded by Rahv and Brooks were very much in the air he was breathing when Smith set out to compile his critical and historical anthology’ (33). The American influences behind Smith’s collection also extended to his publisher: Smith had succeeded in aligning himself with the University of Chicago Press. That alone gave his Canadian anthology authority and credibility, perhaps even more credibility than it might have achieved with any Canadian publisher at the time. Despite this empowerment, Smith remained fundamentally out of touch with the contemporary poetry scene in Canada; he didn’t understand the extent to which many of the complaints he voiced in his introduction were already being addressed by others. In ‘The Confessions of a Compulsive Anthologist,’ Smith rejects the idea that he was too removed from the poetry scene in Canada to appreciate its shifting landscape. He says: ‘I was certainly not unaware of the fact that poetry in Canada in the last two Modern sections of The Book of Canadian Poetry had been written since 1926 – most of them in the mid-thirties and a few in the very early forties’ (114). Yet Smith’s detractors found it hard to get around the idea that an American academic who had sporadically

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returned home was telling Canadian writers how to avoid colonialism while his academic position marked him as the colonizer who would dictate standards to his distant subjects. The response to Smith’s anthology is a response to his double-sided position. The native-cosmopolitan binary was not just about explaining a poetic tradition; it was implicitly about power and subjugation, imperial editor and colonial reader, American power and Canadian weakness. As Smith said in his introduction, Canadian poets could be ‘heroic’ by embracing foreign ideals. Smith would have denied that his own editorial activity was implicitly about intellectual heroism. But the conditions surrounding his move to the United States and the publication of the anthology replicated the conditions he had advised Canadian writers to embrace. In encouraging them to turn to foreign models for inspiration, he was also telling them to turn to him. In setting up foreign magazines and publishing houses as approved arbiters of taste, he set up the foreign publisher of his own book as an exemplar. Behind all this was the idea that Canada was somehow not good enough to produce The Book of Canadian Poetry. It was best handled outside Canada, by an editor who had made ‘a heroic effort to transcend colonialism by entering into the universal civilizing culture of ideas’ (5). Smith’s introduction was explicitly about the native-cosmopolitan tension, but that tension is much less interesting than the metaphors it invokes: editor as deserter; editor as traitor; editor as the dispossessed anthologist whose book exposes the conflicts he himself experiences – editor as native (Smith’s past); editor as cosmopolitan (Smith’s present). The narrative of Smith’s introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry has much less to do with defining two traditions than it does with his desire to reconcile the opposing forces that define him as an individual – first as an outcast whose collection makes the impossible promise of coming home, and second as an expatriate who knows that he has left Canada, and that, living in the United States, he is home. In many ways, Smith’s anthology is about him. This connection is not lost on Mandel, who reads the anthology as a long poem. Mandel asks: ‘Who is the maker of anthologies and why? Is every writer his own secret anthologist? And after all, what is an anthology? A collection of poems or essays or stories? One long poem, itself, as James Reaney would have it? A critical rather than an historical comment?’ (‘Masks,’ 17). In working through the tensions between native and cosmopolitan, Smith narrates the story of his own transgressions, his own uneasy rejection of the native, his own anxious alliance with the modern – the

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metaphysical, the cosmopolitan, the universal, the civilizing, the contemporary – call it what you will. The introduction to Smith’s anthology is about identity and all the troubling metaphors that make identity come alive. That is what Smith means when he demands that editors collect material that is alive, vital, intense, and connected. He means that those works are about nothing less than the very being of the poet, because the editorial act of selection is an existential act. From this perspective, Smith’s anthology is a confession, a repudiation, an apology, an act of faith. And in that anthology’s central narrative, in the anguished choices of its editor, readers can see fragments of themselves. Even the most naive editor understands, at some level, that the selections he or she makes are about self-definition; editors define themselves through their choices. The most interesting editors make explicit the connection between literary selection and existential awareness. One way of judging them is to determine the extent to which they are conscious of the connection. In the most influential anthologies, that connection becomes a point of contention, the focalization of an editorial consciousness that reveals deep-seated self-doubt, the cry of a person who is alone and who surrounds himself with a community of poets who speak only on paper or in the silence of how we read anthologies to ourselves. There are many voices here, but only one that is in control. The poets in an anthology are fundamentally passive. The anthologist orders their world. He speaks through his selections. But he knows that his power is ultimately illusory, and that his choices are as good as dust. If I am correct in arguing that the difference between Smith’s anthology and those that preceded it lies not only in its range of selection but also in its double-sided expression of existential affirmation and existential doubt, then it should not be surprising to find that those who responded to the anthology saw it in terms of their own sense of self-definition. The business of anthological reception became personal and political; it was no longer a polite act. Smith’s introduction allowed Canadian literature and criticism to become invested in the nature of modern identity. This marked a radical shift. The response to The Book of Canadian Poetry began almost immediately. In ‘Canada and Its Poetry’ (1943), Northrop Frye used his review of the anthology to construct a theory of Canadian poetry that had a profound impact in the years to come. As Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski observe, Frye’s review represents ‘the first attempt at a theory of Canadian literature on large comprehensive lines’ (84). Frye

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spends a few pages reviewing the contents of Smith’s collection and praises the time and research that went into the selection process. Then he begins to warm to his theme: ‘The qualities of our poetry that appear from this book to be distinctively Canadian are not those that one readily thinks of’ (89). Meditating on these qualities, Frye finds himself drawn to the idea of doubleness. Smith’s two-sidedness is beginning to make itself felt. Frye spends a few lines thinking about these modes of doubleness as they appear in some of Smith’s selections: ‘If a poet is a patriot, for instance, there may be two natures within him, one scribbling ready-made patriotic doggerel and the other trying to communicate the real feeling his country inspires him with. If he is religious, the poet in him may reach God in very subtle ways; but the man in him who is not a poet may be a more commonplace person, shocked by his own poetic boldness. If he is a revolutionary, the poet in him may have to argue with a Philistine materialist also in him who does not really see the point of poetry at all’ (89). What Smith’s anthology communicates to Frye is this pervading sense of duality, both in terms of its introduction and in the selections themselves. Only after he has identified this principle is he ready to take the next step, which is to assert that the ‘creative schizophrenia’ he has identified in the volume is ‘common in Canada’ (89). Frye explains that this is because Canada is both a nation and a colony in an empire, a fact that forces Canadians to confront two sets of values simultaneously. What, then, can Canadians do to escape this schizophrenia? The answer to this question lies in determining what is essentially Canadian, to find a source of identity that will transcend the doubleness that is at the heart of the colonial-national experience. In searching for this source, Frye falls back on Romantic nationalist ideology. Or as Fee says, ‘like many other English-Canadian critics, Frye is a Romantic nationalist at home, and something else abroad’ (‘Literary Criticism,’ 392). Perhaps Frye’s attraction to Smith’s work is grounded in their shared interest in keeping the nationalist code that unites Canadian anthologists and critics. Frye doesn’t really want to cure Canadians of their schizophrenia – it is distinctive and empowering. Yet the question of how one might transcend that psychosis still fascinates him, and it is what leads him to a radical theory of Canadian response to the natural world, which is a function of his own response to Smith’s anthology: ‘According to Mr. Smith’s book, the outstanding achievement of Canadian poetry is in the evocation of stark terror. Not a coward’s terror, of course; but a

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controlled vision of the causes of cowardice. The immediate source of this is obviously the frightening loneliness of a huge and thinly-settled country. When all the intelligence, morality, reverence and simian cunning of man confronts a sphinx-like riddle of the indefinite like the Canadian winter the man seems as helpless as a trapped mink and as lonely as a loon’ (93). This observation, of course, lies at the heart of the ‘garrison mentality’ theory of Canadian literature that Frye would go on to develop in other essays, most notably ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology’ (1956) and the ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada (1965). What most interests me about Frye’s initial response to The Book of Canadian Poetry is not this apparent terror of the natural world. It is the ways in which he sees this response to an external terror as the reflection of an internal horror, a Canadian heart of darkness. He speaks of the external landscape as a ‘faceless mask of unconsciousness’ and says that ‘whatever sinister lurks in nature lurks also in us’ (95). In short, ‘the unconscious horror of nature and the subconscious horrors of the mind thus coincide’ (95). This is a crucial statement; it prompts Frye to assert that ‘Canadian poetry is at its best a poetry of incubus and cauchemar, the source of which is the unusually exposed contact of the poet with nature which Canada provides’ (96). Smith’s anthology allows Frye to see that the poet’s inner terror is projected onto the landscape; but it also allows him to see that the mover behind this world embodies the terror. Smith becomes the editor who can channel doubleness, the very essence of an alienation that is at the heart of his modernity. Frye isolates the allegorical status of Smith’s introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry and the anthology itself: it is about division; it is about doubt; it is about loneliness; it is about being out in the wilderness, away from home. Yet at the same time, it is written in the mistaken and therefore fascinating belief that learning (‘the tradition’) can save the editor from his exile and provide him with the ancestral armour he will need to survive in the wilderness he created through his selections. Although the focus of Frye’s commentary is Smith and the poetry he collects, it is clear that he sees in Smith the editor a kind of everyman, just as he sees the book as a symbolic tabula rasa through which the reader writes his or her own journey. This is why Frye observes that ‘anthologies ought to have blank pages at the end on which the reader may copy his own neglected favourites’ (87) and, by doing so, write him- or herself into existence. This kind of selfwriting by editor and critic is at the heart of the anthology’s modernity.

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Dudek and Gnarowski note in their commentary on Frye’s review: ‘The view that a particular conception of nature – nature as cruel, indifferent, or violent – is recurrent in our poetry presents a significant and daring hypothesis. The same idea, of course, can be treated historically and related to central currents of modern thought. It then appears as a stage in the disillusionment of modern man with the romantic idea of nature – from romantic “pantheism” to existentialist “meaninglessness” – and the idea can be carried further to possible forms of reconstruction’ (84–5). While the central preoccupation of Frye’s review is an elaboration of the ‘creative schizophrenia’ (89) that characterizes Canadian life, he also devotes some attention to defending Smith’s idea of the cosmopolitan tradition, arguing that most great poetry ‘has been the fruit of endless study and reading’ rather than the product of ‘first-hand contact with life,’ which Frye calls the ‘Ferdinand the Bull theory of poetry’ (91). Here he is clearly taking aim at contemporary American poetry and opposing the proponents of what he calls ‘Tarzanism’ – those poets who ‘have sought for the primitive and direct and have tried to avoid the consciously literary and speak the language of the common man’ (92). Although Frye does not seem to have had him in mind when he made this comment, it rankled John Sutherland, whose response to Smith’s anthology opened another route into the study of Canadian literature that was quite distant from Frye’s. Sutherland’s early reputation rests on his work as the editor of First Statement, which he founded in Montreal in 1942, after his poems were rejected by Preview, the Montreal magazine edited by Patrick Anderson. Sutherland’s editorial board included Louis Dudek and Irving Layton, who supported Sutherland in his pursuit of poetry that was connected to the local and particular. The emphasis was on ‘social realism.’ Preview was influenced by British modernism; First Statement looked more to American models such as Whitman, Masters, Frost, Sandburg, and Crane. Wynne Francis provides a succinct description of the contrast between the two groups: Several members of the ‘Preview Group’ had been educated in England or had come to Canada comparatively recently and were quite naturally steeped in modern British poetry; while others, like Smith, had long maintained a predilection for Eliotian, metaphysical poetry, terse, elliptical, intellectual, literary. By contrast, First Statement poets prided themselves on writing a masculine, virile ‘poetry of experience’ – their own experi-

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ence. They would not write of the phoenix and the hyacinth but of Berri Street and De Bullion. Scorning the artifice of metaphor and symbol, they preferred to shout huzzahs and hurl insults, to fight, spit, sweat, urinate and make love in their poems, and did so in a deliberate defiance of Preview. They eschewed all abstractions and swore that ‘words’ would not come between their poetry and life. ‘Celebration, not cerebration’ as Layton was later to phrase it. (27)

While there were strong differences between the two magazines, they were not strong enough to prevent them from merging in 1945 to become Northern Review, under Sutherland’s editorship. (Brian Trehearne argues that Francis presents ‘misleading antinomies’ in describing the two magazines and suggests that the differences between them were not nearly as stark as she makes them appear [‘Critical Episodes,’ 21].) In the same year, 1945, Sutherland founded First Statement Press, which was the only publishing company in Canada, aside from Ryerson Press, that was willing to invest in contemporary Canadian writing. (Ryerson had published Ronald Hambleton’s Unit of Five in 1944, an anthology containing works by Louis Dudek, Hambleton, P.K. Page, Raymond Souster, and James Wreford.) In 1947, First Statement published Other Canadians, Sutherland’s attempt to present an alternative anthology to Smith’s, one that would contradict the cosmopolitan tradition valorized in The Book of Canadian Poetry. Sutherland’s collection was not entirely revolutionary, since the five poets represented in Hambleton’s Unit of Five all appeared in Other Canadians. Hambleton beat Sutherland to the punch, as Ryerson showed itself to be willing to support young writers before Sutherland’s anthology came out. But Other Canadians is unique by virtue of the ferocity of its introductory attack on Smith, a barrage of invective and insult that is unrivalled in the history of Canadian anthologies. Although most observers discuss Sutherland’s response in the context of his introduction to Other Canadians, his objections to Smith began years before. Sutherland had registered as a student in English literature at McGill (Smith’s alma mater) in 1941. One of Sutherland’s professors, Harold G. Files, compiled an anthology of young poets at McGill, to which Sutherland contributed. The anthology was never published, but the idea of putting together such a collection inspired Sutherland, and when Other Canadians appeared in 1947, it contained poetry by a number of the writers included in Files’s unpublished manuscript, including Louis Dudek, Dennis Giblin, Irving Layton, Bruce Ruddick, and Sutherland himself. In 1943 Sutherland married Audrey Aikman, a

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student who was the poetry editor of the McGill student magazine the Forge. Sutherland’s world was centred at McGill, and even after he left the university, he took the alliances he made there with him. It seems unlikely that he could have ignored the role that Smith played in exactly the same milieu, some fifteen years earlier. His response to Smith was undoubtedly territorial. In any number of ways, Sutherland was telling Smith that the literary world attached to McGill had been passed to another generation, and that he intended to take up Smith’s former role. Smith was born in 1902. Sutherland was born in 1919. Smith was old enough to have been Sutherland’s father. How much did the anxiety of influence colour his response to Smith’s anthology? Desmond Pacey views Sutherland’s attack as an example of ‘bravado which can now be seen to have resulted from his own uncertainty’ (‘English Canadian Poetry,’ 257). Sutherland’s initial response to Smith’s anthology did not occur with the publication of Other Canadians in 1947. Early versions of the polemical introduction to that book appeared in several editorials in First Statement in 1944. Sutherland takes issue with the distinction Smith makes between the native and cosmopolitan traditions. In ‘Literary Colonialism,’ Sutherland turns Smith’s argument upside down by asserting that the true colonials are in fact the cosmopolitans, who take their marching orders from foreign masters. They ‘waited for the go-ahead signal to come from England and America,’ and even when they got the signal, according to Sutherland, they were ‘approximately a decade late’ (32). Implicit in this criticism is the idea that Smith had not kept up with the times, that he had failed to appreciate the new realism emerging in Canadian poetry, precisely the kind of realism that Sutherland was publishing in First Statement (this despite the fact that most of these poets had only started publishing around the time that Smith was completing his anthology). In ‘Cosmopolitanism and Our Literary Provincialism,’ Sutherland complained about the lack of an audience for contemporary Canadian poetry and blamed the continuing influence of the cosmopolitan school on Canadian readers’ apathy. In ‘Literature and Society’ he called for poetry that would exhibit a ‘social consciousness’ in the face of ‘social chaos, of which the war is only the violent and morbid symptom’ (33). The formal means of achieving this kind of ‘social consciousness’ was outlined in ‘Towards a Canadian Realism.’ Sutherland maintained that ‘Canadian literature is “romantic,” if one can use the word to indicate its lack of connection with life’ (35). In other words, ‘a fundamental realism is lacking in Canadian writing,’

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and editors need to encourage the work of writers ‘who show themselves capable of a critical awareness of the individual and society’ (35). Like so many other Canadian anthologists, Sutherland was a nationalist wearing a realist’s clothes. By the time he published Other Canadians, Sutherland had become more indignant, and perhaps more resentful of Smith’s role. He called Smith a prude who upheld Catholic ideals and classical models in the face of modernity. Sutherland described Smith as a royalist who turned his back on innovation and fostered a new colonialism by insisting on the superiority of British models: ‘Mr. Smith, like his spiritual father T.S. Eliot, is a traditionalist and classicist in literature. Regarding with trepidation the example of America, he flies to European fields, and to those sheltered haunts where the “classical” tradition still maintains itself. Mr. Eliot has not taken more glances at the classical world than he could manage over the shoulder of Dante; but Mr. Smith has slipped past the colossal statue by night and come to anchor in the bay of Virgil. The critic is here to remind us that Canadian poetry is more truly Roman than we could ever have imagined in our wildest dreams’ (9). Sutherland understood that in order to praise the cosmopolitan tradition, Smith had to invent an antagonistic tradition – the native tradition – to make the praise credible: ‘The traditional bias of Mr. Smith’s criticism means that his allegiance to the Good – i.e. the cosmopolitan – is fixed and irrevocable, but it also means that a Bad must be invented over which the Good can duly triumph’ (8). He argues that Smith’s model depended on the binary. Sutherland rejected the binary; Frye built on it. In the second section of his introduction, Sutherland turns to what he calls ‘new necessities.’ The difficulty of promoting a new kind of Canadian poetry is a function of prevailing critical values, which are out of touch with post-war reality: ‘It is concerned with the past only for the sake of the past, and therefore it is meaningless and dead’ (13). Criticism needs to move towards a recognition of contemporary standards and focus on ‘the social theme which has become of prime importance in the new movement’ (13). Smith is among those conservative critics who are out of touch. They are responsible for maintaining a ‘decayed faith’ and a ‘shoddy and outworn morality, which blends in Canada with the colonial’s desire to preserve the status quo’ (14). This, says Sutherland, is the ‘art-religion hypothesis’ (14). But it is the wrong hypothesis, because it ignores the contemporary poet’s concern with everyday life: ‘May it not be that the actual environment is even more

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essential in the case of poetry? Does not the poet work upon everyday things so as to extract their essence and give them back to us in more concentrated, meaningful form?’ (14). Sutherland was recommending social realism. The poets he supported were ‘concerned with the individual and the individual’s relation to society’ (15). For these new poets, ‘the seven-day fireworks of the world’s creation matter less than the creation of the socialist state; the cure of earthly ills is to be achieved by economics or psychology rather than by divine intervention’ (15). They ‘intend at least to speak to the average man of everyday realities and of the principles which operate in them’ (15). Sutherland made clear his socialist leanings and proffered his anthology as the harbinger of a new order, one that would replace a European consciousness with a North American one focused on everyday life. From this perspective, he pronounced Smith close to dead: ‘Mr. Smith’s oxygen tent with its tap to the spirit will keep a few remnants breathing for a while, but can hardly impede the growth of socialism in Canada, or prevent the radical consequences which must follow for the Canadian writer’ (20). Sutherland devoted a lot of energy to portraying Smith as his alter ego. Although he was correct in suggesting that Smith’s cosmopolitan tradition was another form of colonialism, he didn’t give Smith credit for the ways in which he recognized the kinds of changes Sutherland was talking about. If we look back to Smith’s introduction, it becomes clear that although he privileged the cosmopolitan tradition, he was also pursuing many of the same values supported by Sutherland. Literary historians have made much of their differences, but not much of the ways in which they shared common values. Chief among these values was an interest in realism. This was nothing new for Smith. Despite his interest in T.S. Eliot and the metaphysical poets, Smith was also a student of his age, and he recognized that in order to be ‘alive,’ poetry had to demonstrate its involvement with the real world that people inhabited. He stressed the need for accuracy in reflecting the conditions of real life and echoed Sutherland’s view that the poet had to be responsible to the political currents of the time. In order to construct Smith as an adversary, Sutherland chose to ignore Smith’s repeated calls for realism. He set up a distinction between realism and metaphysics, or mimesis and myth, that was every bit as formulaic as Smith’s distinction between native and cosmopolitan. Sutherland and Smith inadvertently worked together to create the governing binaries influencing future anthologists and critics. But they

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were really just formalizing and renaming binaries that had existed in Canadian anthologies all along. Sutherland’s ‘social realism’ was a modernized expression of nationalism while Smith’s ‘cosmopolitanism’ was a displaced form of imperialism. Later, the anti-mimetic and anti-national values aligned with Smith’s cosmopolitanism morphed into postmodernism, while the mimetic values associated with Sutherland’s social realism became the call for coherence and verisimilitude associated with post-war realism. But just as Sutherland’s social realism was never an absolute realism, so was Smith’s cosmopolitanism never a pure cosmopolitanism. It was precisely because Sutherland and Smith were tempted by both the mimetic and the mythopoeic that they embodied the tensions associated with influential anthologists in Canada. And what they transmitted was a sense of their divided personalities, which were embodied in their editorial creations. Smith’s interest in poetic realism is not some random shard that shows up at a few points in his introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry. The document is peppered with references to realism, mimesis, faithfulness, accuracy, and the importance of focusing on everyday life. The influence of science is obvious: it appears in Smith’s faith in exactitude and in his attention to detail. Sutherland conveniently overlooked this aspect of Smith’s introduction, but the evidence of his interest in what Sutherland called ‘the actual environment’ and ‘everyday things’ is present throughout the text (14). Smith calls Canadian poetry ‘the record of life in Canada’ (5) and argues that ‘the significant tests’ (4) for the poet have to do with ‘sincerity and vitality’ (4). He praises Goldsmith because of ‘some touches of convincing realism’ (6) and admires Sangster because he was ‘the first Canadian poet who made a successful attempt to express a personal reaction to experience in terms of his native landscape and his northern weather’ (8). Although he thinks Mair is glib, he admires the ‘best passages’ in those poems that ‘afford some delightfully precise close-ups of the Canadian woodlands and their flowers, animals, and insects’ and that ‘reveal in Mair an eye for the tiny realities of nature that many better poets might envy’ (9). When he arrives at the Confederation poets, Smith lauds their ‘genuine feeling and accurate observation’ (16). Lampman is the best of the group because of his ‘fine painter’s eye for the details of the landscape’ (16). His most powerful poems have a ‘peculiar authenticity’ and ‘a timeless and placeless significance which, paradoxically enough, rises out of their faithfulness to the local scene and to the specific experience’ (16). Roberts’s best poems ‘shine with a

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sober veracity’ (19). Carman, in contrast, was ‘in essence a fin de siècle aesthete turned out of the overstuffed boudoir into the almost equally overstuffed outdoors’ (18). He was not faithful to nature. But ultimately the Confederation poets’ achievement was questionable because they ‘ignored on principle the coarse bustle of humanity in the hurly-burly business of the developing nation’ (23). Smith’s critique here is very similar to Sutherland’s. Smith dates ‘the modern revival’ to the arrival of Pratt (27). He praises Pratt’s ‘development in the direction of reality and moral seriousness’ (27). In the last section of his introduction, Smith turns to the contemporary poets of his time and says that they ‘turned against rhetoric, sought a sharper, more objective imagery, and limited themselves as far as possible to the language of everyday life and the rhythms of speech’ (28). They tried to render the world with ‘a new faithfulness’ that had previously been passed over as ‘unpoetic.’ ‘They have sought in man’s own mental and social world for a subject matter they can no longer find in the beauty of nature – a beauty that seems either deceptive or irrelevant’ (29). In short, their ‘aims were those of realism’ (28–9). Smith’s emphasis on literary and poetic realism is not restricted to The Book of Canadian Poetry. It is also present in later anthologies. As Anne Compton says, ‘Smith found a peculiar essence that runs like a vein through Canadian poetry; an identification with place. He found it almost in spite of himself’ (31). It was the tension between the cosmopolitan tradition and his belief in the need to write out of immediate experience that energized Smith: ‘He came to work on The Book of Canadian Poetry with a bias in favour of the British tradition, but he believed authenticity in poetry to be determined by “the pressure of experience.” The term cosmopolitan indicates Smith’s lack of ease in straddling two “value” systems – one, English, literary, and traditional and the other, passionate and experiential. The shift Smith would make in the following twenty years of criticism would be away from the former and over to the latter. Unfortunately, almost everyone remembers only the early Smith and his argument for the “English measure”’ (Compton, 34). In The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English and French (1960), Smith argued that ‘whatever else it may be Canadian poetry is and always has been a record of life in the new circumstances of a northern transplantation’ (xxiv). When he introduced The Book of Canadian Prose (1965), more than two decades after The Book of Canadian Poetry, Smith was still focusing on how the authors he selected were ‘writing out of the immediate experience of the world around them and their struggle to master

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it’ (xiv) and on how their works ‘illustrate the special character that geography, climate, and politics have imposed upon the sensibility and thought of the Canadian people’ (xiii). For Smith, it is the ‘inevitable, often unconscious, and sometimes artistic expression of this character in writing’ (xiii) that defines Canadian literature. In Modern Canadian Verse: In English and French (1967), Smith wrote that Canadian poetry ‘expresses implicitly the special character imposed by geography, climate, history, and society upon an individual poetic temperament’ (xvii–xviii). The equation Smith makes repeatedly between a northern people and their land, between consciousness and environmental determinism, demonstrates his debt to Frye and anticipates Atwood’s arguments in Survival. But at the same time, they situate Smith in a long line of editors who have seen the connection between people and place as a defining feature of national consciousness. By affirming a link between environment, realism, and national identity, Smith aligns himself with an anthological tradition that begins with Edward Hartley Dewart. Although Canadian literary history usually records Sutherland’s attack on Smith as evidence of a shift taking place in Canadian literary values, the similarities in their positions on several points suggest that Sutherland may have been using Smith as a straw man. He didn’t find Smith’s ideas offensive enough to exclude him from the editorial board of First Statement. By the same token, the appearance of Preview and First Statement in 1942, a year before the publication of The Book of Canadian Poetry, may have prompted Smith to edit his collection in response to the kind of material appearing in those small magazines. Then, when Smith’s anthology did appear, Sutherland used the occasion of its publication to denounce Smith and to conceive of Other Canadians, which opened with an attack. They may have been sniping at each other, but Smith and Sutherland also fuelled each other, and in fact their cooperation was often explicit. Sutherland credits Smith with creating a new interest in Canadian poetry through his anthology. In an article entitled ‘Letter from Canada,’ published in 1945, Sutherland says that ‘Professor Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry, brought out two years ago by the University of Chicago Press, was big and formidable enough to impress scholarly circles and achieve its own kind of reputation. These successes of Canadian writing abroad have influenced the conservative publishers here, and helped produce the recent flurry of publication’ (qtd. in Whiteman, 43). Smith was on the editorial board of Northern Review from its found-

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ing in 1945 until 1947, when he resigned in protest over Sutherland’s controversial review of Robert Finch’s Poems. While Sutherland may have been publishing articles objecting to Smith’s views in 1944, those did not stop him from seeking Smith’s cooperation on Northern Review the following year, and, in fact, the magazine published one of Smith’s poems (‘The Dead’) late in 1945. Still, he resented Smith’s success. Sutherland was always frustrated when people confused the magazine Northern Review with First Statement Press; it bothered him that someone like Smith got credit for what he had produced. In a letter to Ralph Gustafson in 1946, he complained that ‘a reader was given the impression that Northern Review and First Statement were the same organization, and that Scott and Smith – the only two names mentioned at that point – had somehow “made them possible.” Good God! I sweat out my blood actually printing the books, and then someone else is apparently responsible for them. I know it doesn’t really matter, but it still gets under my skin’ (qtd. in Whiteman, 43–4). By the same token, Sutherland may have objected to Smith’s failure to mention First Statement by name in his anthology, even though Smith only became aware of the magazine during his visit to Montreal in 1942, the year it was founded. Sutherland thought he was responsible for establishing new voices in Canadian poetry, voices that Smith ignored. As Don Precosky notes, ‘Smith’s anthology came out a year after Preview and First Statement had begun and was, at least in part, a result of the renewed interest in Canadian poetry which those two little magazines were generating’ (87). Smith had little respect for the First Statement poets. He said: ‘the general difference was that the First Statement group were poets of “social significance” and I had no use for that. I wanted metaphysical poetry, intellectual poetry and, perhaps, “pure” poetry, and I think that poets like Patrick Anderson, P.K. Page and myself were poets of that sort in contrast to the First Statement people. Souster and Dudek and the early Layton, their hearts were in the right place all right but it seemed to me that their poetry was flat and prosaic – journalism rather than poetry’ (qtd. in Heenan, 75). I don’t think the relevant issue here is whether Smith was right or wrong. More important in terms of this study is the fact that an anthology of Canadian poetry highlighted a distinction between approaches to poetry that would have far-reaching consequences, even if Sutherland did eventually undergo a conversion experience to Catholicism that led him to renounce his earlier objections to Smith’s book. However, the initial conflict between the two men was crucial for what it

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symbolized: Canadian literature was worth fighting about. That symbolism represents a huge move forward in value. Things that are worth fighting about have currency and draw interest. Literary pugilism brings people to the ring. The Smith-Sutherland conflict helped to change the literary climate in Canada. Dudek and Gnarowski say that ‘in the early 1940s the poets struggled in a virtual wasteland of public indifference and isolation’ (66). This condition was explored by E.K. Brown in On Canadian Poetry (1943). Brown argued that ‘no writer can live by the Canadian sales of his books’ (6), because of the sparsity of the reading public, the difficulties of establishing effective distribution and sales networks, and the competition offered by British and American publishers. Another debilitating feature, Brown said, was the ‘colonial spirit’ that made it difficult for Canadians to develop strong convictions about their country: ‘A great art is fostered by artists and audience possessing in common a passionate and peculiar interest in the kind of life that exists in the country where they live’ (17) but ‘in a colonial or semi-colonial community neither artist nor audience will have the passionate and peculiar interest in their immediate surroundings that is required’ (17–18). This was exactly the argument made by F.R. Scott in an essay entitled ‘Canadian War Poetry’ (1942), which was in large part a review of the anthology entitled Voices of Victory (1942). Scott lamented that volume editor Amabel King did not have the courage to promote new material or to engage in the social issues connected with the war. He complained that the selections in the book were tired, patriotic, colonial, and that they reflected a general sense of ennui: ‘Perhaps in Canada more than anywhere else the old traditions are still with us, as dominant as before. Wherever we look – in politics, in the churches, in education, in business, in the press – the pre-war Canadian social order survives, slightly modified but basically unreformed’ (98). Scott wanted writers to show that they ‘perceive the profound drama of man’s attempt to purge himself through suffering of his own making, or that they feel the profound tragedies of an age that threw away its last victory and hesitates now to make vital its war aims by an immediate application of their principles. All is apparently quiet on the philosophic front. So we get sentiment but no passion, loyalty but no dynamic assertion, Ministry of Information leaflets but very little poetry’ (99–100). Although Sutherland could not have missed Scott’s comments when they appeared in Preview in 1942, one would be hard-pressed to find any evidence of a connection he might have made between the war

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and the poetics he supported in Other Canadians, which was one of the first anthologies to be published after the conflict. Given that the period covered by the anthology is 1940–6, it seems bizarre that Sutherland’s interest in social realism did not prompt him to make much more of the fact that he had effectively published a wartime anthology. Perhaps he wanted to distinguish himself from the Preview poets, who believed that writing could be a weapon. Writing in 1952, Desmond Pacey commented on how dated the Preview group’s claims seemed to be: ‘To reread Preview now, with its naive talk of making poetry a weapon, is a disillusioning process. There was so much solemn cant about it: one would have thought the whole Canadian war effort, the very defeat of Fascism, depended on the continued existence of this little mimeographed monthly!’ (Creative Writing in Canada, 143). However, most of the material in Other Canadians was originally published prior to 1943, and even Sutherland’s objections to Smith’s anthology seem located in the same time frame. As Bruce Whiteman notes, Sutherland’s introduction ‘represented in some respects not the fruitful beginning of a new phase but a kind of finis writ to the poetry of the war years’ (xxiii). The only other anthology to appear in close proximity to Other Canadians was John D. Robins’s A Pocketful of Canada (1946), which, despite repudiating its status as an anthology (‘it makes no claim to be a repository of the best Canadian writing’ [xiii]), still brought together prose, poetry, articles on arts and crafts, and excerpts from political speeches. Robins believed that the purpose of the anthology was to encapsulate and teach the national spirit because no single writer was great enough to convey its power. With its varied selections and its pedagogical possibilities, the literature anthology became the medium of nationalism par excellence. The illustrated collection was put together by a committee representing the Canadian Council of Higher Education for Citizenship, an organization established in 1941 to familiarize Canadians and immigrants with information about Canada. As Carole Gerson has observed, Following the devastation of the Second World War, the editors of this small volume responded to Lawren Harris’s call to create a Canadian ‘unity of spirit’ through a program of ‘Reconstruction through the Arts’ by deploying the genres of print, art, and photography, as well as the new pocket book format, to make an enduring and accessible collective claim about the value of Canada’s distinctive national and artistic culture. This ideology would become increasingly familiar through the work of the

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Massey Commission of 1949–51, whose report would further proclaim the significance of higher culture as a defining feature of Canadian identity. Although anthologies of Canadian writing would burgeon in the post-war decades, no subsequent volume would attempt to capture so much of the nation in so small a space. (‘Design and Ideology,’ 85)

Although the editor of A Pocketful of Canada did provide a sweeping view of Canada, the book did not attempt to represent contemporary poetry or fiction. A.J.M. Smith said the book could have benefited from ‘a sterner and more critical realism’ and could have dispensed with its depictions of ‘charming, quaint, and wholesome local colour’ (‘Review,’ 216). Gerson points out that this book was one of many documents issued in the post-war years that tried to convey a positive vision of the country. A Pocketful of Canada presented an ‘optimistic conception of Canada as a prosperous and untroubled northland, replete with schools and libraries, symbolic monuments, model homes, sturdy workers (all male and mostly white), abundant harvests, varied landscapes, flourishing cities, and iconic art, all pristinely undamaged by war and clearly appealing both to Europeans seeking a fresh beginning and to the book-buying Canadian public’ (‘Design and Ideology,’ 81). This approach to representing the country was far removed from Sutherland’s. He believed that in pursuing socialism and Freud he would somehow come closer to achieving ‘the cure of earthly ills’ that plagued post-war culture (Other Canadians, 15 [1947]). Yet, as it turned out, he was ultimately promoting poetry in an era that seemed resistant to poetic change. In his essay entitled ‘Poetry Canada, 1940–45,’ Raymond Souster says that when he ‘returned after V-J Day there could be no doubt that the sparkling spring of poetry which had only begun to reach its full power had almost ceased flowing. Only a bare trickle still ran across the Canadian literary soil, which looked more like The Wasteland [sic] than ever. So that when John Sutherland’s anthology of the new poetry, Other Canadians, appeared the next year, it was like an epitaph’ (69). Other Canadians may be a post-war anthology in terms of the date of its publication, but not in terms of its informing spirit. This stance is even more surprising in light of Robert Weaver’s assertion that Other Canadians did not actually appear until 1949 because ‘an accident delayed its publication for three years’ (81). If that is true, then Sutherland would have had even more time to revise his introduction and to seek out material more closely connected with the post-war period. Perhaps he failed to do this because he had become preoccupied with

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securing funding for First Statement Press by appealing to the Massey Commission, which was criss-crossing the country receiving briefs on the state of the arts in Canada. Sutherland made a presentation to the commission at the end of 1949, pointing to his need for federal support. When he published his essay entitled ‘The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry’ in 1951, Sutherland admitted: ‘First Statement Press had no sooner published Other Canadians, “An Anthology of New Poetry in Canada, 1940–1946,” which I furnished with a bristling, defiant introduction, than the whole purpose and driving spirit of the “new movement” were in a state of decay. We had barely rushed to the side of this challenger of tradition, holding up his right – or rather his left – hand in the stance of victory, when the challenger laid his head upon the block and willingly submitted to having it removed’ (73). Sutherland repudiated his critique of Smith (‘events have shown that he was substantially right’ [74]), acknowledging that the poets of the 1940s had returned to the kind of intellectual introspection promoted in The Book of Canadian Poetry. While Sutherland may have changed his position by 1950, his comments in the introduction to Other Canadians had an impact on Smith, who went on to revise his original anthology with Sutherland’s critique in mind. When he published a second edition of his anthology in 1948, Smith included a number of the poets aligned with Sutherland – including Kay Smith, Miriam Waddington, Louis Dudek, and Raymond Souster – and did away with the native-cosmopolitan binary that was at the centre of his earlier work. Beyond Sutherland’s influence in this regard, Smith also changed the approach to publishing in Canada by founding an independent publishing house that was devoted to pursuing the unconventional and the irreverent. In doing so, he ushered in the age of the independent small press. Sutherland’s activity and his lobbying efforts before the Massey Commission prepared the ground for the later founding of Contact Press (1952–67) and for its own anthology, Cerberus (1952). He also influenced Earle Birney’s decision to edit the Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry anthology in 1953. There was momentum here. But soon that momentum would become a lull. Writing in 1954, Desmond Pacey described the changes that took place between 1944 and 1950: ‘How are we to explain the surge of activity from 1944 to 1948, and the sudden slackening of 1949 and 1950? The last years of the war and the first years of the peace were the high water marks of economic prosperity and of the sense of national well-being in Canada. The country was prosperous, prices were still controlled, and more people had money for relative luxuries such as books of verse;

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and at the same time the sense of national excitement and pride created by the war made more people interested in Canadian books. Even those who opposed the war, or had doubts about the nature of the peace to follow it, were stirred up by it, and were anxious to learn of other people’s reactions to it’ (‘English-Canadian Poetry,’ 256). Although Smith represented a number of the younger poets who emerged during the war in the revised edition of his Book of Canadian Poetry in 1948, the critical community was not receptive to experimentation and there remained few outlets for new critics. Magazine publications offered few venues for new writing. Northern Review, the Canadian Forum, and the Canadian Poetry Magazine were established but not particularly receptive to experimental work, while the newer and more eclectic Here and Now, founded in Toronto in 1947, lasted only two years. Northern Review was in decline following the resignation of most of its editorial board in 1947 (in protest against Sutherland’s critical review of Robert Finch’s Poems). Souster’s magazine, Direction, had stopped publishing in 1946 and his Enterprise (1948) lasted a single year. A scattering of other small magazines made little impression. The market was not receptive to innovative work, and small publishers faced an uphill battle in securing financing and in establishing effective modes of distribution. The prevailing conservatism of critics and educators is embodied in W.P. Percival’s Leading Canadian Poets, a collection of biographical essays by various hands published by Ryerson in 1948. Percival was the director of Protestant education and later the deputy minister of education for Quebec. His introduction to the book might have been written twenty years earlier, with its emphasis on the idyllic relationship between literature and country: ‘We want to bring our children up first of all on love of Canada. This is their native land, their patrie. Our children love Canada and recognize it as their homeland. They love its hills and dales, rivers and prairies. They love its cities and its towns, its streams and its forests and perhaps the little red schoolhouse two miles from nowhere. They know their own land and are true to it’ (18). Canadian schoolchildren in their little red schoolhouses had somehow escaped the nuclear age. Percival was not alone in making alignments between literature and nation that seem grounded in another time. The first major anthology of the 1950s seemed equally resistant to change. Canadian Poetry in English (1954) was edited by Bliss Carman, Lorne Pierce, and V.B. Rhodenizer. The 1954 edition was based on Watson and Pierce’s 1922 collection. That edition was revised by Pierce in 1935 and

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bore Carman’s name as co-editor, even though he had died in 1929. The 1954 edition was mainly the undertaking of Rhodenizer, a professor at Acadia University. Rhodenizer made no bones about where he stood on the native-cosmopolitan debate. He quoted approvingly from the words of his coeditor Lorne Pierce: ‘No nation can achieve its true destiny that adopts without profound and courageous reasoning and selection the thoughts and styles of another’ (xxv). He argued that by following American and British models, the ‘new poets’ had introduced ‘a new and more harmful colonial attitude to Canadian poetry; namely, that its development would be faster and greater by grafting foreign techniques on the native tradition’ (xxvi). For Rhodenizer, the main culprits in this business of ‘foreign technique’ were T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. It was writers like Eliot and Weston who turned the attention of Canadian poets towards symbolism and the metaphysical. But to make the content of those works central to Canadian poetry is, according to Rhodenizer, ‘to take poetry away from the people, especially in a country like Canada, where the [urban] population as shown by the 1951 census is still only slightly less than half the rural and where a large part of [that] statistically urban population was rurally reared’ (xxvii [1954]). The Canadian reader ‘will not get the ideas because he cannot comprehend their intended expression. Hence the absurdity of trying to write Canadian poetry of ideas for the imaginative appeal of which The Golden Bough is a manual or the far-fetched imagery of the metaphysical the only means’ (xxix). Rhodenizer objected to the ‘obscurity’ he found in the ‘new poets’ and argued that their apparent originality was deceptive (xxvi). They were, he argued, lunatics engaged in promoting ‘shredded’ and ‘hysterical prose’ (xxxii): ‘The imagery of the lunatic is the most original possible to man but the least sharable. Some of the imagery of our neometaphysicals is dangerously near the “lunatic fringe”’ (xxix). By pursuing this kind of lunacy, the new poets ‘took poetry away from the people, and, as one college president wittily remarked, they did not give it to anybody else’ (xxxi). Rhodenizer and his fellow editors would ‘give poetry back to the people by presenting them with poetry they c[ould] understand’ (xxxi). Despite Rhodenizer’s patronizing perspective, his confident conservatism, and all his biases against the modern, he still managed to put

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together a volume that brought some of the ‘new poets’ on board. He didn’t have much choice if he was going to do any justice to the poetry that had appeared after Smith’s 1948 revision to The Book of Canadian Poetry. Rhodenizer presents the work of every member of the New Provinces group and the Other Canadians poets, with the exception of Denis Giblin, Mark Gordon, David Mullen, James Wreford, and Sutherland himself. Rhodenizer adds Margaret Avison, Elizabeth Brewster, James Reaney, and Al Purdy, among other young poets. One wonders whether the selection of younger writers included in the volume might have been the result of Pierce’s influence, since their inclusion seems to run directly counter to the values supported by Rhodenizer in his introduction. Perhaps the actual content of this anthology represents a compromise between the editors that is not reflected in the prefatory material. Or perhaps it represents Rhodenizer’s ability to transcend his own judgments in the interest of presenting a more balanced collection. Although Sutherland contributed to the small-press culture that would flourish in Canada in later decades, there remained few outlets for alternative poetry and fiction in Canada in the 1950s and few venues for debate. In The Perilous Trade, Roy MacSkimming notes that ‘in publishing, as in Canadian culture generally, a kind of mini-depression followed the Second World War’ (31). This was one of the reasons behind the creation of the Massey Commission in 1949. The large companies producing profitable textbooks or commercial titles were the ones dominating Canadian publishing. It was difficult for other Canadian publishers to make money in the best of times and impossible for them to profit from alternative or experimental poetry or fiction. There was little demand for such experimentation because venues for alternative criticism were also lacking. The remainder of the decade continued to be characterized by an absence of poetry anthologies that challenged the status quo. The situation was little better when it came to fiction. When Desmond Pacey published his A Book of Canadian Stories in 1947, there had been no substantial collection of Canadian fiction since Knister’s Canadian Short Stories in 1928. In his introduction, Pacey extolled the virtues of realism that Knister had supported two decades earlier. His anthology was organized historically in order to illustrate the development of Canadian fiction, which he saw in terms of the gradual movement away from romantic towards realistic modes of writing. In Pacey’s view, the evolution from romantic to realistic ran parallel to the industrialization of the nation; new fiction was needed to express the increasingly urban

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consciousness of Canada’s inhabitants. Pacey believed that in tracing the movement from rural to urban, romantic to realistic, and individual to community, he was editing a selection of stories that would provide readers with ‘a fuller and more direct comprehension of the nation’s past and present’ (xv). In his pursuit of realism Pacey was simply following in the path of earlier anthologists who saw their books as a means of verifying the existence of the nation. Once again, the driving force behind the call to ‘realism’ was an all-pervading nationalism. Regardless of the name attached to the editorial aesthetic, the primary impulse remained the same: find selections that testified to the existence of the nation. Realism was nationalism renamed. The best of Canadian literature was a reflection of nation. This perspective governed Pacey’s critical work, as well as his activities as an anthologist. In the first edition of Creative Writing in Canada (1952), Pacey argued that ‘an understanding of the development of Canadian society is necessary for an understanding of Canadian literature’ (196). In the second, revised edition (1961), Pacey expressed this equation between mimetic and national advancement in even more forceful terms: ‘The gradual displacement of an agricultural and rural way of life by an industrial and urban one is, however, only the most striking of the social developments of the last century in Canada. Almost all the other developments – the steady rise of national independence and national consciousness, the involvement in world wars in particular and in world affairs in general, the depression and drought of the thirties, the growth of progressive and collectivist political ideas – have been clearly reflected in our literature and have helped to give it a distinctive quality’ (276). Pacey’s anthology of short stories exemplified this mimetic-national connection. Designed primarily as a pedagogical tool, it ran through editions in 1947, 1950, 1952, and 1962, with the 1962 edition ‘modified for the use of schools’ (preface). In his introduction to that edition, Pacey returns again and again to the virtues of realism, reserving special praise for those writers who had studied the French, British, and American realists and brought their method to Canada, even though they were a generation behind the times (‘The realistic movement in Canadian fiction was at least a generation later than similar movements elsewhere’ [xxix]). Realism involved more than a mimetic response; it embraced a complete revaluation of the kinds of techniques appropriate to realist aesthetics. Pacey was not validating realism strictly in terms of subject matter. He was interested in writing that was formally inno-

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vative as well. While Canadian fiction could be described as having gradually moved away from a romantic mode, few of the contemporary writers understood that the renunciation of romanticism involved a shift in technique: ‘Writers were needed who would approach life and language experimentally’ (xxviii). Pacey applauds the work of Grove, Callaghan, and Knister, whom he calls ‘the leading practitioners of the new realism in Canadian fiction between the wars’ (xxxii), but he can find little in the way of younger writers involved in experimentation. The absence of such experimentation was directly related to the scarcity of publishing venues. For Pacey, the rejection of blatant nationalism following the war led Canadian writers to pursue vague ideas of the cosmopolitan without perfecting their technique: ‘The effort to avoid nationalism and the waving of the maple leaf has led at times to a rootless cosmopolitanism, to an apeing of foreign models which is more slavish in its way than the “imitativeness” which these writers decry in their Canadian predecessors’ (xxxvi). Pacey wanted Canadian authors to study the techniques used by foreign writers, but he also wanted them to apply those techniques to the realistic depiction of contemporary Canadian life. However, until the marketplace could produce a truly competitive atmosphere when it came to the publishing of poetry, fiction, and criticism, the landscape would be dominated by a few writers who managed to align themselves with some of the more prominent publishers and magazines. The cultural landscape Pacey observed in 1947 had changed considerably by 1952. One of the most important changes was the increasing promotion of Canadian writing through readings on CBC radio. The most influential figure in this regard is certainly Robert Weaver. He sought out new Canadian writers and made their work known to the public through such shows as CBC Stage, CBC Playhouse, Canadian Short Stories, and Anthology. When Weaver joined the CBC in 1948 there was already a Friday night series called Canadian Short Stories under the direction of James Scott, but it had not generated much enthusiasm among listeners. Weaver was determined to change that. He approached established writers such as Sinclair Ross and Malcolm Lowry, but he also set a new goal. In the CBC Radio Guide for June 1949, he wrote that ‘one of the chief aims of this program is to discover and develop new talent’ (qtd. in Knaves, 35). Weaver’s Canadian Short Stories anthology (1952) was made up of twenty-four selections, most of which were originally broadcast on the show (Weaver co-edited the collection with Helen James, the show’s

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producer). In his introduction to the anthology, Weaver notes that ‘There have been so few collections of Canadian short stories that there is no tradition which an editor is required either to follow or to explain away’ (ix). He was correct. We know that after Knister’s short-story anthology in 1928, the only other substantial collection of short fiction before Weaver’s 1952 selection was Desmond Pacey’s Canadian Stories (1947). In editing Canadian Short Stories, Weaver wanted to create a permanent record of what had appeared in the brief, fifteen-minute time slots allowed for the broadcast of each story on-air. However, the appearance of this anthology did more than preserve broadcast material. It set up the first connection in Canada between mass media and the arts, and by doing so gave an entirely new kind of currency to the writers featured on the show. The print anthology promoted the show as much as the show promoted the anthology. Weaver technologized Canadian fiction and by doing so fostered a sense of community focused on new writing. At the same time, his program allowed the audience to hear these short stories for the first time, a factor that placed new emphasis on the qualities of voice, pacing, and rhythm unique to every piece. Like Pacey, Weaver championed realism. Although the stories in the anthology date from the post-war period, there is little sense of experimentation here. Pacey’s anthology was designed to showcase a history of the Canadian short story; Weaver’s was tied to the present. But both anthologists found authors in common to represent contemporary fiction, including Ethel Wilson, Hugh Garner, and Sinclair Ross. Weaver also introduced many new writers at a time when Canadian literature was stalled. Anthology promoted poetry and criticism, but not as extensively as short fiction. Nevertheless, Weaver did introduce a number of writers whose audience had been limited to print exposure. In its first two years alone, from 1954 to 1955, Anthology broadcast poems by Raymond Souster, A.J.M. Smith, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, Anne Wilkinson, Peter Garvie, James Reaney, Kildare Dobbs, Louis Dudek, Phyllis Webb, and Gael Turnbull. Critics commenting on Canadian writing and the arts included Ronald Hambleton, Morley Callaghan, Malcolm Ross, A.J.M. Smith, Northrop Frye, Norman Endicott, Reginald Watters, Claude Bissell, Lyle Blair, Dorothy Livesay, and Bernard Trotter. Margaret Atwood provides a succinct portrayal of the years leading up to the 1950s: ‘There had been a group of modernists in the ’20s. There had been writers, you know, here and there all along, not very many of them. Not enough to form a critical mass. And then the Depression and

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the war came along, and the advent of the paperback book. And those three things dealt a huge blow to the mushroom that was beginning to send up what we call fruiting bodies, making sort of visible writers. And therefore, people virtually had to start all over again in the late ’40s and ’50s, so you had a kind of die-off or a suppression’ (qtd. in Knaves, 99). Atwood reminds us just how difficult it was for writers to find publishing venues in this period. Weaver’s radio show did more than broadcast literature across the land. As Atwood says, he ‘helped people feel that they were doing something real’ (qtd. in Knaves, 103). Weaver understood that by bringing writing to radio, he was also encouraging the development of different reading communities in Canada. At the Kingston Writers’ Conference in 1955, he spoke of his belief that ‘radio, and probably also TV, is beginning to create specialized “publics” rather than one great mass public, and as this occurs programmes devoted to more experimental literature become more possible to maintain’ (Whalley, 7). It seems odd to hear anthologists like Pacey or Weaver talk about the need to support ‘experimental’ writing while they devoted themselves to promoting realism. But it’s not such a contradiction: in Canada, in 1947, realism was experimental, and it remained so well into the 1950s, as Weaver’s selections make clear. Realism remains the dominant form of Canadian fiction today. The publication of experimental poetry and fiction is highly dependent on the presence of small presses and alternative magazines; those venues have never been able to survive in Canada without government support. The market is simply too small, and the financial risks are too great. If the 1960s and 1970s saw a gradual increase in the number of publishers willing to take this kind of risk, it had everything to do with the type of funding that became available towards the end of the 1950s, especially after the founding of the Canada Council in 1957. In the absence of the Canada Council, Weaver was able to promote ‘new’ writing because he had a wealthy backer: the CBC. Without such backing, the 1950s in Canadian literature might have been as bleak as the 1930s and 1940s. One bright spot in this period was the founding of Contact magazine in 1952 by Raymond Souster, and of Contact Press by Souster, Louis Dudek, and Irving Layton the same year. In a letter to Dudek, Souster described Contact as a magazine that would feature ‘translations, experimental writing from Canada and the U.S.A., the odd poetry review, the emphasis on vigour and experiment’ (qtd. in Gnarowski, 4). Invoking

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Ezra Pound, he said, ‘MAKE IT NEW is our unofficial slogan’ (qtd. in Gnarowski, 4). Contact published Canadian poets including Eli Mandel, Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, Gwendolyn MacEwen, R.G. Everson, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey, D.G. Jones, Fred Wah, and Phyllis Webb, to name a few. The magazine was instrumental in promoting the aesthetics of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, and Vincent Ferrini. The first national anthology produced by Contact Press was Canadian Poems, 1850–1952, edited by Dudek and Layton. It was one publication in a cluster of works that appeared from Contact in the early 1950s, including the collection entitled Cerberus (with poems by Dudek, Souster, and Layton) as well as polemical articles on issues and aesthetics in Contact magazine. In the introduction to Canadian Poems, the editors argue that the weaknesses to be found in Canadian poetry exist in British and American literature as well and that the challenge is not necessarily to find a Canadian Shakespeare but to promote poems ‘which show a dark grain of fact running through them, which are challenging and experimental, which shake up acquired prejudice and ingrained habit; poems which make us angry, reflective, and mistrustful of the conventional responses to the life about us’ (17). They want poetry to offer an alternative to the mediocrity of everyday life: poetry ‘has a great deal to offer the modern man and woman high-pressured by their truncated occupations, moronic newspapers, stale movies, and ads for soaps and deodorants’ (17). The editors clearly believe that their own poems offer such an alternative, while the inclusion of material by James Reaney, Colleen Thibaudeau, and Phyllis Webb show the editors moving in a new direction that welcomes younger writers. Yet the nationalist bias that informs so many Canadian anthologies prevails. Dudek and Layton say they are aware that ‘nationhood and self-consciousness as a people must come if we are to have a literature that expresses our life and distinctiveness’ and they affirm the idea that ‘eventually a true sense of nationhood might come’ (13). Implicit in this hope is the desire for an aesthetic that is, again, fundamentally mimetic, one that encourages poetry to bear witness to its time and place as a means of validating that time and place. Ultimately, in 1952, as in 1864, Canadian literary anthologies were tied to nationalist values, and even those that embraced experimentalism found themselves caught in the nationalist-mimetic net. Dudek and Layton were compiling their anthology in the years immediately following the release of the Massey Commission’s report

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in 1951. If they found it difficult to ignore nationalist values, it was partially because the country had been exposed to a constant discussion of those values since the commission was established in 1949. As Dean Irvine observes: ‘Contrary to the cultural-nationalist myths that still haunt the Massey Commission, its Report actually determined that “Canada has not yet established a national literature”’ (225). Its findings document a critical moment in Canadian literature, a crisis predicated upon the absence of a coherent national culture. Instead of a national literature, the Massey Commission was presented with evidence of a multiplicity of literatures, a heterogeneity of literary discourses and cultures’ (221–2). Fee points out that this absence was addressed in the recommendations of the 1951 report, which ‘ensured the achievement of goals the Romantic nationalists had begun working for before the turn of the century’ (‘Literary Criticism,’ 3). Many of the recommendations made by the commission were designed to organize this multiplicity and to channel it into more manageable forms of nationalism. The federal institutions established in response to the report were one means of organizing this nationalism. The National Library was established in 1953. The Canada Council for the Arts was founded in 1957. There were private initiatives as well. McClelland and Stewart launched the New Canadian Library series in 1958. The first journal of criticism devoted to Canadian writing – Canadian Literature – was founded in 1959. Ten years earlier, John Sutherland had presented his brief to the Massey Commission explaining in detail why his small press deserved federal funds. Now the Canada Council was in place to make that funding possible, and new publishing venues were appearing with regularity. Government support was crucial to the development of domestic markets for Canadian literature, but it also contributed to the creation of foreign interest in Canadian poetry and fiction. Anthologies were central to the development of international interest in Canadian writing. The Department of External Affairs had initiated the Book Presentation Programme in 1949 under the direction of Benjamin Rogers, a Canadian career diplomat. The program used government funds to buy Canadian books that were then sent overseas as a gesture of cultural diplomacy. It was a cultural version of the Colombo Plan for economic aid to Asia-Pacific countries established by Commonwealth countries in 1950. Janice Cavell has shown that this program made External Affairs ‘one of the better customers in the country’ (81) when it came to supporting Canadian publishers. The first two books chosen

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to represent Canada abroad were both anthologies: John D. Robins’s A Pocketful of Canada (1946) and Desmond Pacey’s A Book of Canadian Stories (1947). Through its book-selection process, which was itself a quasi-anthological act that brought various works together under the rubric ‘Book Presentation Programme,’ External Affairs was able to control the literary representation of Canada abroad while supporting Canadian publishers at home. The problem of providing government support to Canadian publishers and writers had been an issue of special concern to John Sutherland several years before the Massey Commission began its inquiry in 1949. It was Sutherland who planted the seed for what would become the Kingston Writers’ Conference in 1955. The difference between the Kingston conference and other gatherings of poets or novelists was its emphasis on the ‘literary assembly-line in Canada’ (Whalley, viii). This was the first time Canadian writing was discussed in relation to the material conditions of its production at a conference that included writers, publishers, editors, librarians, and booksellers. The theme of the conference – ‘The Writer, the Media, and His Public’ – spoke to the new realization that the media was a central means of connecting the writer with his or her audience, and that the conditions of making literature public had a great deal to do with the venues through which the literature was disseminated. The conference focused on the means of improving those venues and the means of dissemination. Although much had changed to make Canadian writing more visible and present to the public, the challenges facing publishers and writers were similar to those at the beginning of the century: absence of distribution and sales infrastructure, small readership compared with the United States, competition from foreign publishers, lack of small presses and magazines willing to support alternative writing, and poor funding for public libraries. The conference put forward seven recommendations, which I will summarize: (1) more prominence should be given to the teaching of Canadian literature in schools; (2) colleges and universities should include more Canadian literature in their curricula; (3) public libraries should receive more government support; (4) Canadian literature should be kept in print through a reprint program subsidized by the government; (5) fellowships and scholarships should be provided to writers in order to provide a better source of income; (6) the Governor General’s Awards should have a cash component; and (7) the Canadian government should purchase Canadian writing for distribution abroad.

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Although it was too late for Sutherland to benefit from the idea of government support to writing in Canada, other anthologists and publishers would prosper as a result of the Kingston conference. Many of the recommendations made there were taken up by the Canada Council when it was established in 1957, a pivotal year in Canadian literature. But even before the council was founded, editors and publishers were beginning to understand that a fundamental shift had taken place by the mid-1950s: Canadian literature was becoming an increasingly curricular topic. And if the Kingston conference was any gauge of future developments, Canadian literature would soon be taught in more and more schools, perhaps even as a required subject at the university level. Malcolm Ross understood this when he proposed the creation of the New Canadian Library series to Jack McClelland in 1952. So did Carl F. Klinck, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, and Reginald E. Watters, a professor at the University of British Columbia who was preparing a detailed checklist of Canadian literature in 1949. Watters invited Klinck to join him in the editing of a new anthology designed for Canadian schools. Their Canadian Anthology appeared in 1955, just when enthusiasm for the resolutions adopted by the Kingston Writers’ Conference was at its height. What differentiates this anthology of poetry and fiction from its predecessors is the editors’ clear desire to create an edition that would be adopted by schools and universities. Klinck and Watters were operating in an environment that now made such widespread adoption possible. While it is true that previous anthologies were used in scattered courses in Canadian literature from province to province, the Klinck and Watters anthology was the first collection to be prepared under the assumption that the teaching of Canadian literature could be national in scope. They consciously thought of the features they would introduce to make the volume enticing to teachers. At the same time, they included the kind of critical and bibliographical apparatus that made their anthology eminently curricular in design. In his memoir, Giving Canada a Literary History, Klinck notes that ‘early on, we decided what we wanted to do, in the light of our experience as teachers of courses in Canadian literature’ (90): 1. Not less than three-quarters of the book will be devoted to Major Canadian poets and prose writers, texts of their works and editorial comment. There are for this purpose approximately fifteen ‘major’ authors.

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2. One-quarter of the book, or less than one-quarter, will be given to early and later ‘minor’ writers. 3. Significant writers of earlier periods will be included. Appeal to our generation will not be the chief criterion. 4. Care will be taken to prevent duplication with the contents of AJ.M. Smith’s Anthology. 5. A special effort will be made to print important literary works not readily available to the student or general reader. 6. It will be planned for use as the standard textbook for college courses in Canadian Literature. 7. The editorial comment will be brief but, we hope, scholarly, revealing the personality, thought, critical theory, and technique belonging to the work at its inception, and offering guidance to an understanding at the present time. A review of Canadian critical opinion concerning the work will be included. 8. Dates of publication and, wherever possible, dates of composition will be indicated. 9. The book will illustrate the history of Canadian Literature but will not represent an attempt to write a systematic history. 10. The bibliographies will be better than any now provided for the study of Canadian writers. (90)

This brief strategy statement contains some key features aligned with the canonization of Canadian literature that would develop in the 1960s and 1970s. Klinck and Watters had already decided that by 1955 there were fifteen ‘major’ Canadian writers of poetry and prose. Unlike earlier anthologists, who made their selections with an eye to broad-based inclusion, they introduced the canonical term ‘major’ as a central criterion in anthology making, a decision that would allow other anthologists and teachers to give credit to the term. By also naming ‘minor’ authors, they established the idea of canonical hierarchies, and they suggested that historical representation would only be accorded to ‘significant’ writers, although they did not spell out the criteria accounting for their identification of such significance. What we begin to see here is the prioritizing of Canadian literature in terms of historical time frames, with a clear emphasis in favour of the contemporary over the historical. In correspondence with Watters, Klinck stressed the canonical dimensions of the anthology by noting that ‘the number of authors was to be severely limited’ and that ‘an author who survived the critical sifting was to be given the full treatment as an interesting individual,

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with a fair, varied, and “genetic” (the phrase is [Harry Hayden] Clark’s) representation’ (Giving Canada a Literary History, 91). The reference to Clark is revealing. He was the editor of the Major American Poets anthology, published in 1936. Clark’s definition of his ‘genetic’ approach establishes an important model: ‘Some of our poets reveal themselves, when studied closely, as having gone through many changes of view from youth to old age, changes so striking in some cases as to make the same man seem composed of different individuals. By disregarding chronology, by artificially arranging the order of a poet’s poems, or by omitting all his early or all his mature poems, one is in danger of securing a portrait of the poet which fails to present him faithfully proportioned and integrated as a “man against the sky.” Materials have therefore been provided which should enable a reader to trace the growth of the poet’s mind and art from his earliest to his latest expression in order that he may emerge as a complete, organic personality in his intellectual habit as he lived’ (v). Klinck and Watters seem to have followed Clark’s selection methods, even though his anthology appeared almost twenty years before theirs. In his preface, Clark says that ‘most teachers today agree that it is preferable to acquaint oneself thoroughly with a considerable body of the work of a relatively few major figures who are representative than to try to read snippets from a multitude who soon become mere names’ (v). Like Clark, Klinck wanted ‘no snippets’ (Giving Canada a Literary History, 91). He believed that the major figures in the anthology were somehow ‘interesting’ as individuals while the minor writers were not. Since Canadian Anthology was designed for use in the schools, it was transmitting to students the idea that there was a canon, that it was composed of major Canadian writers, that it had evolved in a logical and orderly fashion, and that its major writers were ‘interesting’ in a way that others were not. The editors recognized their own agenda; as Klinck says, ‘We helped establish a canon’ (Giving Canada a Literary History, 88). Klinck and Watters had no hesitation in asserting their desire to use the anthology as a means of constructing a Canadian canon. All anthologies are implicitly involved in canon making, but in this case the editors openly celebrated the fact. For them, national literary canons were a sign of cultural maturity. British and American anthologists had constructed their national canons. Klinck and Watters wanted to do the same for Canada. Therefore it is not surprising to find them using canonical rhetoric, and indeed celebrating it, at every turn. In

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their foreword, they complain that the problem with ‘Canadian literary culture’ is that ‘no canon of major works has become established – as it has for the literature of Britain and the United States’ (xv). Their aim was to redress this situation by presenting ‘essential’ material that had gone out of print. At the same time, they wanted to display ‘the achievement of our principal authors’ in a ‘single comprehensive collection’ (xv). Their anthology would be better than others in Canada because it offered ‘substantial samplings’ of ‘major authors’ (xv). In this sense, they assert, it is ‘the most copious gathering of our literature ever published’ (xv). This extensiveness is complemented by the ‘exceptionally full bibliographies’ (xv) of each author. Canadian Anthology would erect a new literary superstructure, and at the same time encourage the reader to ‘brush aside the rickety palings set up by others’ (xvi). The editors asserted that they were not only creating a Canadian canon but that their anthology was itself canonical, even on publication. Klinck and Watters see themselves as anthological conquerors. Their collection would establish a new order: the realm of the ‘major.’ This is an anthological realm of ‘essential,’ ‘principal,’ ‘single,’ ‘established,’ and ‘comprehensive’ things. The canon doubters of the 1970s would have little patience with this self-congratulatory perspective. Klinck and Watters failed to consider the idea that a writer might be ‘interesting’ precisely because he or she was not major or because he or she had written in a way that was anti-canonical and deserving of representation precisely because it went off the line. But this would be asking them to think ahead twenty years. What they were trying to do in 1955 was to create what Steve McCaffery would parodically call ‘teachable texts.’ Or as Klinck put it to Watters: ‘If a distinction had to be made at any time, [the choice should be] teachable, rather than esoteric, selections’ (Giving Canada a Literary History, 91). When an anthology places its emphasis on the major, the modern, and the teachable while excluding the minor, the historical, and the unteachably ‘esoteric,’ it runs the risk of entrenching values that run against the experimental and the subversive, simply because such works might not function properly in the curricular ethos envisioned by Klinck and Watters. However, the term ‘envisioned’ here is actually a misnomer, since in supporting the comprehensible over the esoteric and the established over the marginal, Klinck and Watters were in fact creating the conservative literary culture in which their selections could thrive. Anthologies are little worlds. They contain their own creation stories, their own narratives of progress, their own distinctive landscapes ren-

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dered by the editor’s hand. That editor is always there, turning things towards his or her objectives, fitting and cutting and niggling until the whole collection bends to the form of its creator, who is always its unsung hero-god. The world of Klinck and Watters’s Canadian Anthology is a world of plenitude. A world is made, and through the selection process, a variety of authors are brought to life. Unlike previous anthologists, Klinck and Watters tend to represent authors through numerous selections organized by the genetic method first used by Clark. Because this method encourages editors to represent major authors by more space than minor ones, it also constructs those major authors as beings who possess fuller lives in terms of the anthological space they inhabit. Archibald Lampman is represented by an astonishing twenty-seven selections; P.K. Page by twenty-three; E.J. Pratt by fifteen; Stephen Leacock by seven. The space devoted to the standout authors in this anthology far exceeds the allotment in any other anthology of Canadian literature before or since. Klinck and Watters were invested in individual reputations. This means that while one can indeed find a historical trajectory in the anthology that begins with Frances Brooke and ends with James Reaney, the editors are essentially saying that Canadian literary history is primarily constructed around the central figures who claim the majority of the book’s physical space: Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, D.C. Scott, Stephen Leacock, E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, Robert Finch, A.J.M. Smith, Earle Birney, A.M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page. In this 1955 anthology, then, the history of Canadian literature becomes a history of personality writ large. What does it take to be ‘major’ in Klinck and Watters’s eyes? Their anthology provides practically no direct answer to this question. However, certain values are implicit. The anthology contains the work of forty-seven authors, but only fifteen of them write fiction. ‘Major’ seems to involve poetry more than prose. While each author’s selections are preceded by a biographical sketch, the editors make almost no statements about the qualities of the writing. They seem primarily interested in the writer’s family or career rather than in the actual substance of the works. Anne Wilkinson’s chief claim to fame is that she is ‘a granddaughter of Sir Edmund Osler’ (422). P.K. Page ‘has worked as sales clerk, filing clerk, radio actress, and historical researcher’ (453). Mazo de la Roche spent her childhood on her father’s fruit farm, where ‘she learned to love country life and the dogs, horses, children, and adults around whom she would weave her stories’ (267). When we do get scat-

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tered commentary on the works, it often seems superficial. ‘Roughing It in the Bush’ is ‘vigorous, accurate, and humorous’ (49). Isabella Valancy Crawford wrote about ‘farming, Indians, cowboys, and the opening of the great Northwest’ (75). Perhaps this was an attempt to bowdlerize Crawford, or other authors who were more interested in sexuality, psychosis, and perversity than Klinck and Watters were willing to credit. What is striking in the biographical sketches is the editors’ preoccupation with canonical trappings. For them, a successful author’s life was the record of a string of awards, medals, degrees, prizes, career achievements, and various forms of public recognition. The achievement represented by the works themselves was secondary to the recognition those works gained the author. The tendency in Canadian criticism in the 1960s and early 1970s towards privileging the biographical and the thematic over the formal and the stylistic begins here, in the equation Klinck and Watters construct between literary value and the writer’s life. They had virtually nothing to say about the technical qualities of a work. They may have planned to comment on ‘critical theory’ and the ‘technique belonging to the work at its inception,’ but that is not what emerges in their commentaries. Given the power their anthology came to wield, this kind of critical silence had a profound impact. What is even more surprising about Canadian Anthology is the way it appears to undermine its own preference for life over art. The preface is about the need to bring together these major writers. The biographical sketches are about their achievements. The ‘genetic’ selection of poems reinforces the emphasis on biography by showing how the writer’s work evolves, like his or her career. But the end of the book is dense with a listing of secondary articles on each author’s work. It is almost as if, by including such a detailed listing, Klinck and Watters absolved themselves of any responsibility of commenting on the observations contained in all that secondary material. The inclusion of the bibliographical material seems more symbolic than practical. It proved that there was an industry surrounding Canadian writing and that the industry literally had weight. Watters had been working on his Checklist of Canadian Literature for several years, and it was not difficult for him to import portions of that list into the bibliography at the end of Canadian Anthology. It was a good marketing feature, and it made the book look much more scholarly and authoritative than its predecessors. It gave the impression that the collection was the product of extensive research, and to do it justice, it was. But how many of its readers would actually use this secondary mate-

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rial? The editors themselves seemed unconcerned with drawing on it, and the articles and studies it listed would have been very difficult for most teachers to obtain, let alone students. This was 1955. Many of the articles cited in the bibliography had been published in journals or scholarly books found only in the collections of major university libraries. How many students or teachers would be heading off to find the article entitled ‘Two Canadian Poets’ in the London Times Literary Supplement for 12 June 1948? How many would be searching for William Archer’s chapter on Bliss Carman in his Poets of the Younger Generation, published in London in 1902? The reproduction of portions of Watters’s Checklist was a useful marketing tool but of little practical value to the students and teachers for whom the anthology was designed. While Klinck and Watters presented the canonical view of Canadian literature, packaged in a weighty, scholarly looking tome, other Canadian editors were working hard to negate this appeal to the canonical and curricular. Raymond Souster had never been a stranger to dissent, and his Poets 56 (subtitled Ten Younger English-Canadians) provides a concrete illustration of the huge gap separating the academic editors like Klinck and Watters from the poet-editors like Souster. The cover of Poets 56 is a crude hand drawing. Only one hundred mimeographed copies were printed, and each is numbered and signed by Souster. He dedicates the volume to Louis Dudek and says that the poets included in the volume are presented in response to Dudek’s 1952 question, ‘Où sont les jeunes?’ The anthology includes poems by Avi Boxer, Marya Fiamengo, William Fournier, Daryl Hine, D.G. Jones, Jay Macpherson, John Reeves, Mortimer Schiff, Peter Scott, and George Whipple. It remains a testimony to Souster’s determination to pursue the new. While there were sporadic attempts to produce alternative anthologies, the late 1950s saw an increasing tendency to proclaim the canon in collections that were designed for school use. The introduction of the New Canadian Library series in 1958 gave a boost to the teaching of Canadian literature in high schools and universities, and new funding provided by the Canada Council also promoted measures designed to encourage course adoptions along with classroom visits and speaking tours by writers. Large-scale anthologies in the late 1950s included a third edition of A.J.M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry (1957), Ralph Gustafson’s The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958), and A.J.M. Smith’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, which came out in early 1960. Klinck and Watters published a revised edition of their anthology in 1966. In the second edition, the editors replaced their original pref-

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ace with a new one that showed a different kind of self-consciousness. The canonical rhetoric was gone. Now Klinck and Watters pointed to the dramatic changes that had taken place in Canadian literature over the previous ten years, citing ‘a remarkable growth in the scholarly and critical attention accorded to our national literature’ (preface) and pointing to the proliferation of bibliographies, a paperback reprint series (the New Canadian Library), the founding of Canadian Literature, and the release of the Literary History of Canada in 1965. They include a number of important critical documents and commentary, indicating their belief in the relationship between primary and secondary material. While they removed several figures who appeared in the earlier volume (Jacob Bailey, William Dunlop, William Murdoch, Mazo de la Roche, and Bruce Hutchison), they added a lot of new material by more than thirty authors, including recent work by Leonard Cohen, D.G. Jones, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Jay Macpherson, Eli Mandel, and Alden Nowlan. The youngest poet in the anthology is MacEwen, who was twenty-seven years old at the time. Nevertheless, this remains a conservative anthology. For whatever reason, the editors say they ‘felt constrained to avoid extremes of either traditionalism or avant-gardism, while recognizing the validity of interest both in the roots of our literary traditions and in the new tendrils searching for a future direction’ (xv). They decided not to include contemporary work that might be considered experimental, and they decided that the Canadian literary tradition should not be seen to originate with traditional works. How contemporary was their anthology in this respect? It appeared more than a decade after Allen Ginsberg first recited Howl and six years after the publication of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, a crucial anthology of recent work. Allen’s definition of what his anthology embraced stands in sharp contrast to Klinck and Watters’s canonical norms. Allen wanted to achieve ‘a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse … These poets have already created their own tradition, their own press, and their public. They are our avant-garde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry. Through their work many are closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting, today recognized throughout the world to be America’s greatest achievements in contemporary culture’ (xi). Klinck and Watters were not interested in the abstract or the experimental. They tended to favour poets from eastern Canada (but where is Al Purdy?) while they bypassed some of the important challenges to eastern models evident in books by west coast writers

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such as George Bowering, Frank Davey, John Newlove, Fred Wah, and Phyllis Webb (the same writers who would have been cognizant of Allen’s work). Klinck and Watters could hardly have been unaware of the Vancouver Poetry Conference, organized by Warren Tallman in 1963, which brought together Canadian poets and such American writers as Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov. Nor could they have missed an earlier development – the founding of TISH in 1961, one of the earliest magazines to introduce contemporary American poetics to Canada. TISH was founded by Frank Davey, Fred Wah, George Bowering, David Dawson, and James Reid. The magazine promoted new writing and was heavily influenced by the Black Mountain group of writers, many of whom had moved to San Francisco after Black Mountain College in North Carolina was closed in 1957. After Donald Allen published The New American Poetry in 1960, Tallman proposed a series of lectures at University of British Columbia by Robert Duncan, the former editor of the Black Mountain Review. Eventually, the idea of exploring the new American poetics led to the conference in 1963. By that time, TISH had been running for two years, and its editors were exploring an aesthetics of the local, the particular, and the marginalized as opposed to the national and centrist. They were focusing their poetry on the west coast, and spurning the authority of the east. For Davey, ‘Tish marks the turning point of British Columbia poetry away from the shadows of derived, humanistic, Toronto-focused writing and toward the light of its own energies’ (qtd. in Miki, 188). Although the founding editors left TISH in 1963, it had a profound impact on the development of experimental poetry in Canada and was instrumental in challenging the canonical models adopted by anthologists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. TISH made it clear that there was an alternative poetry scene in Canada. It also made clear the extent to which the anthology editors empowered by Toronto publishers had closed their eyes to that scene. Klinck and Watters ignored the American aesthetic endorsed by the TISH group and distanced themselves from the minimalist poetry of Newlove and Webb. Instead, their anthology is slanted in the direction of the ‘mythopoeic’ poets who were influenced by Northrop Frye: Douglas LePan, Jay Macpherson, Eli Mandel, and James Reaney. The informing aesthetic behind their selections is mainly connected with the traditions aligned with the modernists in Toronto and Montreal, or with the mythopoeic poets influenced by Frye in Toronto.

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Klinck’s alignment with Frye shows up in other ways. Klinck was the general editor of the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965), for which Frye provided his well-known conclusion. Klinck recalls that as early as 1956 he had asked ‘Norrie’ whether Canadian literature ‘could be tested against international standards’ (Giving Canada a Literary History, 103). Frye replied that such a test could be undertaken, but that first a great deal of research would have to be completed. This was the germ behind the Literary History of Canada, which was seven years in preparation before a manuscript was ready in 1963. Although the Literary History remains a crucial achievement, in that no one had ever prepared such a comprehensive view of Canadian literature, it was also the highly exclusionary product of its contributors’ conservative values. Klinck’s own understanding of his position in relation to the Literary History was concerned with power. He reflects that by the time he conceived the Literary History he ‘was beginning to have very good relations with publishers, such as Lorne Pierce at Ryerson Press’: ‘I felt rather cocky about my association with Ryerson; also we had very amicable relations with Gage, who published Canadian Anthology. I had not yet invaded the University of Toronto Press, but that was in the offing’ (Giving Canada a Literary History, 110). The business of finding a publisher was framed either as a gentlemanly pursuit or as an act of war. These contexts were appropriate to an editor who believed that his 1955 anthology had established a canon that would be supported and extended through his work on the Literary History. In this kind of editorial environment there would be little room for representing experimental writing that challenged the status quo or the authority of its defenders. Klinck’s willingness to bypass the contemporary was not lost on reviewers. For example, Philip Stratford noted in the Literary History that ‘“Fiction 1880–1920” merits 79 pages. “Fiction 1920–1940” gets 35 pages. “Fiction 1940–1960” only 28 pages’ (Giving Canada a Literary History, 128). Recent Canadian poetry was similarly under-represented in the Literary History of Canada. Klinck and Watters’s revised Canadian Anthology, published a year after the Literary History, demonstrates the same reluctance to include the ‘new tendrils’ in Canadian poetry in the early 1960s. While the youngest poet in the volume – MacEwen – was born in 1939, the youngest fiction writer – Robertson Davies – was born in 1913. By the time the revised version of Canadian Anthology appeared, Davies was fifty-three years old. Were there no younger writers producing fiction at this time?

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Did Klinck and Watters tune in to Weaver’s Anthology, which had been airing since October 1954, or to his earlier Canadian Short Stories broadcast, which went back to the late 1940s? Did they read Weaver’s Tamarack Review? Alice Munro had published several stories in the 1950s and early 1960s. The same goes for George Elliott, Mavis Gallant, Hugh Hood, Margaret Laurence, John Metcalf, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, Sheila Watson, and Adele Wiseman. Six years earlier, in 1960, Robert Weaver had published his Canadian Short Stories, which included stories by Gallant, Munro, and Richler. Clearly Klinck and Watters were either not current in their reading or chose to ignore many of the younger writers who were emerging from coast to coast. Meanwhile, other new writers had shifted the landscape considerably since 1960. I think here primarily of the west coast figures associated with TISH (1961–5) and of poets and critics who published in several small magazines established to promote experimental writing in the early 1960s, including blew-ointment (1963–72), Cataract (1961–2), Evidence (1960–7), Ganglia (1965–7), Intercourse (1966–71), Is (1966–77), Island (1964–7), Moment (1960–2), Mountain (1962–3), Up th Tube with One i (Open) (1961–3), and Yes (1956–70). Prior to Weaver’s Canadian Short Stories, there were only three anthologies of Canadian short fiction published in Canada, a startling indication of just how little progress had been made in bringing Canadian short stories to the public. Weaver virtually dismisses all Canadian short stories published prior to the First World War. He says: ‘I believe few short stories of much literary consequence were published in Canada before the First World War’ (ix). He goes on to observe that it has been difficult for Canadian short-story writers to flourish ‘because there were almost no outlets in Canada for serious and experimental short fiction,’ which forced authors to seek publication outside the country (xi). ‘This fugitive existence of the short story has continued until today’ (xi). Six years later, in 1966, Giose Rimanelli and Roberto Ruberto edited Modern Canadian Stories, with selections by Moore, Laurence, Wiseman, Richler, Hood, Munro, Metcalf, Bowering, and Henry Kreisel, among other newcomers. Rimanelli and Ruberto’s Modern Canadian Stories was published a year before Canada’s centennial. National self-consciousness was at an all-time high. The Centennial Commission had spent four years planning events across the country to build excitement and anticipation. Yet Rimanelli makes no mention of the ways in which the planned celebration was altering Canadians’ sense of their country. Perhaps this

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was because Rimanelli was not Canadian, nor had he been living in Canada for very long. Information about Rimanelli is not easy to find. However, Professor Sante Matteo of Miami University provided this helpful biographical sketch: ‘Though he has lived mostly in the States since his definitive immigration in 1960, his first landfall was in Canada in 1953, where his parents and brothers had immigrated several years earlier (his mother was Canadian-born). While there he became editor of the Italian newspaper Il cittadino canadese, which may have introduced him to the publishing industry albeit marginally. After emigrating to North America permanently in 1960 and teaching at Yale and Sarah Lawrence, he moved to Vancouver in 1963 to teach at UBC for a couple of years before heading Stateside again in 1965 for UCLA. It’s in 1963 at UBC that he started putting together the Canadian anthology that came out three years later. Perhaps at the time he entertained the possibility of remaining in Canada’ (Letter to the author, 16 December 2008). Rimanelli was a respected Italian writer and editor with many books to his name. What he brought to the task of editing this anthology was a distinctly European perspective that had not been seen in Canadian criticism before. In his preface to the anthology, Earle Birney tells us that Rimanelli ‘is one of Italy’s important men-of-letters, a prizewinning author of novels and short stories, writer of a critical survey of contemporary Italian narrative, authority on Cesare Pavese, and a leading playwright for the Roman theatre and film. He is also a multilingual scholar, trained in the universities of Rome and Paris, who has settled on this continent, taught comparative literature at the University of British Columbia, and spent much of his last six years reading and assessing our literature’ (x). How Rimanelli and Ryerson Press found each other remains a mystery to me. I suspect the contact was made through Birney, who was publishing his own work with Ryerson and teaching at UBC during the years that Rimanelli was there. Although he seemed an unlikely candidate for the job of editing an anthology of Canadian fiction at such a high point of Canadian nationalism, it turns out that Rimanelli was the editor who would shift his readers’ attention towards a contemporary poetics. Because his background was European rather than North American, and because Rimanelli had been reading European critical theory, his judgments about Canadian fiction seem more influenced by French structuralism than they do by American New Criticism or the preoccupation with realism that marks the anthologies by Pacey or Weaver.

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This European perspective is not immediately apparent in Rimanelli’s introduction. At first, he seems to be a bit condescending towards the very authors he selects. After dismissing all Canadian short fiction published before D.C. Scott’s In the Village of Viger (1896), he turns his attention to the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, he tends to appreciate those authors whose sensibility is European, starting with Scott, who was ‘more a willing pupil of Flaubert than of Zola’ (xvii). If we listen to the way he describes Scott’s poetry, we realize that we are hearing a critical tone and vocabulary that is entirely new in the Canadian context: ‘But Scott brought a tone to poetry that is uniquely his own and which, we would venture to say, is transmitted to the “consciousness” of things. Scott’s poetic movement follows a parabola of discovery that proceeds from the object to the subject, and vice versa. In his poetry the subject is highly articulated, it possesses a strong main channel, and estuaries. The psychology of the subject is simple. It is when Scott approaches the object, the point of observation – nature, the cosmos – that his poetry fashions into image and archetype, and becomes idea’ (xvii). This is pretty heady stuff for 1966. Rimanelli is a poet responding to a poet, but he is also a critic who had clearly been influenced by the Geneva School, the ‘Critics of Consciousness’ who were prominent in France in the early 1960s, including thinkers such as George Poulet, Marcel Raymond, Jean Starobinski, and Jean-Pierre Richard. His prose reads a lot like Poulet’s. As Rimanelli’s introduction unfolds, we realize that he is committed to devaluing the realistic parameters that his editorial predecessors had held up as such a desirable value. Grove has been ‘overvalued’ (xx). Leacock is ‘frivolous’ (xviii). Rimanelli starts to become more positive when it comes to Ethel Wilson because the best of her stories remind him of Andre Gide. Callaghan, and his ‘existential urgencies,’ reminds Rimanelli of Gabriel Marcel, or Mauriac, or Julian Green (xxii). Although Hugh MacLennan’s fiction is marred by ‘voluptuous machinations which are all too obvious,’ he achieves a ‘strange expressive and interpretive force’ and, ‘at bottom,’ he is a writer ‘inclined toward existential tragedy’ (xxiii). Rimanelli is introducing a new vocabulary to the discussion of Canadian fiction. No Canadian editors had ever spoken about ‘existential urgencies’ or phenomenology or the ‘interpretive force’ of fiction. Rimanelli is gesturing towards the self-reflexive nature of postmodern fiction. By the time he discusses the younger writers included in the anthology (Layton, Nowlan, Bowering) he had become even more pre-

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occupied with articulating this postmodern stance. He chooses short stories written by poets because they are primarily concerned with the inner life: ‘If we read attentively the prose writing of Layton, Nowlan and Bowering, we discover that these Canadian poets are not really concerned with a relativistic reality found at random in the disconnected tableaux of life, but with the creative act itself. They do not want to give a full value to the reality of man, but to the reality in man; not, in short, to phenomenological reality – even if, as Layton says, appearance also interests him’ (xxix). This must be the first time that critical commentary on Canadian writing uses the term ‘phenomenological reality.’ Rimanelli has shifted the measurement of value in the short story away from the realism of Pacey and Weaver and replaced it with an interest in ‘the creative act itself.’ All of a sudden, the landscape is interior, psychological, a matter of individual consciousness. Rimanelli aligns conventional realism with what he calls ‘the myth of the romantic fallacy’ (xxx) and argues that truly contemporary writers aim to replace the ‘brutally naturalistic’ (xxx) pursuits associated with that fallacy with a more symbolic order and a sense of individual style based on mental processes: ‘they deal with the “métier of poetry” in terms of style, which is tantamount to a mastery of expressive means. But style also means a sense of contemporaneity, the ability to translate one’s own subjective experience into the mode of expression employed by others’ (xxx). Rimanelli’s anthology was not alone in signalling a move towards experimentation in Canadian writing. This was particularly evident in poetry. In 1961 Ryerson Press published Poetry 62, edited by Eli Mandel and Jean-Guy Pilon. Its aim was to bring together new poets writing in French and English. In the preface, the editors argue that they wanted to include ‘lively poetry’ that ‘shatters limitations’ and that ‘refuses to be contained by officialdom’ (n.p.). Surveying the landscape of contemporary Canadian poetry, the editors concluded that ‘one senses in it a gathering of forces for the performance of some unprecedented and enormously significant drama of the mind’ (n.p.). They wanted to give new work ‘wider circulation than it can get in its experimental workshops in little magazines’ (n.p.). Poetry 62 brought together poems that had never appeared in book form and anticipated future anthologies by other editors who would continue to introduce new material. The co-publication of Poésie/Poetry 64, edited by Jacques Godbout and John Robert Colombo, seemed designed to fit this bill. Again, the emphasis was on new poetry by several relatively unknown English authors

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including Frank Davey, Lionel Kearns, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Colombo seemed as drawn to the Black Mountain–inspired poetry of Davey and Bowering as he was to the mythopoeic-oriented work by Atwood and MacEwen. This was one of the first anthologies to recognize the work of these young poets, many of whom had been publishing in small magazines for several years (so, they were not ‘unpublished,’ as Colombo claimed in his preface). One poet who objected to the contents of Poésie/Poetry 64 was Raymond Souster, who decided to create his own anthology as a corrective to the Godbout-Colombo endeavour. Souster took issue with the west coast bias evident in Poésie/Poetry 64, and no doubt with Colombo’s assertion that poets such as Bowering, Davey, and Kearns were of interest because ‘these poets are reading and reacting to contemporary American poetry rather than to the less exciting poetry being published in England and Canada’ (12). Souster had been responsible for publishing some of the poetry that Colombo found uninspiring. When his proposal for an alternative anthology was rejected by Ryerson and Macmillan, Souster put out New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (1966) with Contact Press. The selections themselves were made by Victor Coleman, the editor at Coach House Press, which had been founded in 1965. New Wave Canada was an important venue for the new poets. It shared with Coach House and other small-press magazines an interest in experimentation and open forms. Souster’s short preface to New Wave Canada gives credit to the TISH group by including such writers as Daphne Buckle (Marlatt), David Dawson, Gerry Gilbert, Robert Hogg, James Reid, and Fred Wah. Writers centred in the east included Victor Coleman, Scott Davis, William Hawkins, Barry Lord, Roy MacSkimming, David McFadden, and bpNichol. It also included works by George Jonas, E. Lakshmi Gill, and Michael Ondaatje. Souster points to the influence of Pound and William Carlos Williams and speaks of how Canadian poetry has now moved beyond the ‘reactionary period’ of the 1950s: ‘since then it has never looked back’ (n.p.). The alphabetically organized collection opens with Daphne Buckle’s ‘The Black Bird’ and ends with Fred Wah’s ‘Eyes.’ We can see the influence of the Black Mountain poets on many of the authors here. But beyond this connection, there is a freshness to the language, and a preoccupation with language as language, that distinguishes these writers. There is also a strong sense of play, not only in the use of line and stanza breaks, but also in a general willingness to use form to challenge form.

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Many of the poets interrogate the mimetic bias of earlier poetry and celebrate the creative process itself. Others reflect on their own techniques and the influences, to which they are bound. At the end of New Wave Canada, Souster provides ‘A Working Magazine Bibliography’ that in many ways is as valuable as the poetry in announcing a way of finding what Ondaatje calls ‘new myths to wind up the world.’ Each of the twenty-two magazines Souster lists – most of them small and recent – was dedicated to finding alternative perceptions of Canada, a new take on Canadian poetry, fiction, and criticism. Together they form a community that is brought together in the final pages of Souster’s anthology, in the year before the centennial. Souster had indeed collected a new wave. The ‘explosion’ identified in his anthology’s subtitle seemed to be gaining force.

Chapter Five

Nation Making, Nation Breaking, 1967–1982

While Raymond Souster was reading the proofs of New Wave Canada, schools all over the country were encouraging students to come up with different ways of celebrating the approaching centennial. Souster’s ‘explosion’ had not yet reached those students, nor had it affected the style of Bobby Gimby, the man who wrote ‘Ca-na-da,’ or ‘The Centennial Song,’ which was published in French and English in 1967. For those who were in high school at the time, entranced with Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, the opening lines of Gimby’s song are hard to forget: CA-NA-DA (One little two little three Canadians) We love thee (Now we are twenty million) CA-NA-DA (Four little five little six little Provinces) Proud and free (Now we are ten and the Territories sea to sea) [Chorus] North south east west There’ll be happy times, Church Bells will ring, ring, ring It’s the hundredth anniversary of Confederation Ev’rybody sing together!

Although the exuberant nationalism of the centennial celebrations would not be lost on Canada’s youth, the years following the centen-

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nial took the country – and the idea of nation – in directions not always characterized by Gimby’s homogenized, church-bell-ringing patriotism. Over the next two decades, Gimby’s Canada was redefined. Sam Solecki identifies 1988 and the passing of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (Bill C-93) as the year in which the Canada of 1967 ceased to exist: ‘When Canada’s centenary was celebrated in 1967, few anticipated, except perhaps for a handful of intellectuals, native leaders, and Quebec nationalists, that the country was about to enter an era of intense self-questioning and disunity, and that internal and external forces would lead to a gradual erosion of whatever national self-definition is possessed’ (6). I would argue that the ending came a little earlier – around 1982 – as the effects of the 1980 referendum in Quebec and the patriation of the Canadian constitution began to alter the discourse of nationalism. By 1982 the effects of the referendum were beginning to register in English-Canadian anthologies; their editors recognized that, in one way or another, the nation would never be the same. Conveniently, 1982 also marks the release of the findings of the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee – the Applebaum-Hébert Report – which had a profound impact on the arts and broadcasting in Canada. Finally, 1982 marks the date of publication of Margaret Atwood’s The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, a central anthology that demonstrates a number of crucial shifts in the representation of nation. If it is true, as I have argued, that English-Canadian literary anthologies reflect national values as they shift over time, then we should be able to examine the collections published during this period with an eye to determining what kinds of changes they embody on the part of editors, publishers, writers, educators, and their implied audiences. Such a survey is revealing. In a bibliography I completed of Canadian literary anthologies published between 1837 and 1997, the years bracketed by 1967 and 1982 show a dramatic increase in anthology production and a marked rise in the number of constituencies and ideologies served by those anthologies. This period saw the publication of close to seven hundred anthologies, an average of almost fifty per year. Compare this to the period between 1943 and 1966, in which two hundred anthologies appeared – an average of fewer than nine per year. The variety represented by those rising numbers was partially the result of increased immigration and the cultural pluralism it produced during the period, which saw Canada declare multiculturalism as official state policy in 1971. Solecki says that ‘on or about 8 October 1971,

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when Prime Minister Trudeau announced his government’s support of multiculturalism, Canadian identity began to change. The Canadian state is still recognizably the same, but the nation – that often inchoate aggregate or complex of attitudes, values, and traditions – has significantly altered. I would suggest that it has altered to the point that many of the constitutive assumptions and myths of our first century, as well as the questions we thought worth asking about identity, nation, and culture, no longer have the same frame of reference they once did. It’s as if the key words – including nature and culture – have themselves shifted, and continue to shift, in meaning’ (3–4). This change was reflected in a host of anthologies. In Scandalous Bodies, Smaro Kamboureli notes that ‘the many ethnic anthologies that appeared between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s marks the first such concentrated unfolding of ethnic writing in Canada. As it emerges from the Other side of Canadian literature’s cultural syntax, this writing brings into play what was previously disregarded. It makes present what rendered it absent; it brings into relief the boundaries that separated it from the mainstream tradition’ (131–2). While it is true that the period covered by the preceding chapter saw the publication of some regional and theme-based anthologies, their editors might have been hard pressed to imagine the extent to which Canadian anthologies emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as vehicles representing various regions, cities, sporting and leisure activities, diverse literary genres, political leanings, hobbies, religious beliefs, sexual preferences, diasporic communities, and ethnic and racial identities, to name just a few of the ideologies and interests served by anthologies in this period. A brief sampling of this diversity includes such titles as Canada First: A Mare Usque ad Edmonton; Thumbprints: An Anthology of Hitchhiking Poems; Six Days: An Anthology of Canadian Christian Poetry; Sweetgrass: An Anthology of Indian Poetry; I Breathe a New Song: Poems of the Eskimo; Around You: An Anthology of Southern Albertans’ Literature; Voices Down East: A Collection of New Canadian Writing from the Atlantic Provinces; Mountain Moving Day: Poems by Women; Black Chat: An Anthology of Black Poets; An Anthology of Poetry by Saskatoon Poets; 39 Below: The Anthology of Greater Edmonton Poetry; Harvest: Anthology of Mennonite Writing in Canada; The Sound of Time: Anthology of CanadianHungarian Authors; Baffles of Wind and Tide: A Selection of Newfoundland Writings; Skookum Wawa: Writings of the Canadian Northwest; North by 2000: A Collection of Canadian Science Fiction; Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology; Arab-Canadian Writing: Stories, Memoirs, and Reminis-

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cences; Yarmarok: Ukrainian Writing in Canada since the Second World War; Words from Inside ’76: An Annual Publication of the Prison Arts Foundation; Stories from Pangnirtung; Whale Sound: An Anthology of Poems about Whales and Dolphins; Inalienable Rice: A Chinese and Japanese Canadian Anthology; Paper Stays Put: A Collection of Inuit Writing; and Visions from the Edge: An Anthology of Atlantic Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy. The very existence of such an eclectic range was also a profound indicator of the extent to which the measures adopted in response to the recommendations of the Massey Commission had taken hold. Many of the anthologies published during this period were the product of small-press initiatives. The dramatic rise in the number of independent publishing houses was a direct result of funding provided to publishers by the Canada Council, which initiated the Block Grant Program for publishers in 1972, and by Heritage Canada’s Book Publishing Industry Development Program, established in 1979. When the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada was established in 1978, more money was made available to academics involved in the study of Canadian literature. Criticism increased, experimental magazines proliferated, and many small presses became involved in publishing works by and about Canadian authors and literature in general. This extensive new publishing activity was further supported by government programs that purchased titles directly from the publishers (e.g., Book Kits Canada), and in some cases these programs even went so far as to encourage the holders of provincial lottery tickets to trade in their losing stubs for Canadian-authored books, a policy brilliantly lampooned by John Metcalf in General Ludd. Canadian authors were now pictured on card games (‘Suitable for ages 7 and up’). CanLit crash courses were offered to high school teachers. Critical works started appearing in force. Anthologies joined the celebration and tried to find formulas that would appeal to a new generation of students being exposed to Canadian writers and their works. In an attempt to attract a young audience, some anthologies began to play with mixedmedia formats. I think here of anthologies such as Northern Journey, edited by Fraser Sutherland and Terrance MacCormack (1971), which includes fiction, poetry, a comic-book story centred on hero ‘Jim Canada,’ line drawings, concrete poems, and perforated pages containing Canadian Writers Cards (‘Save them, swap them with your friends – see who can get the biggest collection! It’s a new and absorbing hobby!’ [110]). The rise of independent, small publishing companies in Canada and

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the resulting diversity of anthologies devoted to multiple ideologies and ethnicities produced many eccentric volumes, but these did little to disrupt canonical representations of the nation in the major anthologies attached to the few remaining big publishing houses in Canada. As Kamboureli says, ‘the heterogeneity of these ethnic anthologies is one of the reasons why their potential to revise the canon has remained largely unrealized. Although intended to reach a group of readers that has stubbornly ignored ethnic writing, they were published by small if not obscure presses, and hardly reviewed at all; thus their readership was actually very small’ (135). During the same period, the teaching of Canadian literature finally became entrenched as a subject in high school and university curricula while graduate courses that would produce future academics devoted to teaching and commenting on Canadian literature flourished. As Paul Litt notes, ‘The Massey Commission’s observation that literature was overshadowed by painting no longer held: writing was undisputedly the standard bearer of Canadian cultural nationalism, a success story that filled nationalists with hope for Canada’s future’ (44). Inspired by the cultural nationalism that had developed in the 1960s, which was partly influenced by a deep sense of anti-Americanism in response to the war in Vietnam, many young Canadian academics saw their involvement with Canadian literature in quasi-evangelical terms. There was a sense in which putting Canada on the map was an act of political resistance that was also a kind of conversion experience. But this was actually nothing new: devotees of Canadian literature had always seen their interest in spiritual, if not explicitly religious, terms. In this sense, the nationalist fervour and commitment that mobilized Canadian editors and publishers and academics in the 1960s and especially during the 1970s linked their interests with those that had driven the earliest anthology makers, as far back as Dewart and Lighthall. In Eli Mandel’s words, it was now possible to see the anthology form in Canada as ‘a weapon in a war of taste and ideology, not simply a retrospective survey’ (‘Masks,’ 21). Like Dewart and Lighthall, anthologists in the 1970s and 1980s were obsessed with organizing the material that constituted their worlds. Every anthology became an inventory. This is not surprising, for by editing anthologies, writing criticism, and talking about Canadian literature, anthologists were in many ways contributing to a creation narrative. The world of Canadian literature had yet to be systematized and lacked resources such as bibliographies, listings of secondary sources, and considered criticism of the country’s younger writers. The field

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resembled the landscape that so many sought to capture on the page: it was a wilderness waiting to be surveyed, mapped, tamed. For explorers of this new world, everything was possible. Faced with such potential, many anthologists in this period did what all explorers do: they systematized. This passion for systematization had three immediate effects. First, it led to a proliferation of anthologies that were conceived in terms of numbers, almost as if their very existences were tied to some kind of obscure numerological system. Second, it created anthologies in a variety of series that appeared annually, a clear attempt to take advantage of burgeoning library budgets that, once invested in serial anthologies, treated them as subscriptions rather than individual titles; publishers could count on libraries buying annual editions automatically, as soon as they appeared. Third, it encouraged anthologies to be developed with the school market in mind: the goal was to create texts that would gain widespread adoption in newly established courses devoted to Canadian literature. The anthological possibilities were inviting, and potentially quite lucrative. Mandel has drawn attention to the ‘mad numerology of proliferating collections reminding us of regional diversity, ethnic differentiation, urbanization as a social reality, class structure, changing taste and preference, Maoism, Sexism, and Saskatoon’ that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s (‘Masks,’ 20–1). But even beyond the titles of anthologies devoted to particular groups, styles, histories, or interests, the presence of this ‘mad numerology’ as a force in itself emerges in many anthology titles: 15 Canadian Poets; Eleven Canadian Novelists; Five Modern Canadian Poets; Eight More Canadian Poets; Sixty Poets of Canada (and Quebec); 40 Women Poets of Canada; 21 x 3; Fifteen Winds; Four Perspectives; Ninety Seasons; One Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec; Thirty-One Newfoundland Poets; A Second Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec; 39 Below; Fourteen Stories High; Sixteen by Twelve; Twelve Prairie Poets. All of this counting is a form of taking inventory, a process that involves the continual ratification of the objective reality of the items available to the consumer. These anthologies lining the shelves proclaim, over and over, that the store is open for business, that it is filled with goods. In this case, the goods are Canadian literature; the inventory proves that the country is culturally rich. The titles promise to deliver the nation’s literature in terms of measurable volume: so many poets, so much fiction, so many authors, all for a reasonable price. But as the extensiveness of these anthological objects on the shelf also indicates, the commodification of Canadian literature was now in

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full force. However, publishers did not always benefit from the rush to commercialize Canadian literature. While individual readers might be attracted to the proliferating selection available to them, their interest alone could not support such a wide range of titles. The profits available to publishers on the sale of any book is always limited by numerous factors: discounts to retailers; distribution and warehousing costs; marketing fees; editing, design, and production expenditures; royalties; permissions costs; general overhead. It becomes very difficult for any book to become profitable unless it sells thousands of copies, or unless the cost of producing it is offset by government grants. In this kind of environment, most small publishers don’t stand a chance of competing against established, well-capitalized houses with extensive backlists. Many of the post–Massey Commission programs designed to assist Canadian publishers were framed by the realization that without such funding most of those publishers, even the big ones, would fail. When two large Canadian publishers – Gage and Ryerson – were taken over by American interests in 1970, it provoked a crisis that reminded cultural nationalists of just how vulnerable the publishing industry was. Litt observes that ‘the crisis of the early 1970s was a turning point. It made clear that the book was a product not just of literary genius but of a healthy publishing industry as well. Like other cultural industries, the book trade was to be fortified as a line of defence against Americanization. Unlike others, it had significant existing Canadian production, distribution, and public demand for a Canadian product. This belated official recognition of the book as a particularly significant bastion of Canadian culture ensured that there would henceforth be government policies that focused directly on the cultural industry of publishing’ (42). These policies resulted in programs that encouraged publishers to pursue titles that might never have seen print. At the same time, funding became available to university, college, and public libraries to allow them to increase their holdings in Canadian literature. The sale of any title to the library market could easily make a book profitable. The challenge for editors and publishers was to determine which kinds of books libraries would buy. This meant that in developing their editorial policies in the post-Massey era, many Canadian publishers had to imagine an implicit library buyer who would judge the suitability and desirability of their products for use by a general readership. And, of course, different buyers in different regions often had different interests. So, a further challenge faced by the publishers would be to develop titles that had pan-Canadian library appeal.

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Librarians had always influenced the selection of books available to the public, but the post-centennial role of librarians gave them even wider power, especially because in some cases, a single buyer could make a decision that would place a book in dozens of branches belonging to a single public library system (the Toronto Public Library system, for example, has close to one hundred branches). While it would not be true to say that publishers always had to consider the powers of the invisible library buyer, it would also not be true to say that those powers could always be ignored. The market was too lucrative. At a certain level, then, the kinds of Canadian literature produced in the 1960s and 1970s were developed in a material environment influenced by a surge in government programs that empowered a new class of buyers: librarians who controlled massive budgets. The imagined librarian had the power to alter editorial direction. While the extent to which this new class of buyers discouraged the production of experimental literature remains the topic of another study, it is clear that in selecting titles for widespread purchase, librarians had to consider the tastes and demands of their audience. In imagining a librarian, publishers also had to imagine a set of standards that, if met, would allow their titles to flourish. While public libraries did not frequently invest in detailed works of literary criticism, they welcomed critical books that made Canadian writers seem more accessible to the public. Just as increased library budgets encouraged the production of a certain kind of anthology that would be appealing to the librarian-buyer, so did those buyers look for patron-oriented criticism that would be clear and understandable. The rise of thematic criticism in Canada during the 1970s may have had a lot to do with the theories advanced by Northrop Frye in his conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, and later with the ideas proposed by Margaret Atwood in Survival, but it also had much to do with the desire of publishers to promote the kind of criticism that would be appealing to the library market – criticism that was straightforward, digestible, comprehensible, and useful in the classroom. Because the promotion of the national literature and its explication had so much to do with librarian-buyers, an implicit handshake controlled the relationship between literature and criticism. The literature, like the criticism, had to be approachable and usable. Writers who met these criteria had a better chance of being purchased than those who did not. In this way, the libraries helped to establish canonical norms while the publishers buttressed those norms by providing the libraries

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with critical material that explained them. This mutually supportive form of determining literary and critical canons deserves further study. The key to this symbiotic relationship between librarian and publisher was government funding. Such funding frequently encouraged conservatism. If things got too experimental, there was always the chance that some reactionary MP would stand up and ask why the government was investing in radical nonsense. Perhaps the best example of this kind of intervention occurred in the case of bill bissett, whose work was censured in the House of Commons in 1977. Bob Wenman, a Conservative MP from British Columbia, rose to argue that ‘the Canada Council is supporting, with public money, individuals to write what anyone in this chamber would term as offensive and demeaning pornography’ (1487). He tried to have the Canada Council’s funding reviewed and pointed to ‘the disgusting and pornographic exhibits of Mr. Bissett’s published works, sponsored by the Canada Council’ (1496). Wenman’s request was turned down, but bissett’s funding was slashed the following year. This pointed to the inescapable connection made between public funding, taxpayer dollars, and literary values. How many librarians would be willing to invest in bissett’s work after learning that he had been called a pornographer in the House of Commons? Public patronage implies acceptable and unacceptable literary values. At the same time, funding bodies such as the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council have their own sets of eligibility criteria that work against the production of certain kinds of work (I examine this kind of implicit state censorship in ‘The Canada Council and the Construction of Canadian Literature’). If the post-centennial age of anthology making in Canada represented a high point in terms of sheer volume, it was also a period marked by pronounced editorial freedom (new sources of funding were available) and pronounced editorial constraints (that new funding came with strings attached). In some ways, the widespread introduction of Canadian literature as a curricular topic during the 1960s and 1970s fractured the field. While high schools might choose to introduce students to Canadian literature through the selection of a particular author or through the adoption of a small and tightly focused anthology, university offerings were moving in the opposite direction, with full-year courses on a wide variety of subjects designed for different levels of expertise. The anthologies that served this expanding market had to meet the criteria of professors who were planning to cover multiple authors and

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any number of historical periods. This caused a split in the very conception of Canadian literature anthologies. There were the big ones, clearly intended for use in universities, like H. Gordon Green and Guy Sylvestre’s A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne (1967), Robert Weaver and William Toye’s The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature (1973), and Russell Brown and Donna Bennett’s two-volume An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (1982/3). Then there were a number of anthologies designed for high school use, such as John Metcalf’s Sixteen by Twelve (1970), John Stevens’s The Urban Experience (1975), and Metcalf’s Second Impressions (1981). Authors were either compartmentalized within the narrow confines of focused anthologies, or they were seen as participants in a historical trajectory that framed them as part of an expansive, evolving tradition. The fragmentation of Canadian literature during this period is not only the result of poetry, fiction, and criticism being reconfigured to meet the multifaceted demands of bookstores, librarians, high school teachers, professors, and students; a generalized view of the country’s literature also began to break down because it was increasingly taught in units that reflected an array of curricular options: courses on early Canadian literature, the modern Canadian story, writing by women, the Canadian long poem, prairie fiction, and so on. Canadian literature had become a congested and conflicted marketplace with numerous publishers vying for control. The anthology editors who were most successful in this environment were those who learned how to serve various market niches and to build bridges between camps. Janet Friskney and Carole Gerson note that during this period, ‘the literary anthology, a long-standing classroom staple, was to prove a growing source of income as Canadian literature became an established area of study. Poets and authors of short stories were the main beneficiaries, along with the publishers who supplied texts for the baby boomers swelling Canada’s post-secondary classrooms thorough the 1960s and 1970s’ (137). A glance at the list of anthologies produced during this period quickly reveals the most influential editors, each of whom managed to corner a different market niche. For example, John Metcalf edited fourteen anthologies between 1967 and 1982, most of them with educational publishers such as Van Nostrand Reinhold, Methuen, McGrawHill, and Macmillan. He also initiated a Best Canadian Stories series with Oberon that was published annually. Metcalf had been a high school teacher. As a public reader of his own fiction, he had performed with

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the Montreal Storytellers group of writers at dozens of schools. He understood the market, and clearly had no problem convincing publishers that he knew what teachers wanted. The three academic anthologies in general use during the 1970s were Gary Geddes and Phyllis Bruce’s 15 Canadian Poets (1970) (which was revised and updated several times over the following four decades), Eli Mandel’s Poets of Contemporary Canada (1972), and John Newlove’s Canadian Poetry: The Modern Era (1977). As Frank Davey points out, these academic anthologies were edited by writers ‘who had some association with Canadian nationalism: Geddes was editor of Copp Clark’s monograph series Studies in Canadian Literature; Mandel was concurrently editing two other collections of Canadian poetry and the anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism; Newlove was senior literary editor for his anthology’s publisher, McClelland and Stewart’ (‘Poetry,’ 10–11). Other anthologists, such as Carl F. Klinck, A.J.M. Smith, William Toye, Reginald Watters, and Robert Weaver, continued to hold sway. At the same time, several anthologists offered collections that directly challenged the status quo, including Peter Anson’s Canada First: A Mare Usque ad Edmonton (1969), Eldon Garnet’s w)here? the other Canadian poetry (1974), and George Bowering’s Fiction of Contemporary Canada (1980). While the established anthologists tended to align themselves with the bigger publishing houses, the small presses performed the crucial function of producing the more experimental collections. Anson’s book was published by House of Anansi; Garnet’s by Press Porcépic; and Bowering’s by Coach House Press, which proudly declared that its titles were ‘Printed in Canada by mindless acid freaks.’ However, the creation of multiple constituencies, and the publication of anthologies designed to serve them, did not succeed in dislodging the large-scale anthologies as instruments of canonical transmission. Douglas Barbour notes that although the small-press publishers envisaged ‘a different notion of canonicity’ and ‘although such anthologies are taught in smaller, specialized courses (“Contemporary Women’s Poetry of Canada,” “Prairie Literature,” “Poetry of British Columbia”), they do not have much impact on the larger canon-making effects of an anthology like 15 Canadian Poets x 2, which is used in so many general Canadian Literature or Canadian Poetry courses’ (‘Poetry Anthologies,’ 165). The diversification that marked anthology making between 1967 and the early 1980s was a clear sign of the extent to which the means of disseminating Canadian literature had matured. It also pointed to the many factors that worked towards destabilizing any monolithic

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understanding of the nation or its literature. Now there were all kinds of interests involved in the mix, and one didn’t necessarily have to be well connected or live in Toronto or Montreal in order to produce an influential anthology. At one level, the myth of a unified and transcendent Canada whose citizens sang in bilingual harmony from coast to coast (Bobby Gimby’s vision) was unravelling long before the centennial church bells were ringing in 1967. But at another level, the myth lived on in the hands of anthologists determined to produce collections that reflected canonical ideals of national literary unity even in the face of all the evidence suggesting that such unity could not exist and never did. One could argue that the pan-Canadian values held by these mythologizers had always been contested by others who supported more unconventional aesthetics. However, the post-centennial years stand out in the history of anthology making precisely because the conflict between the mythologizers and the demythologizers (to use Robert Kroetsch’s term) becomes the central feature of the period. For this reason, it is not possible to trace a straight line connecting the dozens of anthologies emerging in these years. If there is a line, it is jagged and erratic, wobbling uncertainly between the making and breaking of the idea of nation. Anthologies in this period are energized because they inhabit such an uncertain national space. Their editors are all pursuing various forms of self-interest and attempting to capture the attention of the marketplace through a variety of strategies that influence the kinds of material they choose to represent. One way of looking at this conflicted field is to observe the various encampments. After all, these editors are waging a kind of canonical war, however politely, and their followers and torchbearers are out there with them, vying for power and control. It is messy. Occupying a large swath of territory are the committed nation builders, the inheritors of the tradition first articulated by Dewart when he proclaimed that a national literature was a central element in the creation of a national consciousness. These editors are the big believers, the secular descendants of their Methodist forefathers, who believed that the anthologist’s task was to represent the panorama of the nation and to assert that all forms of diversity and minority could be comfortably housed under a single roof. They were determined to imagine their community. The church may no longer be present, but the religious sentiment is still there: we are all members of the same congregation; our shared house is this country we inhabit, and it is what unites us (Gimby exploited this repressed association between nation and church

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in his lyrics). This is what Lorraine Weir calls a ‘strategy of containment’ based on the idea of ‘sharability’ (27). Containment and sharability keep the house in order. If these editors assert the presence and desirability of a canon, then it should come as no surprise that literary canons find their roots in canonical values originating with the church. The nation builders see themselves on an evangelical mission. They will convert the nonbelievers and deliver them into the promised land encapsulated in the anthologies they construct. All are welcome to enter. These constructions are, of course, not exclusive, and their architects would never assert that their congregations resist difference. They would argue that they welcome difference, precisely because it gives them more credibility by demonstrating their ability to embrace otherness and to define their centrality precisely through the activity of supporting alterity. The nation-building anthologists are necessarily haunted by the French-English divide that makes the dream of a united Canada so difficult to maintain. Many English-Canadian anthologists have tried to bridge this divide by creating collections that represent material in both languages. How can the nation truly be unified if French and English writers cannot live together, under the same covers? This is the dream of unity that inspires the inclusion of French material in anthologies edited by Lighthall (1889), Carman and Pierce (1935), and Smith (1960, 1967), among others. In their hands, the anthology becomes a vehicle for linguistic and cultural reconciliation. Ironically, the dream of unity inspiring these editors weakens progressively after the centennial, but in 1967 it is still there in full force, embodied in the kind of nationbuilding anthology one might expect to see published in such a central year. That anthology is H. Gordon Green and Guy Sylvestre’s A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne. Henry Gordon Green was a creative writer and radio personality best known for his Sunday morning broadcasts on CBC’s Fresh Air. He became the fiction editor of the popular Family Herald magazine and was president of the Canadian Authors Association, which pushed for the creation of an anthology that would celebrate the centennial. Guy Sylvestre was the associate director of the Library of Parliament from 1956 to 1968 and then served as the director of the National Library of Canada from 1968 to 1983. His involvement with La Société des écrivains canadiens encouraged that organization to support the French half of the publication. Both men were involved in nationalist pursuits that suggested their anthology would be committed to celebrating the

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country. The collection, co-published by Ryerson Press in Toronto and Éditions HMH in Montreal, was ‘subsidized by the Centennial Commission’ (title page), a fitting recognition of the extent to which government funding was essential to the publication of creative works in Canada. In his English introduction, Green says that he was pursuing ‘a sort of Canadian exploration rather than a judgement of what constitutes the absolute best in our writing’ (ii). This ‘Canadian exploration’ was about identity: the anthology would feature authors ‘who had some special ability to tell [Canadians] what manner of men we Canadians are and how we got that way.’ The anthology would ‘follow these authors … on a literary rambling through one hundred years of this nation’s history and over 3,500 miles of its geography’ (ii). The material in the anthology supports the idea of inevitable evolution and progress linked to nation building, while the authors provide the key to this narrative of national advancement. In this context, they become guides to a wilderness that is becoming a garden: they are not slogging through the forests but ‘rambling’ through the country, a kind of celebratory jaunt that demonstrates how a once imposing and threatening landscape has been subdued at the hands of the writers, who can ramble along with their readers. Green expresses his hope that this book will break with the canon: ‘we trust that this book will not be an anthology of other anthologies’ (iv). He reinforces his anti-canonical aims by asserting: ‘we have included writers whose appeal has been to the millions rather than to the professors’ (iv). It seemed as though Green and Sylvestre would be breaking new ground, especially in their bold, American Idol–type embrace of popular taste at the expense of professorial standards. Also like American Idol, the editors do not take personal responsibility for the selections because they are the product of a collective, in this case ‘three separate committees, one each for fiction, non-fiction and poetry’ (iv). However, the appeal to popular consensus (‘millions’?) is undermined by the acknowledgments, appearing first in the English section of the anthology, which express indebtedness to Professor W.G. Hardy (‘who first conceived the idea of this unique anthology, and who, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for its creation’ [xiv]), as well as Professors Fred Cogswell and Earle Beattie (these three men ‘worked for over a year with the Editor to gather the selections for the English language section of the book’ [xiv]). Green says that these committees would ensure that the anthology

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would not simply embrace canonical choices, but then he runs into problems because he realizes that the committees, which were put in place to encourage newness, ‘turned first to the best works of our best known authors’ (iv, vi), a canonical strategy if there ever was one. Not surprisingly, Green becomes confused about exactly what standards he wants to establish. Is he pursuing ‘new names and new developments in Canadian letters’ (iv) by those ‘who are not yet famous’ (vi) or is he seeking out ‘long-established authors’ (vi) in order to give the book credibility? While Green maintains that ‘what has been written in this country since 1940 will one day be regarded as more important by far than anything which preceded it’ (iv), only 14 of the 187 writers included in the volume were born in the 1930s (or after) and began publishing after 1940. The editorial preoccupation with fame, importance, and ‘the best’ by ‘our best known’ suggests that, despite the ostensible interest in the present and popular opinions, the collection is rooted in canonical ideas about status that link it to the professorially inspired anthological tradition it claims to transcend. Green’s introduction is interesting mainly because of the unselfconscious contradictions it expresses. He is wrestling with some of the central issues posed by canon formation and its relation to the construction of nation. He understands that the anthology he has created is not innocent and that the selections appearing in the book also carry with them judgments about the relevance of the history, society, and culture of the country he is attempting to represent. He also knows that there is something autocratic about choices being made by a single editor, so he seeks a broader consensus through the committee approach. But he fails to see that the people on his committees are all white, Christian, and overwhelmingly male. Sixteen people are credited with shaping the English side of the book: twelve men and four women. The French side lists fifteen specialists consulted in order to determine what Sylvestre calls a ‘consensus omnium’ (iii); only one woman was involved. When we turn to the French side of this collection, the contradictions continue to multiply. Although the anthology is obviously presented as a symbol of the unity that can be found between the French and English, what it really presents is ample evidence of just how distinct and different their literary cultures remain. For example, when Green wants guidance, he turns to professors, editors of popular magazines, and professional writers. When Sylvestre wants advice, he turns to a grand committee of specialists, most of whom are professors (twelve of the fifteen). No one on Sylvestre’s list is involved with the popular media

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except (marginally) Jean Marcel, a literary critic with Action Nationale, and Jean-Ethier Blais, a literary critic for Le Devoir. Sylvestre’s central problem is to explain the presence of this book in the first place. What does the anthology signify? That the French and English in Canada are finally united and that the Confederation being celebrated in this centennial year made that union work? That French literature occupies the same ground as English-Canadian literature? That the narrative represented by the anthology’s chronologically organized selections articulates a myth of progress in which the distinctions between French and English are resolved in a perfect balance (the editors point out that the French and English sides of the volume have an equal allotment of pages)? That in this centennial year English Canadians might purchase an anthology that displayed the spirit of French Canada, or that, conversely, French Canadians might consult this volume to see English Canada in a new light? This might be the ideal held by the editors, but it could hardly become reality. This dream of national unity and linguistic parity was being presented at the end of a decade that saw the rise of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, which was partially inspired by the gulf that separated the English and French in Canada, and by the perception among many Quebecers that they had no place in Confederation. Indeed, it was the perception of this gulf and the failure of the federal government to establish linguistic equality that led to the creation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963. In 1961, only 12.2 per cent of the population claimed to understand both languages (Statistics Canada, 1961 Census). Even in 2006, only 7.4 per cent of anglophones outside Quebec said they could carry on a conversation in both official languages (Statistics Canada, 2006 Census). Given these figures, one can only wonder who would be reading A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne when it appeared in 1967. Its audience was a dreamed audience. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had been receiving briefs about the lack of bilingualism in Canada for close to four years when Green and Sylvestre’s anthology was published. The editors had to know that their dreamed audience did not exist. The presence in their collection of an earlier writer such as Camille Roy (who wonders in his 1907 essay whether a national literature is possible) or a more contemporary novelist like Hubert Aquin (who supported terrorism as a means to Quebec independence) should have provided a wake-up call, but the ‘consensus omnium’ was to keep most of the young

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Quebec writers involved in the separatist cause at a distance. Meanwhile, Pierre Vallières’s celebrated Québécois call to arms – Nègres blancs d’Amérique – appeared the same year as Green and Sylvestre’s collection. If it illustrated anything, A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne showed that the topic it set out to idealize simply did not exist. Green says that this is the first bilingual anthology of Canadian literature, but here he is mistaken. In 1960, A.J.M. Smith published The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, which was completely revised and updated in 1968. Smith’s book contains practically no apparatus – only the authors’ dates are provided. However, the brief preface makes it clear that Smith does not share Green and Sylvestre’s celebratory mood, even in the centennial year. He is more downbeat than ever. He says that Canadian nationalism is on the wane and that ‘the distinction that was once valid between a native and a cosmopolitan tradition has grown rapidly less significant’ (xviii) because nationalism has been both ‘absorbed’ and ‘transcended’ in the sense that ‘it has developed a sensibility and a language that are international but not rootless – a biculturalism that unites more than French and English in Canada (although some of the younger poets writing in French consider themselves poets of Québec, not of Canada)’ (xviii). This internationalism ‘joins Canada to the world’ and shatters the illusion that any nation is an island in an age ‘united by a common fear of possible annihilation’ (xviii). With these words, Smith acknowledges the rising trend of globalization, which he links to the advent of ‘instantaneous communication, electronic and nuclear devices, and the universal half-education supplied by the mass-media’ (xviii). Smith’s choice of words suggests that he has been reading Marshall McLuhan’s influential theories about the global village and the impact of the media in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). For the most part, the eightytwo poets he selects (fifty-seven English and twenty-five French) are part of this increasingly post-national ethos: ‘All but a scant half-dozen of the poets are still living; most of them are actively and continuously writing and publishing’ (xvii). The difference between Smith’s anthology and Green and Sylvestre’s in terms of this contemporary focus is striking. Only 7 per cent of the writers included in A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne were born in the 1930s or after. But in Smith’s collection, the number of young writers born in this period rises to 31 per cent. Smith’s volume may include more recent writers, but only a small proportion of them are women (13 out of 82

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writers). Green and Sylvestre make more of an attempt to be inclusive (37 out of 187), yet it seems clear that for these three editors, women have less to say than men in any historical, national, or global context. Both of these prominent anthologies demonstrate the growing problem of making national literature anthologies at a time when the value of asserting national identity – and its possible expression in literature – is becoming the subject of intense interrogation and doubt. Green and Sylvestre simply ignore the problem. Their committee-oriented attempt to give equal representation to English and French writers and to frame them as friendly guides to a pan-Canadian form of experience that will unite all readers under the banner of citizenship is undermined at every turn. The problem of how to represent the nation becomes so problematic that it has to be relegated to separate committees that never speak to each other. The difficulty of depicting the nation’s history within the confines of the volume calls for the erasure of most Canadian history prior to 1867, which was constructed as the new departure point on a road to contemporary awareness that is valorized over the past. The need to find a perfect balance between English and French selections results in literary value being reduced to page counts, as if the anthology performed the function of a scale, weighing words to ensure that everything is even, counted, beyond reproach. Meanwhile, the forces within the book itself are working to rip its equalizing assumptions to shreds. French writers complain about their subjugation by the English. They write about pain, loneliness, and the desire for revenge. The English writers know little about their French counterparts, but their world – their Canada – often seems painful as well. Close to the end of the ‘ramble’ that takes us through this anthology, we find John Newlove writing ‘By the Church Wall.’ That poem is not much of a ramble. Newlove does not seem happy with his own voyage, or with the country: The mocking faces appear in the churchyard, appear as I curl on the hard ground trying to sleep – trying to sleep as the voices call me, asking why must I always be frightened and dreaming? I have travelled this road many times, though not in this place, tired in the bones and the long blistered feet,

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beneath a black mass of flat clouds, dry in a damned and useless land.

(528)

Jean-Guy Pilon does not seem any more optimistic in ‘Je murmure le nom de mon pays’: Je murmure le nom de mon pays Comme un secret obscène Ou une plaie cachée Sur mon âme Et je ne sais plus La provenance des vents Le dessin des frontières Ni l’amorce des villes Mais je sais le nom des camarades Je sais la désespérance de leur coeur Et la lente macération De leur vengeance accumulée.

(546)

Like Green and Sylvestre’s anthology, Smith’s Modern Canadian Verse seems to undermine itself. For if it is true that globalism has replaced nationalism as a driving contemporary force, what purpose is served by a literature anthology that, by its very presence, asserts the existence of a national identity that the editor himself openly questions? Why publish the book, if not to assert a form of nationalism in the face of globalization? Smith is obviously conflicted. He wants to frame the nation, and like all of his editorial predecessors, he believes that literature anthologies can do that, but unlike many of those predecessors, he understands that his project is destined to fail. What is it, then, that drives Smith to complete this project? A powerful sense of nostalgia? A desire for the construction of a more innocent Canada decoupled from the world? Surely it cannot be A.J.M. Smith who would embrace such desire. This is the man who shunned the national in favour of the cosmopolitan and who now goes one step further by saying that even the cosmopolitan has been transcended by the global. In this sense, the A.J.M. Smith of 1967 is a very different Smith than the man who was able to see Canada through the convenient and comforting native-cosmopolitan binary he constructed in 1943. He had a place in that structure. But now, in 1967, precisely the year that should

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offer the comfort of national self-assurance and accomplishment, all he can think of is how the nation is threatened by forces beyond his control, and how it is breaking down. What, then, is the place of his anthology in the midst of such a breakdown? It represents a desperate attempt to find home. Smith casts himself in the traditional role of the anthologist as existential wanderer. He makes the selections in Modern Canadian Verse, asserting that they represent ‘the best work being done in Canada today’ (xvii). There is that comforting term: ‘the best.’ Simply by invoking it, Smith harks back to the safety of hierarchy, to the canonical ideal of a world where things are ordered, ranked, safe. But this is also a way of erecting a dam to stem the global flood. Can anything be ‘the best’ in a globalized environment that breaks down such distinctions? ‘Best’ in relation to what globalized standard? And who is Smith to judge? His anthology speaks powerfully about its failure and its inauthenticity. It is an anthology in bad faith. It speaks with equal power about the increasing difficulty experienced by other English-Canadian literary anthologists in making claims about the nation, even though their books were contracted and sold with the idea that such a nation could somehow be represented in an anthology. The same assumption informs much Canadian criticism and pedagogy. Can a course called ‘Introduction to Canadian Literature’ begin from the assumption that the object referred to by the literature – Canada – does not exist? That is a difficult assertion to make in the face of literary histories and anthologies that go to great lengths to formalize the presence of history, identity, and the reality of Canada itself. It is also a difficult assertion to make to young undergraduates who have few ideas about Canada in the first place. For many teachers, it is necessary to build the place up and make it real before the responsible process of demolition can begin in earnest. Anthologies exist in order to allow this building up. We can’t really hold them entirely responsible for constructing a myth. And besides, myths are often much more interesting than reality, so why not keep building? For some anthologists, the myth of a united and serene Canada would prevail. They would continue to assemble collections that pretended the country was in the continuing process of actualizing itself. In this model, divergence from implied norms would be invited and celebrated, precisely because the tolerance of the editor – his or her openness to a carefully monitored representation of difference – was a synecdoche for the tolerance of the country as a whole. By admitting

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difference within the generally conservative confines of the anthology structure, the anthologist replicated the discursive practices used to define Canada itself as a tolerant society open to alterity. For others, the myth of a transcendent and all-embracing nation had to be undercut, at all costs. But it would be a mistake to look for direct evidence of this kind of demythologizing. The target was not often explicitly national ideals. Anthologists who worked against the status quo pursued their options by supporting a variety of political contexts that challenged prevailing norms. The anthological route from 1967 to 1982 is troubled by the presence of these two distinct camps: the makers of the national myth and those determined to undermine it. I would argue further that these two camps also describe a divide that would develop in Canadian publishing. Before the 1960s, there were few small presses in Canada that pursued alternative writing. Most literary publishing and the bulk of the national literature anthologies were produced by the big publishing houses: Macmillan, Ryerson (later McGraw-Hill Ryerson), McClelland and Stewart, and Oxford University Press. But the 1960s saw the creation of new small presses, and other small publishing companies were formed in the 1970s. The pull between conventional visions of Canada and more subversive ideals often emerges through the publishing programs aligned with the bigger and smaller houses respectively, although there is no hard and fast rule, since the larger houses would sometimes embrace experimentation and radicalism, if only to keep themselves in style. What we begin to see is a dialectical movement between construction and destruction of the national ideal. This kind of dialectic emerges in literary criticism as well. When Margaret Atwood published Survival in 1972, it was still possible to adopt a purely thematic approach to the study of Canadian literature and to write about that literature as if it was the product of an all-white population. But by 1976, with the publication of Frank Davey’s attack on Atwood and other thematic critics in his essay ‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ the national ideal became much more difficult to maintain. Critics began to embrace formalism, reject thematics, and bring theories that were increasingly influenced by French post-structuralism and postmodernism to the concept of nation. By the early 1980s, the thematic ideal was in disrepute, as was the unproblematized understanding of nation that it embodied. This shift in critical attitudes was not always matched by similar shifts in editorial perspectives. Editors of national literature anthologies were reluctant to compromise or question the national ideal at the

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centre of their collections. Sometimes, as in Smith’s 1967 anthology, the articulation of the national ideal is hampered by the realization that Canada is part of a post-national global community and that in many respects any anthology that innocently trumpets the centennial is also involved in the creation of an epitaph and an obituary. As Pierre Berton has so eloquently argued in his book entitled 1967, that was perhaps Canada’s ‘last good year,’ the culmination of a culture of innocence. Anthologists in the post-centennial era had to decide whether they were going to further this myth of innocence or alter their books to reflect the changing make-up and values of the nation. For some, the celebratory perspective was hard to escape. In the revised edition of The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1967), Ralph Gustafson spoke of the ‘northness’ that characterized Canadian poetry and took issue with ‘the boredom of those critics who are convinced that it does not matter who we are’ (31). Gustafson wanted to nail down this Canadian identity in his revised edition, which, coinciding with the centennial celebrations, showed that Canadians were ‘in the midst, or at the beginning of the re-creation’ (32). It is particularly in his isolation of the idea of ‘northness’ that Gustafson joins a historic line of editors, writers, and artists who celebrate their nordicity as if it were mystical. It is no coincidence that Glenn Gould’s documentary, The Idea of North, was first broadcast in 1967 as part of the CBC’s celebration of the centennial year. As Sherrill Grace says, the north in Canada is a central idea, a ‘mental background’ that colours Canadians’ conception of the country: ‘North is gendered, raced, and classed; it permeates all aspects of our culture, from painting to comic strips, from politics to classical music, and it encompasses the entire country’ (15). In ‘True North,’ Margaret Atwood writes, ‘the north focuses our anxieties. Turning to face north, face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of a dream’ (142). But the north is more than mystic, more than psychic, more than a dream. It is also a symbol of nationhood and national unity: ‘To celebrate the North as a symbol of national unity and Canadian identity is to make a virtue of geographical reality and socio-economic necessity, to differentiate us from the United States’ (Grace, 67). In defining Canadian writing in terms of its ‘northness,’ Gustafson is also signalling its distinction from American literature, which is ‘south.’ In this sense, he not only also repeats the preoccupation of earlier editors but also anticipates others who frame Canadian experience as something connected with a natural world that is explicitly non-American. Margaret

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Atwood’s Survival (1972) may be about American colonial oppression, with a feminized Canada struggling against masculinist American imperialism, but it is also about the attempt to define the Canadian landscape as a place where one can become a ‘creative non-victim’ (38). The northern landscape identified with Canada, hostile as it may be, still provides the means to personal salvation. In making this alignment between a northern landscape and identity, Atwood is repeating the connection between ‘northness’ and ‘re-creation’ so central to Gustafson’s work. She is also echoing a group of artists and philosophers who believe that Canadians’ relation to the land is an ‘ontological priority’ (Solecki, 20), a ‘psychic crucible’ that defines them, to use Abraham Rotstein’s term (112). Although Atwood did not edit any anthologies until 1982, the ideas she developed in Survival influenced literary criticism in Canada for more than a decade and served the crucial purpose of disturbing enough people to prompt a rethinking of critical value in Canada by the end of the 1970s. In the beginning, before the reductive axioms in Survival were debunked, editors of Canadian anthologies began to incorporate her ideas into their anthology selections. Atwood was not alone in proposing a direct association between Canadian landscape and identity. This association existed in the earliest critical works and it became a legitimate scholarly connection after Frye made it central to his findings in the conclusion to the Literary History of Canada. Atwood simply popularized Frye’s ideas in a format that was accessible to students and teachers at a time when any means of defining Canada in contrast to the United States was politically inviting. As Robert Fulford points out in his introduction to Read Canadian (1972), there was very little information available to teachers concerning the defining features of Canadian literature, and such information was necessary if students were to understand the relation between literature and citizenship: ‘To us it is self-evident that in Canadian education, Canadian books should play a major role: without them we cannot begin to understand Canada’s situation, values and problems’ (viii–ix). Writing in the same year, Dennis Lee put the problem in more philosophic terms: ‘We aren’t able to identify with the American impulse to simply take over the land (to “master” it) and remake it by technology; and we do not feel a deep sense of being claimed by it – which affirmative sense is often hard for us to come to terms with, because the American way of dwelling, that of unreflecting mastery, has taken such possession of our minds’ (‘Rejoinder,’ 33). This was the idea that he developed in his seminal essay entitled ‘Cadence, Country, Silence.’

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Call it sublimity, nordicity, ‘garrison mentality,’ survival, or even realism. The nation-making anthologies that followed Gustafson had to address the pervading sense of anti-Americanism that characterized the 1970s at the same time as they had to negotiate among proliferating models of nation that, in one way or another, were all rooted in responses to the Canadian landscape. By ‘nation-making anthologies,’ I mean those that rationalize their existence by offering theories about the relation between the material selected and the representation of nation. An idea of Canada is implicit in any anthology of Canadian literature, even if it refuses to offer theories about the nature of the literature itself, because if there is no idea of nation behind the collection, why bother to create it in the first place? Even the most extreme ‘post-national’ position is in fact a national position, because without a conception of the nation there would be nothing to be ‘post’ about. The anti-Americanism that defines the 1970s emerges at the end of the 1960s in an anthology explicitly devoted to the cause of national resistance. Al Purdy’s The New Romans (1968) was published by Mel Hurtig, a committed nationalist and bookstore owner who founded Hurtig Publishers in 1972. If Purdy was interested in finding a publisher who would support the expression of anti-American sentiment, he had gone to the right place. Hurtig was a co-founder of the Committee for an Independent Canada, and he lobbied aggressively against American imperialism. As a publisher, he pursued numerous projects devoted to Canadian sovereignty and cultural independence. The aim of the anthology was straightforward: ‘We envisioned a book that would say, in absolutely biased terms, how many Canadian writers – and it follows, many other Canadians too – feel about the U.S. and Americans. Do we really like Americans as individuals and as a people? Do Canadians feel that the U.S. is pursuing a just and honourable policy with its military presence in Southeast Asia? Considering the U.S. as the ranking world power, do Canadians feel that the U.S. is using that power badly or that it does more harm than good in the world today?’ (i). At least Purdy is direct in establishing that his anthology is the product of absolute bias. For the most part, the forty-nine contributors share his anti-Americanism in poems, short stories, and prose excerpts that present a forceful picture of the extent to which Canadian intellectuals were rising up against American ideology. Some brief excerpts featured on the back cover make the point: ‘The United States is the glory, jest, and terror of Mankind.’ (James M. Minifie)

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‘The United States has mobilized the most barbarous military machine the world has seen since Nazi Germany.’ (John W. Warnock) ‘Today the United States is by far the most belligerent member of the disunited family of nations. Her economy is more permanently a war economy than that of any other nation in the modern world.’ (Henry Beissel)

Published a year after the centennial, Purdy’s anthology illustrates just how shaky the concept of an independent Canada remained. It also demonstrated the continuing presence of the nationalist element in Canadian anthology making. Purdy didn’t undertake to produce a purely literary anthology, but for him the act of bringing together these anti-American voices was akin to assembling an army in defence of the nation. Canadian writers would be warriors in the service of their country, battling against the American invaders, the ‘New Romans’ who would ride roughshod over Canadian soil. By enlisting the services of these writers, Purdy participates in the nationalist impulse central to so many Canadian anthologies and reinforces the idea that the very act of anthologizing Canadian literature is a form of defending the country. Apparently, the many contributors to Purdy’s volume agreed. The New Romans was the first of a number of anthologies Purdy edited, which included Fifteen Winds (1969), Storm Warning (1971), and Storm Warning 2 (1976). The publication history of these anthologies demonstrates that Purdy himself became a victim of the Americanizing forces that so many of the contributors to The New Romans were battling. Fifteen Winds was published by Ryerson Press, one of several anthologies that Ryerson produced since its founding in 1919. When McGraw-Hill took over Ryerson in 1970, it caused a crisis in the Canadian publishing industry. As it turned out, Purdy had contracted with Ryerson to publish a new anthology entitled Storm Warning, but the deal fell through. Purdy explains why: ‘In 1968, I edited a selection by poets (mostly over 30) called Fifteen Winds, published by Ryerson Press, which included that poem [‘The Malamute Saloon’] by [Robert] Service. Being an optimist, perhaps, I’ve been working on another text for Canadian schools called Storm Warning. It was to have been published by Ryerson Press – at least until the United Church announced the sale of Ryerson to McGraw-Hill of New York on November 2 [1970]. I say no; Storm Warning will not be published by an American branch plant. As I write, the sale of Ryerson to McGraw-Hill is not yet final, but I stick to my principle. At some point in your life you have to say no, even if it costs you. But I don’t believe it will cost me, I don’t believe I’ll lose a damn thing’ (‘Why I Won’t,’ 14).

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Storm Warning was rescued by McClelland and Stewart, who published the book in 1971. The hippie days had obviously influenced Purdy’s selection of these authors (most of them under thirty) who were presented in a photographic gallery at the front of the anthology along with brief commentaries on their interests. They were supposed to be cool, representatives of a new, sexually liberated generation that had little respect for authority or permanence or office work. Doug Fetherling tells us that he ‘was not born anywhere or at any time (except maybe the late 1940’s)’ (6). Dana Fraser calls herself ‘a women’s lib fanatic’ (7). Howard Halpern reminds us that although he took up American citizenship in 1963, he renounced it four years later (9). Tom Wayman is ‘Now a laborer. Was a boy scout’ (15). Purdy’s flippant sense of humour colours these brief portraits, which seem preoccupied with each poet’s marital status, their pets, and the various jobs they have done (Kerrigan Almey: ‘Been had by as many different jobs as all the other liars’ [4]; Ken Belford: ‘Runs a trapline and homesteads’ [4]; Sid Marty: ‘Works as Park Warden in Jasper’ [13]; David Phillips: ‘Worked in apple and cherry orchards’ [14]; Andrew Suknaski: ‘Grocer, fence-builder, farm laborer, bull cook, night watchman, bellman (what’s that?), window washer, stone-picker, etc.’ [15]). Purdy deliberately puts his editorial emphasis on framing these poets as ordinary people who are not elevated above others by virtue of the fact that they write poetry. While many of the poets included in Purdy’s anthology did not go on to establish lasting careers, their inclusion in this anthology and Purdy’s characteristic enthusiasm mark a shift away from collections designed to be used in schools, although there is little doubt that Purdy wanted to find a way to sell his anthology into those schools. His strategy was to appeal not to the teachers but to the students, who shared many of the values associated with these poets in 1971: the long hair, the rejection of authority, the back-to-nature embrace of the wilderness. Each writer was invited to make a statement about his or her aesthetic. A brief sampling reveals a shift in values (Kerrigan Almey: ‘Get all my educating from day to day, so will have to start my own church sometime’ [27]; bill bissett: ‘no one I know gud gets paid very much fr poetry neithr nd fr th care of language’ [36]; C.H. Gervais: ‘The true poet is the guy in the streets … who doesn’t want anything but to flow like a sewer and a river at the same time, who knows there’s no such thing as a written poem’ [69]; Tom Wayman: ‘So now my poems want to go off and find what is good in this life. Now my poems want to be exactly as gentle as human flesh and bone’ [143]). Again and again in Purdy’s anthology,

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the writers demonstrate their preoccupation with exactly what it means to be a poet at a time when conventional values are being thrown out the window, when youth aligns itself with a pervasive counterculture, and when writing is a means of expressing resistance through an existential reshaping, however that is framed. Above all, knowledge does not appear to be something one gains from books or formal education. Experience is the means to wisdom, and to being authentically human. In his commentary, Dennis Lee gave voice to a central element in this aesthetic: ‘Can I make this clearer? I wanted the voice of the poems to say things directly, concretely, with as much simplicity as is granted by (say) clear eyesight. But the voice itself I wanted to be a rich organic manifest of being human – so that it would become impossible to say, “This is the voice of a man who has a bunch of feelings; or, of a man who is analyzing something; or, of a man who (… fill in the blank).” What I wanted as a response was, “This is a human voice”’ (96). Although Lee is often at pains to express his learning through a ‘human voice’ that denies his strengths as an intellectual, his desire to achieve this kind of natural utterance says a good deal about how knowledge was to be gained and transmitted in the early 1970s. Lee’s experience at the Rochdale College collective was part of the freeschool movement that burgeoned in the decade as an alternative to formal educational institutions. Free schools emerged as a response to the elitism and technocratic values associated with American capitalism. It was an age dominated by the educational ideologies of Paul Goodman, A.S. Neill, John Holt, and Jonathan Kozol, who argued that conventional schools produced ‘manageable workers, obedient consumers, manipulable voters and if need be, willing killers’ (Miller, 151). As an alternative, free-school theory emphasized community, participatory exchange, experiential learning, and individual empowerment. One way that Canadian anthologists approached that empowerment was by defining Canadian literature in contrast to American and British models. Literary nationalism was riding a wave. That nationalism – fed by anti-Americanism – explains the receptiveness to Margaret Atwood’s Survival when it appeared in 1972. Her thematic approach influenced a generation of teachers and literary critics writing through the 1970s. As Margery Fee and Leslie Monkman have observed, ‘Whether one looks at the mixed response to the classroom activities of the Canadian Authors Association in the 1920s or the equally mixed reaction to Margaret Atwood’s Survival, in the 1970s, one sees both the rejection of what would now be identified as postnational ideologies

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and heated interrogation of attempts to identify national patterns of recurring symbols and themes’ (1088). Not surprisingly, Atwood’s focus on the relation between Canada and the United States was picked up by various anthologists. In The Evolution of Canadian Literature in English: 1945–1970 (1973), Paul Denham speaks about the ways in which ‘relations between the United States and Canada ... form a continuing theme in Canadian writing’ (2). Also published in 1973, Brita Mickleburgh’s Canadian Literature contains a revealing foreword by Malcolm Ross, whose New Canadian Library series had become a huge success. The assumptions underlying the creation of the New Canadian Library series appear in the foreword in condensed form as Ross explains why Mickleburgh’s selections are important. Canadians, Ross says, have become increasingly aware of their dependence on the United States and Britain: ‘From colony to nation – and back again, as New York (and Hollywood) at last drove London out of mind, and film and television killed the book, as it were, in the eye. Culturally, it was contended, we became (and we are) a colony of the United States, putting off our British apron strings only to put on our brand new American diapers’ (10). It was this attitude, Ross explains, that prompted students to expect ‘very little of a native literature’ (10). But now, ‘[Canadians] are at last beginning to grow into our own size’ (11). Ross mentions Frye’s theory of the garrison mentality and argues that ‘we fear now not the red Indian but our own red blood. We fear our impulses, our desires, our very flesh’ (11). Although Ross wonders whether there ever was ‘anything peculiarly Canadian about fear or defensiveness’ (12), he is ready to say that, even though he may take issue with Frye, ‘the critical attitudes’ which Ross has ‘attempted to summarize present useful approaches to the material collected in this book’ (12). The concluding paragraph of Ross’s foreword might easily be mistaken for the closing lines of the introduction to a nineteenth-century anthology of Canadian literature: ‘Now it may be that it was the first task of our writers to make human the land. Not all of it at once. First this river, then that hill and wood and town. Perhaps, before anything else was possible to the Canadian imagination, place had to be peopled. Perhaps it is by this very peopling of the mind that we become at last “a people”’ (12). Although the 1973 anthology is edited by Mickleburgh, Ross’s foreword takes control of the book’s editorial direction and describes its governing ideology, which is built on a familiar set of metaphors. The editor is an explorer taking inventory of a new world contained

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within the pages of the anthology. By journeying down the river and through ‘hill and wood and town,’ the editor becomes involved in the archetypal process of discovering the land anew. The authors he or she selects become new-world inhabitants – natives who give voice to the particular features of this landscape. ‘Above all,’ as Ross says, the book promises to provide the reader with ‘the sense of place’ (12). It is almost as if the country itself has yet to be discovered. Or, if it has been discovered, the editor’s primary task is to give it voice. This act of voicing the country is also a means of keeping it together. Nineteen seventy-three was a boom year for Canadian anthologies. Denham’s and Mickleburgh’s anthologies were competing with Weaver and Toye’s The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature. Weaver had a long-established career as a broadcaster and editor while Toye was the editorial director of Oxford University Press Canada. It would be hard to imagine a more influential team. In their preface, the editors note that although the selections are organized ‘by the alphabetical sequence of the authors’ names’ (xiii) they have provided thematic groupings that ‘reveal some characteristics of our literature, in both English and French, that have often been noticed’ (xiii). The central themes are ‘Alienation. The victim. Endurance. A hostile natural environment’ (xiii). Weaver and Toye note that ‘these are some of the themes explored by Margaret Atwood in her arresting study of Canadian literature, appropriately called Survival’ (xiii). By exploring these themes, the editors believe that readers will discover a new sense of community in the wilderness before them. They express the hope that the anthology ‘will bring together even more Canadian readers and Canadian writers, offering both pleasures and discoveries and tantalizing some’ of the readers ‘into making further investigations’ of their own (xiv). This idea of an anthology fostering a Canadian community is not new, nor is the emphasis on just how pleasurable and tantalizing the anthological experience can be. But how can we explain the presence of these references to pleasure amidst the painful vicissitudes of alienation, victimization, and a hostile natural world? Either Weaver and Toye didn’t notice the contradiction in terms or they understood that Canadian literary experience was unique by virtue of its ability to provide pleasure through pain. Perhaps, at the centre, Canadian literary experience was in some way quirkily erotic. Canadian readers would be happy to experience alienation and victimization because it would give them the pleasure of finding a community that they might have missed in a more hospitable world. Although this

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somewhat masochistic stance may seem odd, it is useful to remember that none of the Canadian anthologists who invoke Atwood’s thesis seems particularly unhappy about the prospects of living as a victim in a hostile world, for the simple reason that those prospects confer identity and purpose, which provide release. The Canadian anthologist who celebrates the wilderness and all that remains to be tamed is at the same time celebrating an aspect of identity aligned with place. Ironically, Canadian literature is distinct and pleasurable precisely because its readers are alienated and exploited. Survival feels good. Atwood’s influence continues to be felt in other anthologies published during the 1970s. In Canadian Literature: The Beginnings to the Twentieth Century (1974), Catherine M. McLay pays tribute to Atwood in the first line of her introduction and then quotes approvingly from Survival: ‘Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been ... For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge, we will not survive’ (13 [1974]). In selecting this quotation, McLay affirms that she is determined to keep the code. Like her predecessors, she links the exploration of a national literature with the process of mapping a territory that is at once physical and psychological. To read the literature – which the anthology encapsulates – is to discover our identity, our community, the means to our collective survival. The anthology that subscribes to this idea carries a huge cultural burden, but it is not a burden that originates in the 1970s. As McLay says, the interest in ‘our own native culture,’ which is ‘at a peak’ (13), goes back to Frye’s conclusion to the Literary History of Canada (1965), to Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), and to Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets (1864). In other words, it has been there all along. The pursuit of this all-encompassing idea of ‘native culture’ creates a myth of nation that is paradoxically exclusionary. As Roy Miki says, ‘In the assumption of a transparent shared “nation” of values what was left unquestioned was the constituting “myth” of expansion through centralization which had excluded those who were other than British or European’ (190). It was this constant preoccupation with literary nationalism that also caused a revolt among a number of anthologists who questioned the relation between literature and nation. For many of these editors, the literature-nation equation was largely a construct of academics in search of a guiding structure for the many new courses in Cana-

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dian literature that were being introduced across the country. In Storm Warning 2 (1976), for example, Purdy took issue with school-oriented anthologies: ‘Most Canadian anthologies are school books, published by branch-plant publishers, and they use old poets like me. Or young sprouts like Peggy Atwood or Irving Layton. These books are best-this or best-that anthologies, or theme books or historical surveys, books that arrive as regularly as advertising flyers in a reviewer’s mail. Much of the time it seems books are created from books, as if they possessed their own odd genitalia’ (22). This statement represented a determined attempt to take a kick at the canon. With tongue in cheek, Purdy calls his own anthology ‘the best book of its kind ever published in Canada’ (22). Ultimately, however, he feels compelled to articulate the criteria behind his selection: ‘In the end the poems were chosen because I liked them’ and because the book ‘attempts to steal a glance at the future like a storm warning, alerting us to some of the people who may rock literary boats in Canada at some distant date’ (22). By 1975, Purdy had become a canonical figure himself. He had already published seventeen books. For many, he embodied the Canadian voice. To read his work, to participate in his aesthetic, was to participate in the country. As a canonical figure, Purdy channelled the nation. In an article on Purdy’s canonization, Mark Silverberg provides a fascinating summary of the connection often made between Purdy and the country: ‘On the first page of the only book-length study of Al Purdy, George Bowering writes that “Al Purdy is the world’s most Canadian poet.” The first sentence of George Woodcock’s introduction to Purdy’s 1972 Selected Poems is “Al Purdy’s writing fits Canada like a glove; you can feel the fingers of the land working through his poems.” Following the familiar pattern, Clara Thomas, in Our Nature – Our Voices: A Guidebook to English-Canadian Literature, presents Purdy as our poet: “To hear him read is to hear the country speak. With his rolled up shirt sleeves, untended hair, Cuban cigar, authentic pride, six foot four body that could (but never would) fit into a Mountie uniform ... he puts on a performance that only Leonard Cohen or Gwendolyn MacEwen can match”’ (226). Silverberg builds on a number of the arguments I make in ‘The Canonization of Canadian Literature’ to show that ‘as a model of the quintessential Canadian ... Purdy in fact becomes a puppet through which the academy can ventriloquize its realist-nationalist agenda’ (233). Part of the activity involves the construction of an Al Purdy persona that is self-taught, masculine, robust, untethered, footloose, brash, and in

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love with the open road. Yet even this persona is part of the canonical norm, at least insofar as anthologies are concerned, because they situate Purdy in the familiar context of editor as explorer, editor as auto-didact, editor as the virile recorder of the new world he sees in his travels, or of the old world he uncovers and releases from its imprisonment in commerce and technology. This is a going backwards, an un-making of the learned man, a journey away from the academy back to the source. Purdy’s participation in this demythologizing is always self-conscious; it is part of the archetypal persona he creates and around which his own canonicity coheres. To participate in Purdy’s journey away from the canon is simply a means of re-entering the canon through the back door. The process is circular, self-referential, and self-sustaining. Purdy invents himself as a canonical object by destroying his viability as a canonical object. Storm Warning 2, like the earlier Storm Warning, is a dramatization of the canonized poet’s ability to empower himself through the action of dissociating himself from the canon he represents. The poets that Purdy includes in his selection are powerless, young, unpublished – figuratively childlike. The task Purdy sets for himself is to introduce them to the world, to give them a leg up, literally to give them voice. In the process, he confirms his own authority as a canonical father, the inseminator who knows how to bring these young poets into the world. But he is also a canonical mother who gives them birth. Both Storm Warning anthologies demonstrate that an editor who selects entirely new material, or who openly repudiates the canon, does not necessarily destabilize the canon. His non-canonical choices may ultimately serve to affirm and catalyse the canonical structures he claims to be anthologizing against. Purdy’s anthology confirms his own power and the power of his publisher, McClelland and Stewart, which reinforces its canonical status by supporting the publication of writers who are largely unknown. Like Purdy, John Metcalf is responsible for creating anthologies that are often founded on a supposedly anti-academic radicalism. More than one book could be written on Metcalf’s aesthetic stance, which is not just anti-academic. He has argued repeatedly against government intervention in culture, lambasted programs designed to support writers and publishers, and satirized the values and assumptions behind the creation of a Canadian canon. For Metcalf, the whole business of writing in Canada comes down to the government feeding trough, with some of the country’s best-known figures lined up for their next meal. I admire

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Metcalf’s writing and his editorial work on behalf of young writers. As an editor, he is also crafty. Over the years, even as he has relentlessly pilloried the authors who take handouts from federal and provincial funding agencies, he has himself authored numerous anthologies (and several works of fiction) that could not have been published without those grants. In fact, Metcalf is the most prolific editor Canada has produced. He has edited or co-edited at least thirty anthologies released by such government-funded publishers as Quarry, Oberon, Véhicule, and General. In the years covered by this chapter, 1967–82, Metcalf produced fourteen anthologies and in the following years, many more. Roy MacSkimming accurately calls him ‘a one-man anthology factory for publishers as various as Macmillan and ECW Press’ (262). Given his editorial profile, it is useful to explore Metcalf’s background and editorial strategies. Metcalf had been a driving force in the Montreal Storytellers Fiction Performance Group in the early 1970s. The group travelled extensively and gave readings at high schools, colleges, and universities in Quebec and the Maritimes. Metcalf was himself a teacher. He worked full-time at Rosemount High School, and part-time at McGill University, Loyola College, and Vanier College in Montreal. He may have ultimately rejected academia, but he knew how the system worked and, from his experience with the Storytellers, he understood what students liked. He was in a perfect position to become an anthologist. Metcalf’s first textbook was Wordcraft, a vocabulary and comprehension guide published by J.M. Dent in 1967. It was successful enough to be followed by four other books in the same series. Metcalf began to edit anthologies with Salutation, an anthology of world poetry released by Ryerson in 1970. His first Canadian anthology was Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by Canadian Writers (1970). The book was published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson, the new entity that had absorbed Ryerson Press. Its brief introduction allowed Metcalf to air some of the objections he had with the way in which Canadian writing was handled by the public. In a startling departure from the tone adopted by other anthologists, who repeatedly emphasized how far Canadian literature had come, Metcalf began his introduction with a quick mathematical calculation of how little the Canadian writer earned through his or her craft. He then went on to argue that very few people bought Canadian books and that librarians were ‘people often possessed of a deep hatred of books and writers’ (6). Metcalf’s anthology was published by what had become a branch-plant company, a testament to how difficult it was for

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indigenous publishing companies to survive. But this had less to do with librarians than it did with the economics of Canadian publishing, which, to use MacSkimming’s phrase, was a ‘perilous trade’ at the best of times. What is distinctive about Metcalf’s introduction is its desire to mobilize students. Metcalf asks them to ‘importune parents and rich relatives’ and to ‘create disturbances in bookstores’ that remain ignorant of Canadian writing (6). These are the fighting words of a man who believes deeply in the business of promoting Canadian literature. Although Metcalf’s discourse is new (he is certifiably the first editor to accuse librarians of possessing a deep hatred of books), his secular evangelism is part of a long-standing tradition of editors who have appealed to readers and students in the name of a national literature. (Metcalf’s father was a Methodist minister; he is no stranger to conversion rhetoric.) As the title indicates, Sixteen by Twelve contains stories by twelve authors, most of whom were recognized figures in the Canadian fiction canon, including Morley Callaghan, Hugh Garner, Margaret Laurence, Hugh Hood, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, and George Bowering. The anthology reinforced the status of these writers and, by including author commentaries on the selections, made the stories approachable to students, who may have been encountering these writers for the first time. Metcalf put together a slim but effective package that exhorted students to rise up on behalf of Canadian writing. The strategy was eminently successful. In An Aesthetic Underground (2003), Metcalf reported: ‘the book is still in print and selling well after more than thirty years ... Year after year Sixteen by Twelve has underwritten my fiction and criticism. It typically produces four thousand dollars a year’ (63). It certainly made other publishing companies receptive to Metcalf’s subsequent anthology ideas. For his second anthology he turned to the Canadian division of Van Nostrand Reinhold. Kaleidoscope (1972) was even smaller than the earlier collection but it included many of the same writers. What made this book appealing – apart from the stories themselves – was the inclusion of several photographs by John de Visser. In the same year, Metcalf published the more ambitious The Narrative Voice, again with McGraw-Hill Ryerson, an indication that the earlier Sixteen by Twelve had been a success. Here Metcalf returned to the method of including commentary by each author. His very short introduction disclaims any kind of ‘historical, chronological, or inclusive’ framework and says that ‘it does not

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attempt to enshrine masterpieces’ because ‘such concerns are, rightly, academic.’ I’m not sure whether Metcalf is being serious or sarcastic here. Anyone who reads his fiction cannot miss the contempt that Metcalf has for academic snobbery and pretentiousness. At the same time, he has supported and encouraged academic writing on Canadian literature and has not hesitated to align himself with several prominent scholars of Canadian literature over the years. While he may be contemptuous of academia and its institutions, there is a level at which he also respects academic inquiry. What is certain is that, throughout his career, Metcalf has devoted himself to building strong networks of writers and critics throughout the country. After Kaleidoscope, Metcalf published numerous anthologies and initiated several important annual anthology series, including Best Canadian Stories and the various Impressions anthologies, both published by Oberon. Over the decade, Metcalf’s increasing cynicism about the state of Canadian writing became more and more evident. In his own fiction, that cynicism reached a high point with the publication of General Ludd in 1980. In his anthologies, his cynicism appeared that same year in the introduction to First Impressions, which takes up many of the concerns Metcalf voices in his novel. Metcalf reveals that the inclusion of his own stories in Rimanelli’s anthology put him in touch with Earle Toppings, an editor at Ryerson. The relationship developed to the point that Metcalf was able to negotiate his own contracts for anthologies with the publisher. But for Metcalf, the dream of an independent publishing industry in Canada began to die when Ryerson Canada collapsed in 1970: ‘Ryerson had been the very model of the myth – idealistic, antiquated, charming, gentlemanly, ramshackle and eccentric in a teetotal sort of way’ (7–8). Although it might have seemed that Canadian publishing was getting ‘healthier and healthier’ during the rest of the decade, in fact ‘this fervent and feverish activity was precisely that – the fevered gaiety and strength of the dying consumptive. What had seemed a rebirth was, in fact, an extended death. What everyone had preferred to overlook or steadfastly refused to believe was that in Canada there was no audience’ (8). Metcalf laments the apparent absence of this audience and the way in which book publishing in Canada has become a matter of ‘“product,” “units” and “the bottom line”’ (9). He says, ‘The announcement by an established novelist that he wished to publish a collection of stories would be greeted with the same sort of enthusiasm as would an announcement of contagious leprosy’ (9). Metcalf is at pains to position

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himself as an editor who refuses to partake in the ‘blockbuster’ mentality associated with the chain bookstores. Metcalf is correct to identify the profound changes in the Canadian publishing industry during the 1970s, but many of those changes were taking place in the United States as well, where publishers talked about ‘product,’ ‘units,’ and ‘the bottom line’ even more vociferously than their Canadian counterparts. As the decade advanced, and as the institutional study of Canadian literature became more entrenched, Canadian literature anthologies became increasingly curricular in orientation. The concept of nation that they packaged was designed for classroom use. This shift was not entirely new. Editors had been dreaming about ways of getting their anthologies into the classroom since the turn of the century. But the conception of earlier large-scale anthologies was that they could appeal to both commercial (‘trade’) and academic markets. Editors in the 1970s began to understand their product in a different way. Now the challenge was to appeal to the various constituencies that made up the academic market and to conceive of anthologies that could be used effectively in the classrooms. Because many universities had now made it compulsory for students to take courses in Canadian literature, the anthological stakes were high and the opportunities for profit had expanded considerably over the previous decade. However, anthologists working in this environment had to contend with what stock market analysts are fond of calling the whipsaw effect. When this happens, there is a rising tide of interest in a stock (the author), and many people rush to invest in it, but then for a variety of reasons the value of the stock comes under fire and erodes quickly; its value plummets. Those who believe in the stock have no idea whether it will return to its former value or continue to sink. Editors who do not want to become victims of this whipsaw effect have to choose their stock carefully, a difficult task when a canon is in the process of being rapidly solidified. The ‘branding’ of Canadian literature as an institutional product – English-Canadian Canon, Inc. – took place rapidly in the early 1970s. It was created by editors, professors, critics, publishers, and federal and provincial granting agencies, all of whom invested in the creation and maintenance of the canon. I have discussed the creation of this canon in Making It Real (1995), so here I will simply summarize some my central arguments. While efforts to create and solidify a canon of English-Canadian literature began in the early twentieth century, it was the publication of the

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Literary History of Canada in 1965 that ‘gave a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of Canadian writing’ (MacLulich, 19). Those involved in this academic study formed a community that tended to support the mimetic-nationalist values associated with the canon itself: a preoccupation with history, an interest in verisimilitude, a bias in favour of the native over the cosmopolitan, a concern with traditional over innovative forms, an expression of national self-consciousness, and a hegemonic identification with texts that were sharable, containable, and safe. In 1978, members of this community met at the Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, which was organized by McClelland and Stewart as a means of increasing the visibility of its New Canadian Library series, under the general editorship of Malcolm Ross. The conference produced a list of the one hundred most important Canadian novels, chosen by way of a ballot circulated in advance to conference attendees. Certainly this conference stands as the apotheosis of canonical activity in Canada. Its very existence – the fact that it could happen at a time when literary canons in other countries were being rapidly deconstructed – suggests the extent to which the 1970s in Canadian literature ended with a canonical bang that brought together teachers, librarians, publishers, and graduate students in a kind of institutional cabal. This was only the beginning of the canonical orgy. In 1978 (the same year the Calgary conference took place), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council split off from the Canada Council to become a body devoted exclusively to funding scholarly research. This brought new financing into the business of publishing Canadian criticism and made it possible for more scholars and publishing houses to become involved in that business. All of this activity required a fundable object of study. The Canadian canon was consciously defined as this pan-Canadian academic investment object. From a grant-getting perspective, it was a gold mine. The values supported by the canon-making institution of Canadian literature were all rooted in a mimetic consciousness implicit in Frye’s conclusion to the Literary History of Canada. As I have argued, ‘All of the terms employed by Frye suggest that what is valuable to him in Canadian literature are those works that establish a relation among national consciousness, literary history, and a kind of idealized mimesis. The same relation provides the currency used by the institution erected after Frye’s conclusion was published’ (‘Canonization,’ 662). At the risk of quoting myself too often, I offer the following observation:

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‘If literary history is “a fiction written by those who wish to retain a record of their own values” (Allen and Anderson, 3), and if I am correct in asserting that in Canada these values are fundamentally mimetic, then it should be possible to see the history of Canadian criticism as a mimetic construct. I can think of many departure points for this kind of narrative: the early emphasis on realism and nationalism in nineteenthcentury Canadian criticism, the debate between native and cosmopolitan values that emerged after the two world wars, Northrop Frye’s implicitly nationalist-realist stance in his conclusion, and the mimetic forces underlying the work of the thematic critics and informing both the presentations and the selections made at the Calgary conference in 1978’ (‘Canonization,’ 666). The statement above was originally published in 1990. In retrospect, it seems clear that the ‘mimetic-nationalist overlap’ I described was beginning to break down by the end of the decade. As Davey has noted, the 1970s also saw the rise of several writers who did not align themselves with a mimetic-nationalist aesthetic and who were committed to challenging conventional norms. Davey says that ‘class, gender, ethnicity, region, national politics, business practice, and discursive and institutional inheritance play much larger roles’ in Canadian literature than my discussion provides (‘Critical Response,’ 680–1). That is true. Had I focused on anthologies rather than criticism, I would have seen a different picture. As the diverse list of anthologies listed near the beginning of this chapter makes clear, there were many anti-canonical forces at work in the decade. These anthologies generally circulated outside the university and high school curricula, although they might have been brought into the schools in isolated instances. This does not undermine their legitimacy, but it does indicate that they were not the primary anthological vehicles used in courses devoted to Canadian literature. Instructors charged with the task of introducing their students to the history of Canadian literature, or with selecting certain representative authors, tended to rely on anthologies that were organized from a historical perspective or that included a group of authors who represented Canadian writing from coast to coast. In short, they often relied on the canon, rather than on regional affiliations. Al Purdy recognized this tendency in 1970 when he reviewed J. Michael Yates’s Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia, published by Sono Nis Press that year. Purdy concluded that ‘this book has the same handicap that any regional anthology suffers from: lack of sufficient talent, which, in this case, is drawn from a comparatively small area. Yes, yes, I know that B.C. is a huge

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province with scads and hordes of poets; but when you get them all in one place they wouldn’t fill more than the smallest room in the house, and you know where that is’ (‘Poetry and Poets,’ 53). Alternative anthologies tend to be produced by small publishing houses that can market their list to specific constituencies and niches. Examples include Dorothy Livesay’s 40 Women Poets of Canada (Ingluvin Publications, 1971); Eldon Garnet’s w)here? the other Canadian poetry (Press Porcépic, 1974); Raymond Fraser, Clyde Rose, and Jim Stewart’s East of Canada: An Atlantic Anthology (Breakwater, 1976); M.G. Hesse’s Women in Canadian Literature (Borealis, 1976); Brian Davis’s The Poetry of the Canadian People (NC Press, 1976); and Donna Phillips’s Voices of Discord: Canadian Short Stories from the 1930s (New Hogtown, 1979). National literature anthologies, on the other hand, have routinely been produced by large publishing houses, mainly because they have the financial resources required to pay permissions costs, print big, costly books, and market them across the country. This means that the representation of nation conveyed by literature anthologies is in one sense deeply corporate, the product of a series of negotiations between the editor, the authors included in the collections (and their agents or representatives), the publisher’s budgetary control person, the bank, the designer, the typesetter, the printer, and the sales agents. The difficulty of representing the nation in the face of these negotiations is further complicated by a host of other material factors that bear upon the kind of work that can be reproduced in an anthology (the cost of paper, rent, heating bills, postal fees, legal fees, building maintenance, and so on). These factors, although often invisible to the reader, continually affect the canonical values enshrined in the anthology and inevitably compromise the representation of nation that such anthologies offer through different editorial hands. Although it is not always the case, authors who are canonized tend to charge more for permission to reproduce their work than authors who are trying to break into the canon. It is simply an issue of supply and demand. Anthologists from the nineteenth century to the present have routinely complained about permission fees or their inability to pay for desirable works. The representation of nation in anthologies is always compromised. ‘Nation’ and economy are conjoined. At a very real level, national literature anthologies are the product of interest rates, commodity prices, labour costs, levels of inflation. ‘Nation’ might surge forward in periods of economic well-being. ‘Nation’ might retrench in a recession.

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Since national literature anthologies tend to be undertaken by publishers with deep pockets, it is useful to consider the strategies they employ in order to secure a decent return on their investment. Most discussions of anthology formation scarcely mention these material concerns, as if they were somehow secondary to the process of selection rather than inextricably linked to that process. This is particularly surprising if we consider that the people writing about anthologies often recognize that the process of selection is simultaneously an act of commodification. If Benedict’s notion of the anthology’s ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ sides stands – demand being the way an anthology is consumed and supply being the network of material interests that create its value and cultural currency – then it would be easy to believe, reading most commentary on anthology formation, that the supply side simply does not matter. The few discussions of the supply side that do exist tend to come from disgruntled editors who have to make choices that are always compromised by material realities. Kevin Dettmar, who has served as the co-editor of the twentieth-century selections for the Longman Anthology of British Literature for more than a decade, observes that because he was involved in overseeing permissions costs, he was ‘in a position to witness how those costs influence decisions about what is included and what is not (and why).’ As he says, ‘one begins to think about how much one can afford, and what one can afford to do without.’ He complains: ‘I resent being forced to make absurd calculations, such as five lines of Auden equals one page of Salman Rushdie.’ Dettmar wanted to include some poems by American Sylvia Plath to accompany the poetry of her British husband, Ted Hughes. But eventually Plath had to be dropped because the fees for reproducing her work suddenly rose. ‘One goes into the project with big dreams,’ he says, ‘but after meeting with the architects and builders, certain features go by the boards; even more desires are sacrificed during construction, as costs overrun estimates. In our third edition, a smattering of poems by Sylvia Plath became those skylights in the kitchen that would have to wait for later.’ Dettmar concludes: ‘One of the hidden forces shaping the evolving canon of modern literature, in ways not always having much to do with literary value, is the shortsightedness of copyright holders.’ Perhaps the biggest player in the Canadian anthology market is Oxford University Press Canada. (In The Perilous Trade, Roy MacSkimming provides an excellent summary of Oxford’s involvement in various anthology projects. My information is based largely on that

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summary.) As MacSkimming says, ‘Oxford became associated with the [taste-making] process through anthologies bearing its name or imprimatur: The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, Modern Canadian Verse, The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, 15 Canadian Poets, and The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature’ (76). Brown and Bennett’s An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English was also published by Oxford. Through these anthologies, Oxford associated itself with some of the most powerful names in Canadian literature: A.J.M. Smith, Margaret Atwood, Robert Weaver, and William Toye. In his later anthologies Smith wrestles with the conflict between his cosmopolitan aesthetic stance and his implicit nationalism, which makes him define Canadian poetry as different while he simultaneously argues against its distinctiveness. The dilemma he faces in 1960, and again in 1967 and 1968, is fundamentally the same problem he encountered with The Book of Canadian Poetry in 1943: how does one praise the realistic attention to detail and faithfulness to locale that make a poetic voice unique while at the same time recommending an international perspective that runs counter to the local and particular? Smith would not and could not resolve this conundrum. I think his influence as an anthologist faded after 1967 because he felt that this problem somehow needed to be resolved. But he was not equipped to resolve it. He was caught up in an argument of his own making. Other anthologists working with Oxford had very different approaches to the representation of nation in their collections. Gary Geddes and Phyllis Bruce completely avoided the issue when they produced the first edition of the eminently successful 15 Canadian Poets in 1970. In utter contrast to Smith, Geddes and Bruce include a stripped down, one-page preface. They purposely avoid providing a detailed rationale for their selections, stating only that ‘there are no prescriptive criteria to offer for choices that are highly subjective; it can only be hoped that the book reflects what is happening in the art itself’ (xi). At the end of the anthology, Geddes and Bruce provide short critical essays on the fifteen poets as well as a brief list of secondary sources. A photo of each author is included. This approach seemed to please the market. The anthology was widely adopted, perhaps because of its economical and user-friendly format and because the selections and notes provided a practical introduction to each author. Geddes and Bruce chose authors who had come to prominence since the Second World War. The book had a directness and freshness about it that was unique for anthologies at the time. As

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Douglas Barbour has argued, 15 Canadian Poets is a good example of the way in which ‘anthologizing has begun to “fix” an image of twentiethcentury Canadian Poetry in the minds of undergraduates across the country’ (‘Poetry Anthologies,’ 167). This ‘fixing’ involves the solidification of a canon that could be taught in the schools. In this context, Miki observes that the Geddes-Bruce anthology created ‘a kind of pseudo-canon with the imprint of the staid Oxford University Press, and for many years the text [was] used in Canadian universities to introduce students to poetry – and probably the tastes of a significant portion of one generation were formed by it’ (182–3). As Barbour notes, this ‘pseudo-canon’ of fifteen writers included only three women (20 per cent). It selected one writer from the Maritimes, three from Quebec, eight from Ontario, one from the prairies, and two from British Columbia. In this formation, Canadian poetry was centred mainly in Ontario and was written mainly by men. Weaver and Toye’s 1973 anthology takes a similar approach. The preface is slim at two pages. The editors stress that, like Geddes and Bruce, they will focus on writers who came to prominence after the Second World War. Eighty authors are included. Of these eighty authors, twenty (25 per cent) are women, which represents a very slight increase over the first edition of Geddes and Bruce. The Weaver-Toye team made Oxford particularly influential because it combined the clout Weaver had achieved with the CBC and the Tamarack Review with the resources that Toye commanded as the editorial director of Oxford. Weaver’s collaboration with Toye went back to 1952, when Oxford published the first edition of Canadian Short Stories. Their association on that project led to their joint involvement in the founding of the Tamarack Review in 1956. The success of Weaver and Toye’s anthology is suggested by a second edition issued in 1981. Eight years had passed since the first edition appeared. It is useful to reflect on some of the major political events that took place during those years. The Parti Québécois won a provincial majority in 1976, which led to the first Quebec referendum in 1980. In the meantime, Canada’s economy had been destabilized by rising oil prices. The federal government sought to normalize relations with Quebec at the same time as it had to deal with rising anger in the western provinces over Ottawa’s intervention in wheat and oil prices and freight rates. The Canadian standard of living decreased as average real incomes fell and interest rates rose towards the extreme levels that characterized the early 1980s recession. The prime rate in 1975 was

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10.5 per cent. By 1981 it had reached a high of 22.75 per cent. Between 1980 and 1983, the unemployment rate went from 7.5 per cent to 12 per cent, a massive increase. This dramatic change had a dire impact on the business environment in Canada. Companies could not borrow money at those rates. Many went bankrupt. Other potential businesses could not get off the ground for lack of financing. It was the kind of recession that makes people look closely at the kind of country they inhabit, and it forces them to distinguish that country from others in terms of government policies designed to rectify the problem. Put simply, the recession, the referendum in Quebec, and the patriation of the constitution were all factors that made Canadians deeply self-conscious during this period. Considering the challenges that marked the 1970s, one would expect an anthology of Canadian literature to do something in the way of reflecting the changes that had taken place in Canadian society. But nothing like that is to be found in Weaver and Toye’s preface. Much of it simply repeats the optimistic statements from the first edition, word for word. The main changes noted by Weaver and Toye are that regionalism has increased and that Canadian literature is being recognized abroad. There is no sense of anxiety here, no sense of the huge political shift represented by the election of the Parti Québécois, no recognition that the country might well have been lost if the 1980 referendum (which was probably taking place the year that Weaver and Toye were revising their book) had gone the other way. The absence of any references to Quebec is not difficult to explain: French-Canadian writers had become a threat. In the first edition, Weaver and Toye confessed: ‘we know there are omissions – particularly of some younger writers from Quebec – but here we must plead the old excuse of space limitations’ (xiii). They don’t explain why these ‘space limitations’ were applied particularly to those ‘younger’ Quebec writers. Could it have been that those writers espoused the separatist cause? In the second edition, Weaver and Toye make an altered confession: ‘There are numerous omissions, but here we must plead the old excuse of space limitations’ (xiii). In the second edition, then, the phrase omitted from this confession is ‘particularly of some younger writers from Quebec.’ Apparently Weaver and Toye no longer felt compelled to apologize for their absence, or even to mention them. Why? Part of the answer lies in the editors’ conception of the function of a national literature anthology. As Weaver and Toye’s preface suggests,

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writers who share political affiliations that run counter to an idealized view of nation have no place in such an anthology. Weaver and Toye wanted their volume to present the transcendent image of a united community with shared values. In this imaginary community, ‘the whole body of our writing’ (excluding those younger writers from Quebec) would ‘bring together even more Canadian readers and writers, offering pleasures and discoveries, and tantalizing some of’ the readers ‘into making further discoveries of [their] own’ (xiv). The discourse here illustrates the nationalist ideals that Weaver and Toye share with many of their historical counterparts. Canadian literature is figured as a corpus that is whole, an image which suggests that the country itself has risen above fragmentation, or dismemberment (to keep the corporeal metaphor intact). The unwhole body would be the dismembered torso produced by separatists who would rip a crucial limb from the Canadian body politic. The younger writers from Quebec cannot be here because they would symbolically disembody the national ideal and crash the anthological party that offers readers ‘pleasures’ that are ‘tantalizing.’ In this context, the national literature model offered by Weaver and Toye provides a kind of high, exposing its readers to a sensual world of pleasure and new discovery. The subtext here is partially boudoirish, partially travel hype – this will be a voyage of discovery, a pleasurable voyage for the reader, who will make further investigations of his or her own. It is 1981, but the most prominent anthology of its day is promising us the same thing as the prominent anthologies of earlier times: to take us on a journey to a new world where we will find communities immersed in tantalizing moments that join them happily from coast to coast. It is a utopian dream. This is the dream that has inspired most English-Canadian anthologists, with few notable exceptions (in his 1973 anthology Denham recognizes that the preoccupation with Quebec politics ‘reflects considerable pessimism and a continuing sense of crisis’ among Canadian writers [2–3]). How would our understanding of the nation be challenged or reconfigured if anthologists had included texts that contested the ideals of harmony and unity that inspired so many editors to take up the cause? Perhaps the representation of nation would be richer if those collections included texts that were subversive, fragmented, and produced by writers who did not align themselves with the idea of an unproblematized nation unfolding like a comforting narrative quilt that extends from sea to shining sea. Most of these anthologies do contain writing that questions the status quo, but the editorial framing tends

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to normalize subversion or to subsume it within the national ideal – all countries have their upstarts, just like all families do. Still, we are all in this together, and in the end, this is a unified community disrupted infrequently by a few black sheep who like to pick fights. It is all quite normal, and that is reassuring. The country lives on. The conservatism of Weaver and Toye’s selections becomes apparent when we consider the writers included in their volume under the chronological heading ‘1970s.’ Only six writers are listed in this category, none of them particularly new or experimental in their methods (Antonine Maillet, W.P. Kinsella, Jack Hodgins, Patrick Lane, W.D. Valgardson, and Tom Wayman). Yet, the years between the first edition (1973) and the second (1981) saw the emergence of non-centralist and, sometimes, experimental writers such as bill bissett, Frank Davey, Christopher Dewdney, Dave Godfrey, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, bpNichol, Ray Smith, Andrew Suknaski, Anne Szumigalski, and Fred Wah, to name a few. Various small-press anthologies over the decade had included these writers. Denham’s Evolution of Canadian Literature in English (1973) included Nichol, as did Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman’s Literature in Canada (1978). Atwood’s New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1982), which appeared just one year after Weaver and Toye’s second edition, included bill bissett, Frank Davey, Christopher Dewdney, Daphne Marlatt, bpNichol, Andrew Suknaski, and Fred Wah, among many other newcomers. Clearly, Weaver and Toye had not kept themselves up to date. But their anthology still commanded respect, even though it encouraged teachers who used it in their classrooms to present a dated version of Canadian poetry and fiction. Atwood’s poetry anthology and Brown and Bennett’s two-volume anthology represent a point of consolidation tied to Oxford University Press. In some ways, these two anthology projects were a means through which Toye passed the torch to a younger generation more in tune with the current literature. I consider the Brown and Bennett anthology (published in two volumes dated 1982 and 1983) in chapter 6. My concluding comments in this chapter are devoted to Atwood’s anthology, published in 1982. In order to position Atwood’s collection, some digression is required. In the 1981 Quebec elections, René Lévesque had been returned to power with 49 per cent of the popular vote. The following year, when the constitution was patriated by the Liberal government under Trudeau, Quebec refused to sign the Canada Act. Its isolation became ever more apparent. Meanwhile, the Federal Cultural Policy Review Com-

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mittee, established by the federal Liberals in 1980, was examining the changes that had taken place in Canada’s cultural policies since the Massey Commission issued its report in 1951 and following the Lambert Report of 1979, which examined the means by which state funding for the arts was administered. The Applebaum-Hébert Report of the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee – named after its co-chairmen, Louis Applebaum and Jacques Hébert – was published in 1982. While a central recommendation of the report was that the federal government should retain its arm’s-length policy when it came to funding the arts through the Canada Council and other funding agencies, it also considered the extent to which the CBC could act in the interests of promoting Canadian nationalism. The committee argued that the CBC was essential to Canadian culture, and that private broadcasters should contribute more in the way of Canadian English-language programming. The release of the Applebaum-Hébert Report in the same year as the patriation of the constitution put Canadian federalism and nationalism at the centre of a debate concerning the survival of Canada in the face of the separatist threat in an increasingly technologized world that challenged cultural sovereignty. All of this interest in federal cultural policy did not sit well in Quebec, where the rhetoric of nationhood was increasingly attached to French culture and the ideology of maîtres chez nous. The tensions between Canada and Quebec were reflected in Canadian literary anthologies. While there had been sporadic attempts throughout the twentieth century to create anthologies demonstrating that English- and French-Canadian literature could live side by side, this ideal of anthological harmony was on the wane. It was as if editors came to accept the idea that English- and French-Canadian literature were aligned with traditions and values that could not necessarily be harmonized, and that perhaps it was best to let the two literatures go their separate ways. In effect, the editors recognized an anthological separation of Quebec from Canada, even if it did not exist in fact. Certainly there were no anthologists in French Canada who were reaching out to the literature of English Canada. The political climate demanded a culture of resistance. In this context, the idea of an anthology that could unite the voices of French and English Canada – for example, Green and Sylvestre’s A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne – could never have been produced in 1982. Looking back at Green and Sylvestre’s undoubtedly well-intentioned

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collection, we can see that the figures it contained were living in two separate realities that were artificially united in a book that did little to reflect the actual relations between English- and French-Canadian writers at the time. The years around the centennial produced a few anthologies that tried to preserve this sense of unity. For example, there was A.J.M. Smith’s Modern Canadian Verse: In English and French (1967), John Robert Colombo’s How Do I Love Thee (1970), Mordecai Richler’s Canadian Writing Today (1970), Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman’s Literature in Canada (1978), and Wayne Grady’s The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories (1982). As the 1970s unfolded, however, the tendency was either to create anthologies that were exclusively English-Canadian or to call the anthologies ‘Canadian’ even though French-Canadian material was omitted entirely. In this way, Canadian literature anthologies gradually erase Quebec and construct a representation of Canada that is purely English, from the second edition of Robert Weaver’s Canadian Short Stories (1968), to Catherine M. McLay’s Canadian Literature: The Beginnings to the Twentieth Century (1974), to Gary Geddes and Phyllis Bruce’s 15 Canadian Poets Plus 5 (1978). Sometimes the editors of these anthologies seem blissfully unaware of the implications of their exclusionary aesthetics, or they convince themselves that their anthologies embody an inclusiveness they cannot actually sustain. A good example of such blissfulness is John Robert Colombo’s The Poets of Canada (1978). Colombo says that he wanted to provide the reader with ‘some indication of the variety and vitality of poetry written in Canada’ (13) and boasts that his ‘is the first historical anthology in which the reader can enjoy, in a single language, the work of poets who write in the two official languages, English and French; it is also the first historical anthology to include, on the same basis, the work of poets who write in the unofficial languages: Inuktitut, Algonkian, Estonian, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish’ (13). Colombo’s intentions are good. But no sooner has he articulated this view of inclusiveness than problems begin to appear. Colombo wants to be so inclusive that he says he has chosen ‘a sprinkling of historical figures better known for their deeds than for their words; lyricists whose verses are nationally sung more for patriotic than for poetic reasons; and versifiers whose rhymes continue to delight unsophisticated readers and listeners’ (13–14). Bad poetry: it’s all here. Colombo has explicitly chosen poetry that can be understood by his implicitly dumb

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(‘average’) readers. Whatever the audience, he does not want to make things too difficult. As he explains: ‘as much modern poetry is considered “obscure” or “difficult,” the poem selected should be (I felt) accessible to the average reader on first reading. All the poems included bear rereading yet few require it for comprehension’ (14). Smith’s ‘difficult, lonely music’ has no place here. Colombo emphasizes another criterion he applies: ‘the poem selected should not be too long’ (14). That might test the endurance of the average reader, who was not only at a loss when it came to things ‘obscure’ or ‘difficult,’ but also when it came to longish material and the ‘official’ languages themselves. For in truth, Colombo tells us, ‘the average English reader is not as interested in lesser-known French poets as he is in lesser-known poets who write in his own language, for the former fall outside his experience as the latter do not.’ Besides, ‘the majority of the poets of French expression regard themselves as Québécois rather than as Canadiens – as poets of Quebec rather than as poets of Canada’ (15). Colombo is saying here that English readers are not interested in Quebec writers because the majority of those writers are separatists rather than the real thing – Canadiens. His spelling of Canadiens harks back to the good old days, a golden age when Canadians were Canadiens, authentic historic settlers uncorrupted by the separatist scourge. Since his values truly do rest in another age, it is not surprising to see Colombo signalling his debt to earlier anthologies. He includes a long list of these, and also employs the allegorical rhetoric of journey and discovery so familiar to this anthological lineage. ‘The Poets of Canada,’ he informs us, ‘if read from cover to cover, will take us on a very special journey, a trek in time and space that no other country’s literature can offer’ (16). This is the anthologist as tour guide, the intrepid voyager who will take us ‘from The New Found Land (1606–1776) across The Northern Woods (1776–1867) through the New Nationalism (1867–1929) into The Modern World (1929–1967), depositing us among The Postmoderns (1967–1977)’ (16). In a single sentence, Colombo has summarized the archetypal motifs associated with Canadian anthology making: the book reflects nothing less than the discovery of a new world that is soon designated ‘Northern,’ which in turn becomes ‘National,’ and then becomes ‘Modern.’ Even the ‘Postmodern’ experience is configured as the end product of a new-world quest, and one cannot get to the postmodern, or even the modern, without first travelling north. The pattern repeats itself, decade after decade. In this archetype, the poet becomes an allegorical

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everyman and wanderer who leads the reader to a promised land that is new, northern, national, modern, and postmodern, all at once: ‘We meet along the way outstanding craftsmen and artists from all the provinces, many of them poor in worldly goods, rich in metaphoric power, largely lacking a public, who have nonetheless given expression to the pleasures and pains, the obstacles and ideals that moved the Canadian people in their day and move us in ours. It is a truly poetic panorama’ (16). Colombo’s description accepts the overblown stereotypes so readily that one wonders whether he is engaging in a parody of anthological discourse. But I think he is dead serious. He really does believe in the metaphor of the poet (and the anthologist) as a new-world traveller, Christlike sufferer, and archetypal wanderer who can give voice to the ‘poetic panorama’ of the nation. Prophets in a northern wilderness, these poets make us real. Colombo’s representation of nation is problematized by his depiction of otherness, particularly as it is embodied in the foreign languages he collects, because each one of those languages represents an ideological structure he cannot control. He tries to include Quebec writers but cannot overcome the resistance he feels towards those who would question his pan-Canadian dream. Other editors deal with the marginalization of Quebec writers by apologizing for their exclusion (the ‘space limitations’ cited by Weaver and Toye is a common excuse), or by explaining their absence as the result of the editor’s poor understanding of French. In one way or another, as E.D. Blodgett says, it is a form of ‘anglophone hegemony’ (Configuration, 9). For an increasing number of anthologists, Canada is English Canada, point finale. This kind of exclusion is not restricted to anthologies of poetry. In what appears to be a companion volume to Colombo’s The Poets of Canada, Hurtig Publishers also released The Best Modern Canadian Short Stories, edited by Ivon Owen and Morris Wolfe, in the same year (1978). The anthology contains stories by twenty-four authors, only three of whom write in French. Their representation by population is dwindling. George Bowering’s Fiction of Contemporary Canada (1980) completely eliminates writing in French. For Bowering, ‘Contemporary Canada’ has become English Canada. John Metcalf’s Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stories (1982) similarly makes no mention of writing in French. Wayne Grady’s The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories (1982) contains the work of twenty-four writers, five of whom are French. Grady devotes a paragraph to explaining how a number of Quebec writers examine the crucial question of separatism in the years after 1960. This recognition aside, the book’s cover features

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the names of six writers included in the collection, none of whom is from Quebec. By the time Jane Urquhart edits the successor volume to Grady – The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007) – only one French author remains: Gabrielle Roy. But Roy’s work in translation had been co-opted by so many English-Canadian anthologists that many readers might have thought she wrote in English. The situation in 2008 was not much different than it was in 1947, when Desmond Pacey published A Book of Canadian Stories, in which all of the stories were written in English. As this brief survey suggests, anthologies of Canadian literature have increasingly become anthologies of English-Canadian literature; they announce a kind of de facto separation between the two cultures. This separation assumes the presence of two distinct literary traditions living side by side but never touching. Enacting a collective national gesture, the anthologists throw up their hands. But the desire to isolate English-Canadian literature is also an act of territorial aggression that is terminological in its force. In an essay on the difficulties of reconciling Quebecois discourse and ideology with English-Canadian literary studies, Davey remarks that although a francophone desire to be maîtres chez nous has been the more public and polemical, a similar anglophone-Canadian desire for exclusive possession of the word Canada – or assumption that it already had exclusive possession – has shown up emphatically in Canadian literature from the earliest anthologies to the present day. When in 1864 the Rev. Edward Hartley Dewart titled his new anthology Selections from Canadian Poets, he understood by the term ‘Canadians’ anglophone Canadians. When he wrote in his introduction the now well-known proposition that ‘a national literature is an essential element in the formation of a national character’ (ix) he appears to have been anticipating a national character that was primarily English-speaking, with French occupying the same position in Canada as Catalan now occupies in Spain. (‘AND Quebec,’ 11–12)

Davey goes on to observe that anthologists have adopted different strategies of dealing with French-Canadian literature. For example, in Canadian Poets (1916), John Garvin ‘offers a second model for dealing with anglophone-Canada’s relation to its large francophone minority: pretend there is no francophone Canada. Garvin simply appropriates the term “Canadian” for anglophone-Canadian writing, and makes no mention of the existence of francophone-Canadian writing in his introduction or elsewhere. Overall, this has been an extremely popular

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model in anglophone-Canadian criticism and anthology construction – so popular in recent times that it is hard not to see here a secret wish that Quebec and francophone-Canadians generally would simply vanish, secede, disappear, fall silent, or otherwise drop from notice’ (15–16). While anthologists and critics have tried to resolve the English-French binary through various constructions of the nation, the separation of English and French literature has been a problem for anthologists from the nineteenth century to the present. Margaret Atwood’s The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1982) continues the tradition of recognizing this separation. Unlike Toye and Smith, both of whom include French-Canadian material in their anthologies, Atwood defines her anthology in exclusively English-Canadian terms: ‘Smith’s book was more ambitious in scope than the present volume, since it was a survey of poetry in French as well as in English. The yeast-like growth of poetry in both languages since 1960 has meant that considerations of length, as well as the ignorance of the present editor, have limited this collection to poetry in English only’ (xxvii). In encouraging the creation of this anthology, Toye, as publisher, did not seek out an editor who had the facility to represent both national literatures. It didn’t matter. Toye understood that the audience for Atwood’s anthology was English, that the anthology would be used in English schools, and that English readers understood Canadian literature as English-Canadian literature. This is not to say that there was no interest in Quebec writing outside the province. There was a considerable amount of strong scholarship on Quebec writing and translation produced by English-Canadian scholars in the 1980s and 1990s. But from an anthological perspective, the idea of two languages sharing a book was dead. The anthology simply reflected a national reality. English Canadians outside Quebec did not live in a bilingual world and they did not embrace the idea of a separate Quebec. Although the Official Languages Act, proclaimed in 1969, made Canada officially bilingual, and although the Constitution Act of 1982 enshrined those rights, pan-Canadian bilingualism was a long way off. In 1981, only 8 per cent of young English speakers outside of Quebec spoke French. As an anthology of English-Canadian poetry, Atwood’s book is a very solid and even innovative collection, with strong representation of contemporary writers and a wide range of material, beginning with poetry by Robert Hayman (1575–1629) and ending with Roo Borson (1952–). Of the 120 poets included in the volume, 88 were still living at the time of publication, which means that the anthology is more

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modern than historical in its orientation. Atwood credits William Toye, ‘who thought up the idea, twisted [her] arm, and acted as co-reader and consultant throughout’ (xl), but her central influence, she says, is A.J.M. Smith. Her anthology is ‘a personal memorial tribute to someone who had contributed greatly to [her] education as a poet,’ and she hopes she edited the collection ‘with the same sense of cultural mission that Smith himself pursued through his collecting and elucidating’ (xxvii). For Atwood, an anthology allows us to place ourselves: ‘we see where we are and where we’re going partly by where we’ve been, and an anthology such as this one is not only gathered from the past but aimed towards the future’ (xvii). Atwood recognizes that her editorial activities are part of a canonical process, and that to be included in an Oxford anthology is ‘like getting your baby boots bronzed: the aim is durability’ (xxviii). Part of her method involves representing works that have ‘entered the canon’ (‘old chestnuts’) and including works by the newer poets she considers to be ‘chestnut-producers of the future’ (xxviii). Atwood provides a brief history of the development of Canadian poetry that ends just after her account of the ‘cultural nationalism’ that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. In the final section of her introduction, she rejects a conventional strategy of Canadian anthologists (‘Until very recently it was considered mandatory to introduce any collection of Canadian poetry with some variant of the Canada-come-ofage motif’ [xxxvi]). While it might once have been necessary to invoke that motif in order to distinguish Canadian writing from the poetry of other countries, Atwood argues that it has already come into its own, so this is no longer necessary: ‘It is not American, or English poetry manqué but a unique organism: spiky, tough, flexible, various, and vital. Finally, it is its own’ (xxxix). Atwood’s assertion is inadvertently ironic, but so are many of the statements she makes about the function of her anthology. While Atwood claims that it is not necessary to undertake any special pleading on behalf of Canadian poetry, the final lines of her introduction claim its distinctiveness. By saying ‘it is its own,’ she is saying Canadian poetry has come of age (‘Finally’). The literature is perceived as a kind of vegetative bildungsroman, a plant that has found its own spiky, tough, and flexible personality. The ‘coming of age’ disclaimer identifies Atwood’s anthology with the tropes that characterize earlier collections of poetry: assembling the material is likened to a process that involves growth to maturity, and that maturity is linked with national independence (‘it is its own’). This

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independence, in turn, is validated by the canon, for it is the canon that provides the foundation on which a national literature is built. The business of investing in old chestnuts and finding the future chestnuts is part of the process of establishing a tradition based on canonical norms. While Atwood may distinguish herself from A.J.M. Smith in terms of the kinds of poetry she collects, the central factor that links them is his ‘cultural mission,’ which is the archetypal mission assumed by Canadian anthologists in their representation of nation. In one way or another, these anthologies undertake the problem of answering Northrop Frye’s question, ‘Where is here?’ The question is central to Atwood. She tells us that anthologies point us to where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. The creation of a collection such as this is an explicit response to Frye. It also asserts its place in an anthological genealogy that moves back in time through William Toye, to A.J.M. Smith, and backwards further, to all of the anthologists who have framed Canada since John Simpson began the task in 1837. At the same time, Atwood’s anthology invites us to consider what happens to the representation of Canada when the idea of nation that has nurtured its editors for more than a century begins to fall apart. Theoretically, the anthologies should reflect this disintegration. But if these anthologies remain faithful to their lineage – if they keep the code – they will continue to reinforce the canon by pretending that the country remains integrated and harmonized. They will continue to embody the Canadian anthologist’s dream. The next chapter examines the fate of this dream between 1982 and 1996.

Chapter Six

Solidifying the Canadian Canon, 1982–1996

With a combined weight of just over two kilograms and containing 1314 pages, the dual volumes of Russell Brown and Donna Bennett’s An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English compose the heaviest anthology of Canadian literature ever produced. The first volume was published in 1982; the second appeared a year later. The sheer size of this collection provides ample evidence of how commercially viable the anthologizing of Canadian literature had become. It also points to the solidification of a Canadian literary canon that was established in the years following the 1978 Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel. While some of the critics attending the conference challenged its canon-making orientation, including its list of ‘the most important one hundred works of fiction,’ no sustained attack on the canon or its underlying ideological assumptions appeared in the 1980s. The proceedings of the Calgary conference were only published in 1982, a fact which suggests that the articulation of Canadian canonical models was still in a very early stage. While it is true that numerous small presses and alternative magazines encouraged anti-canonical aesthetics throughout the 1970s, the dominant movement was towards the consolidation of canonical norms as an expression of national identity. The dissenting voices served the important function of reinforcing the idea that a canon existed and that it was worthy of dispute. Because this canon was saleable in a curricular marketplace, publishers reinforced its currency; they stood to profit from its recognition and promotion. Those publishers were concerned almost entirely with school sales, where profit could be secured through course adoptions that continued year after year. In earlier decades, anthologists had imagined a popular audience for their collections, underlining their

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assumption that the appreciation of Canadian literature was something that could be gained by the reading public at large. But now an important change had set in: anthologists understood that the main readers of their books would be students and that in order to reach those students, they had to appeal to the professors and teachers who had become canonical gatekeepers, professionals responsible for determining how the Canadian canon would be represented and according to what terms. In many cases, anthologies of Canadian literature were born as the result of marketing decisions that originated through the discussion a professor might have with a sales representative visiting his or her office. What curricular demands might be satisfied by a particular kind of anthology? How could the book be packaged so that it was affordable yet authoritative? What kind of apparatus would it contain that would make it usable in an introductory course? These kinds of demand- and supply-side questions often determined the ways in which Canadian literature came to be packaged for school use. They also established a link between the sales divisions of the large publishers and the academics who supported those publishers’ markets through course adoptions and endorsement. Those academics had power denied to people outside the institution, mainly because they possessed the means to drive sales. If the kind of material that was anthologized reflected a predominantly conservative canon, it was because so many of the courses taught by academics were conservative in structure and orientation. The anthologies edited by academics were made to serve the needs of pedagogy, not to challenge those needs. Brown and Bennett’s An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English entered the market with excellent timing. Volume 1 came out the same year as the Canadian constitution was patriated (1982), an event that drew increasing attention to the nature of Canadian identity and its expression in the nation’s literature. There had not been a major new anthology of Canadian poetry and fiction since Klinck and Watters published the third edition of their Canadian Anthology in 1974 (and it was seriously out of date). Daymond and Monkman published their two-volume Literature in Canada in 1978, but in taking on French- and English-Canadian literature, it was not comparable to Brown and Bennett. Brown and Bennett’s anthology was the first to appear after the canonical upsurge that marked the late 1970s. They had a wealthy and committed publisher, they had no serious competition except from other Oxford anthologies that focused strictly on poetry or fiction, and

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they were tied into the academic network through their connection with the University of Toronto, where both of them taught. Russell Brown and Donna Bennett both grew up in the United States. They met in Houston, where Bennett was in high school and Brown was in his third year at Rice University. In correspondence with me, Brown described the circumstances surrounding their move to Canada in 1969. He was completing his PhD at SUNY Binghamton, where he was a teaching assistant for Robert Kroetsch. He says: ‘Donna and I were both deeply affected by the [Vietnam] war and the social climate and politics surrounding it – and especially by the 1968 Democratic Convention, which we watched on TV pretty much from morning to night for four days. That one event (which included watching the National Guardsmen push their rifles into the car windows of individuals driving through Chicago) and all that surrounded it (eventually including the Chicago Seven Trial) was possibly the most significant factor in our decision to emigrate to Canada – though the election of Richard Nixon in the fall certainly confirmed it’ (Letter to the author, 2 April 2009). Brown got a job teaching at Lakehead University in the summer of 1969. Even after he had been in Canada for more than thirty years, he still felt ‘moved’ by the words of broadcaster Andy Barrie, who said (in John Hagan’s Northern Passage): ‘When I came to Canada I’d never been here, and I thought I had arrived home. In fact, all these years I might have imagined I was being socialized as an American in the States – it seems like I was in fact, in some way I couldn’t know, being socialized as a Canadian – like what transsexuals say, “I’m a male trapped in a female body,” I was a Canadian trapped in the body of an American’ (Letter to the author, 2 April 2009). Brown explains: ‘my experience of crossing the border was like an early version of what came to be thought of as social deconstruction, because I discovered that a lot I had taken as “natural” was actually cultural (the need to rebel against authority, for example)’ (Letter to the author, 2 April 2009). An important context for this border-crossing experience is provided by Robert Kroetsch’s fiction. Kroetsch was himself a border crosser, and his work with the postmodern journal boundary 2 at SUNY Binghamton was one means of extending his own border consciousness. Brown’s first publication was a review of Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man. The novel prompted him to read more Canadian literature (‘I was deep into Laurence, Davies, Grove, etc.’) because ‘those books were telling [him] about the place to which [he]’d come.’ In 1974 he taught the Canadian survey course at Lakehead. He began to think about a

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career move that would enable him to become involved in Canadian literature full-time. To this end, he gave up his post at Lakehead to take a limited-term appointment at University of Toronto. In 1979 he taught a small class on Canadian poetry and realized that the students were not bothering to look up allusions or the meanings of obscure words (‘a great deal of class time therefore had to be given over to explanation’). When a representative from Oxford showed up at Brown’s office, he pitched her the idea of creating an anthology similar to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, one that would include critical introductions to each author as well as detailed footnotes. It was this ‘highly pragmatic concern about teaching Canadian texts’ that led to his and Bennett’s contract with Oxford, and to the first edition of their anthology (Letter to the author, 2 April 2009). Although Bennett and Brown undertook their editorial work with practical aims in mind, the anthology provided them with a symbolic means of confirming their identity as Canadians. In embracing this project, they were partaking in a concept shared by their predecessors: the idea that editing a Canadian national literature anthology was a means of validating the nation (and, by extension, the editor’s role as a participant in and maker of that nation). It is therefore not surprising to find them equating their pursuit of Canadian literature and identity with a movement north, for like many other anthology editors, nordicity and Canadian identity were interwoven. Kroetsch gave voice to this quest for the north in several of his novels and poems. Brown says his leaving the United States to teach in Canada while still a graduate student at Binghamton may have been one of the sources of inspiration for Kroetsch’s Gone Indian, with its story of Jeremy Sadness searching for his true identity in the north. In this context, and perhaps from Kroetsch’s point of view, Brown becomes the iconic traveller, the figure who goes ‘Indian’ by travelling north, demythologizing and remythologizing himself in terms of a consciousness that is northern, new, unknown. Kroetsch’s words about the novel obviously have implications for Brown. In a 1973 letter to Patricia Knox of NeWest Press, Kroetsch says: Gone Indian is ‘a novel about going west; not just my going, [but] the going of Columbus from the Old World in search of the New, the going of Tristan in search of a new lay for the old King, the going out of and into that produced Canada, Canadians, the change, the metamorphosis, ideally represented by and in the transubstantiation of the body and dreams of the English boy Archie Belaney (fatherless, and seeking a father) into the Great Canadian Indian, Grey Owl; Grey Owl himself, in

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turn, our father in turn, going west from New Brunswick, from Ontario, to the Saskatchewan bush’ (‘Letter’). As Aritha van Herk observes, ‘Jeremy Sadness, named after Jeremy Bentham, wants to be Grey Owl, the fake Indian Archie Belaney invented himself to be.’ I don’t think Brown and Bennett wanted to be Grey Owl, but the connection between ‘going Indian’ and transforming one’s identity is hard to ignore. Canadian anthology making becomes a means of ‘going Indian,’ of embracing metamorphosis and transubstantiation. In an article entitled ‘Crossing Borders,’ Brown meditates on what it means to move between countries. Inevitably, he ends up considering Kroetsch’s novel. His comments might well be directed at himself: ‘In Gone Indian a young American graduate student named Jeremy Sadness comes to Canada, ostensibly in search of a job, though really seeking several less tangible, if more valuable, things. As it did for many young Americans at the end of the sixties, the northern border has a special appeal for Jeremy: he believes he is crossing into a land where existence will be freer, simpler, more natural, renewing. In fact, since Jeremy thinks of that border as a substitute for the frontier which long ago vanished from the American West, his journey into Canada is also a search for a lost American dream. He is a man who had come to believe that his whole life was shaped and governed by some deep American need to seek out the frontier’ (159–60). Sadness, Brown, and Bennett are all voyagers; their journey north is existential, a means of recreating themselves in the context of a new landscape that is open, new, ‘natural.’ Brown casts himself in the role of the wanderer-explorer who approaches a new country and its literature as an excursion into identity. In this way, he participates in the quest motif that figures so prominently in anthologies of English-Canadian literature, which consistently frames the editor as a traveller whose editorial activities will bring him or her to a new world, a metaphoric promised land. Whether consciously or not, Brown and Bennett join those keepers of the code whose anthologies are symbolic expressions of a rebirth narrative organized around motifs associated with travelling north. To what extent is this voyage into a new world reflected in the anthology itself? In the introduction to volume 1, Brown and Bennett point to several aspects of their selections that are of particular interest to them. Perhaps the most important feature they identify is the idea of community expressed by many of the writers, mainly because that idea of community ultimately leads the editors back to their own place in it.

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They begin by holding it at a distance, but as the idea of community unfolds, it gradually morphs into a mythology that is articulated by the writers they have brought together. In a final step, the editors who unite these writers become myth makers themselves, participants in the community their collection has created. It is an assertion of identity that sets up a correspondence between writer and editor. Brown and Bennett start out by noting that their critical introductions to each author’s work locate the works’ ‘place in the Canadian literary community’ (xi). Canada, they write, has a ‘close community of writers’ (xii). This community forms what Northrop Frye calls a ‘milieu’ that is the product of an ‘imaginative continuum’ in which ‘writers are conditioned by the attitudes of their predecessors’ (xii). Affirming this continuum is crucial, because it is part and parcel of a ‘literary mythology’ that ‘has been emerging for some time’ (xii). In this mythology, the writers ‘become myth-makers and even mythic figures’ (xii). These words energize the editors. We begin to realize that what Brown and Bennett are saying about the writers could equally be said about themselves as Americans who have come to Canada in search of a new order. In writing about the community that these writers have created, the editors are implicitly writing about the community they have found. In writing about the indigenous mythology that these writers have constructed, they are also talking about their embrace of a new mythology. And in identifying the ‘three large movements’ that characterize ‘the development of Canadian literature,’ (xii) they could just as easily be describing their own immigrant experience. In the first movement, ‘pre-Confederation writers initiated the struggle to find suitable language and forms to describe new experiences in a new landscape’ (xii). Brown and Bennett arrive in Canada and find themselves in a new landscape, surrounded by a new literature. In the second movement (‘the emergence of a national literature’), Canadian writers continued to investigate the themes ‘that had been of concern to Canadians since the first days of settlement: a consciousness of exile and isolation; a sense of inchoate identity; ambivalent feelings about nature that sometimes led them to question their place in a universe that seemed hostile or (even worse) indifferent’ (xii). Brown and Bennett understand that they have chosen exile from their homeland. Their exile and displacement is existential, forcing them to question their own place in a universe that is either ‘indifferent’ (the word comes from the French existentialists, especially Camus) or ‘hostile’ (with this word we see the influence of Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye).

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In the third movement (‘the initial stage of literary modernism in Canada’), the Canadian modernists displayed ‘a distaste for revolt, the revolutionary character of European and American modernism – which manifested itself in a desire to shock or astound and in a tendency to break sharply with the past’ (xii). Brown and Bennett may have left the United States behind them, but they are no revolutionaries who want to dismiss the past. Rather, the challenge for them is to find a new past, a new history they can embrace, and that is exactly why the idea of finding a community of writers who are anchored in ‘historical contexts’ and an ‘imaginative continuum’ is of such interest to them. They are editorial pilgrims in search of stability and order. Although the first volume of Brown and Bennett’s anthology appeared in 1982, it makes no mention of a fourth movement, which would encompass the initial stages of postmodernism in Canada. Perhaps they felt that this fourth movement would best be described in volume 2, which is devoted to writers born after 1914. In that volume, they note that ‘in all parts of the world today we hear statements about the end of modernism and about the beginning of a “postmodern” era characterized by literary forms that are self-conscious and self-reflexive, but that also express considerable ironic doubt about the self as an object of inquiry’ (xv). If Canadian writers are interested in postmodernism, Bennett and Brown argue, it is because ‘its concerns are strikingly congruent with preoccupations – such as the Canadian anxiety about self-identity – that already existed in the country’ (xv). The editors’ approach to postmodernism provides a good indication of the extent to which its Canadian appearance lagged. Brown and Bennett were talking about the ‘beginning’ of a postmodern era in 1983, but postmodern writing had dominated American literature throughout the 1970s and had entered Canada in the mid-1970s and early 1980s in the work of Frank Davey, Robert Kroetsch, and Linda Hutcheon. Their own selections indicate that Brown and Bennett knew the Canadian origins of postmodernism were earlier than their introduction claims: they include Kroetsch’s ‘Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction,’ originally published in 1974. However, this is not an anthology that celebrates postmodern theory or innovation. Its central alignment is with more conventional ideas of community, tradition, and realism associated with earlier models of Canadian literary history. This is not surprising to find in an anthology created by two editors who had found a new home in Canada and who had articulated their respect for community and coherence in the

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first volume of their work. At its heart, postmodernism challenged the mimetic structures on which the idea of coherent and recognizable communities were founded; at the same time, postmodernism undermined monolithic assumptions about national identity that had dominated anthological discourse since the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that in most respects its selections were quite up to date, there is a lingering sense of nostalgia that informs Brown and Bennett’s collection. The marble-paper cover motif, designed by William Toye, evokes an earlier era. The even weighting of both volumes spells stability, as does the equal weight given to the two editors, whose names are reversed for the separate volumes, which mirror each other (Brown and Bennett are married). This is a reflective world, not a selfreflexive one. The predominant physical tropes of these coupled volumes are reflection (mimesis) and union, which is fitting for a book that celebrates the coherence of a country. Although it appears in what the editors recognize as a postmodern age, Bennett and Brown’s anthology wants to calm its readers, to assure them that this will be a guided, pragmatic voyage into established canonical terrain. On the first page of the introduction to volume 1, we find ten consecutive lines that include the words ‘important’ (twice), ‘importance’ (once), ‘significant’ (twice), ‘substantial’ (once), and ‘major’ (once). That is seven canonical terms in ten lines, a clear indication of the extent to which Brown and Bennett value canonical language. At the same time, they emphasize ease of access to the canon. We are told that the anthology is ‘a convenient starting point,’ that its footnotes are designed to be ‘useful,’ that its technical apparatus ‘has been kept as simple as possible,’ that the aim is to provide ‘reliable and readable texts’ (volume 1), and that when in doubt about the need for annotation, the editors ‘consulted students in Canadian-literature and in first-year English courses and [were] guided by their responses’ (volume 2). In offering these assurances, the editors demystify the process of canonical initiation while validating the status of the canonical novitiates, those students whose responses guide the editors in their technical endeavours. Implicit in this stance is the value of creating an anthological community in which all members are empowered, a kind of mini-model of the ideal democratic state. The rhetoric is inclusive and user-friendly. In this sense, Brown and Bennett distinguish themselves from earlier editors, who often saw themselves as elitists making educated selections for the literary unwashed. For Brown and Bennett, the anthology is the print version of the classroom. And, as Brown indi-

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cated to me, they often thought about the order of their selections in terms of the kind of connections with other works that teachers and students might make during the discussion of a particular poem or story in class. While there is no clear temporal dividing line between the two volumes, the distinction Brown and Bennett seem to be making is between poetry and fiction before and after the Second World War. Of course, there are several overlaps. Authors such as Northrop Frye, Irving Layton, George Woodcock, Douglas LePan, and W.O. Mitchell are much closer to the post-war group than other writers included in volume 1. But once the decision was made to publish the anthology in two volumes, a boundary had to be established somewhere. The two-volume structure allowed the anthology to be used both in courses devoted to early Canadian literature and in courses focused on post-war writing. Each volume on its own was approximately the same size as the closest competing anthology – Klinck and Watters’s Canadian Anthology (1974). If we study the contents of these two anthologies, it soon becomes apparent that Brown and Bennett’s anthology is much more geographically representative of Canadian poetry and fiction. They also filled in some of the earlier gaps left by Klinck and Watters. For example, they added material by Mavis Gallant, Henry Kreisel, Phyllis Webb, Robert Kroetsch, and Clark Blaise. In terms of new fiction, they included stories by Leon Rooke, W.D. Valgardson, Rudy Wiebe, Audrey Thomas, and Alistair MacLeod. They also made the poetry selections more contemporary by adding Patrick Lane, Frank Davey, Dennis Lee, and bpNichol, and by including a special section called ‘Poets for Further Reading’ that represented work by David Donnell, Gary Geddes, Daphne Marlatt, Andrew Suknaski, Robert Bringhurst, Mary di Michele, Roo Borson, and Erin Mouré. Brown and Bennett had done their homework, and by bringing in new writers and including poets and short-story writers from east to west, they created a much more inclusive anthology than had been realized by their predecessors. They did this at a time when regional interests were displacing the centralist values that had defined the Canadian canon. There is an increased consciousness of prairie writing, an attention to voices from the west coast, a nod to Atlantic Canada with the material by MacLeod, and even a return to new writing from Montreal (Geddes, di Michele, Mouré), which had been displaced by Toronto over the preceding decade. By constructing their anthology in this way, Brown and Bennett not only demonstrated their recognition of differ-

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ent regions; they also showed themselves to be shrewd in their understanding that the professors teaching Canadian literature courses in different parts of the country wanted to be able to use material that was geographically related to where they lived. Beyond bringing in literature from different regions, Brown and Bennett made their anthology pedagogically useful by providing annotations and by explaining various allusions in a way that opened up the texts and made them more accessible to students. While the rhetoric of their introduction suggests that a Canadian canon was important to them and that ‘importance’ and ‘significance’ were literary qualities that could be defined, they were also willing to take chances that extended the canon. Clearly, Bennett and Brown had created a winner. Brown indicated to me that their anthology has been Oxford’s best-selling book since its publication. While Oxford was promoting Brown and Bennett’s new anthology, they were also pushing Margaret Atwood’s The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, which also appeared in 1982. But Oxford was not the only company determined to profit from Canadian literature anthologies. In the same year, General Publishing released the two-volume Canadian Poetry, edited by myself and Jack David, with an introduction by George Woodcock. Here the commentary must necessarily become self-reflexive, and probably skewed, since it is difficult to comment accurately on one’s own anthology making, even with the benefit of hindsight. Notwithstanding these limitations, I want to provide a brief commentary on my own sense of this anthology as an agent of canon formation. By 1982 Jack David and I were jointly editing the critical journal Essays on Canadian Writing (founded in 1974), and we had co-founded ECW Press in 1977. The journal gave us an in-depth exposure to trends in Canadian writing and criticism. The press emerged at a time when critical resources on Canadian writing were slim. Library budgets had expanded, and new funding was available to purchase reference material that would be of use to a new generation of CanLit students and their teachers. ECW Press embarked on an ambitious program of creating multi-volume reference series designed to provide much-needed bibliographical and critical information. Over the course of more than twenty years, the press published hundreds of books about Canadian literature while the journal continued to provide the two of us with exposure to new critics and issues in the field. Although we were aware that there were many divergent voices in Canadian literature, and many forces contesting influence and power, it also seemed clear that a

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pedagogical canon had emerged and that there was a general consensus about the figures constituting this canon. When we were approached to put together an anthology of Canadian poetry that built on the expertise we had gained both as editors and publishers, the question naturally arose as to how we could create an anthology that would have a distinct competitive edge. We answered this question in several ways. First, we aimed to create an anthology that was affordable. Second, in the selection process, we looked for a way to involve professors with particular expertise in particular poets. Third, we would try to secure a well-known authority to endorse the project by writing an introduction. Canadian Poetry appeared in a mass-market paperback size and was priced very inexpensively. It appeared in what General Publishing called its New Press Canadian Classics series, which was clearly designed to compete with McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library series. Each volume contained the work of twenty-three poets. While we picked the poets to be included in each volume, the actual selection of poems was made by more than forty professors from around the country, each of whom also contributed a bio-critical essay on the author in question. We secured an introduction to each volume by George Woodcock, the founding editor of Canadian Literature, a prolific writer, and one of the most influential Canadian critics of his time. This gave the volume the credibility we were looking for. At the same time, each professor who contributed to the project had a small vested interest in it, a factor that helped secure its adoption in many poetry courses despite the fact that we could have done a much better job editing and proofing the text. The cynical take on this approach would be to say that it was entirely market driven. Another perspective might be to argue that it was the first truly collaborative anthology of English-Canadian poetry. All of the critics were shown the list of authors to be included in both volumes. There was little protest, and little in the way of suggesting that we had missed some crucial figures. Of course we had. With the exception of Michael Ondaatje, there wasn’t a single non-white author in Canadian Poetry. It didn’t go quite as far as Brown and Bennett did in identifying new writers, but it also showed that, much like ours, their representation of Canada was overwhelmingly white. Yet Canadian Poetry was also very successful (over 100,000 copies of each volume were sold) and continued to be reprinted by the publisher until General went bankrupt in 2002. It would be years until this whiteness of the Canadian canon began

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to break down. After the two-volume anthology had been in print for several years, we approached General a number of times with the idea of preparing a third volume that would include contemporary Canadian poetry, but the publisher never took us up on the offer and seemed content to continue selling a book that essentially ignored all Canadian poetry published after 1980. The continued sales of these volumes, however, suggests that the primary users of the collection – university teachers – were not that concerned about the anthology’s datedness, mainly because they were accustomed to discussing a pedagogical canon that responded slowly to new material. They were reluctant to alter whatever methods had proven to be effective in studying Canadian poetry. These teachers should not be blamed for their willingness to promote the existing canon. Interrogations of the canon in the 1980s were still in a very early phase. As E. Dean Kolbas points out, ‘The phrase “opening the canon” seems to have been coined in 1979, and the first large Modern Languages Association forum that explicitly made the canon an issue was not organized until 1982’ (37). The first American anthology to directly challenge the canon was Paul Lauter’s The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1991), which appeared almost a decade later. Even the Reconstructing American Literature Project, under Lauter’s direction, did not hold its first meeting until 1982. Difficult as it may be for us to accept this today, literary canons and their ideological implications were simply not an object of widespread debate in the early 1980s. So it is asking a bit much to look back at anthologies published in this time and critique them for not doing their part in ‘opening up’ the canon. In Canada, the idea of questioning the canon might have seemed even more out of place at a time when so much effort was going into constructing the idea of a national literature with its own icons, its own values, its own ‘classic’ texts. The success of anthologies that promoted the idea of a Canadian canon testifies to the widespread belief that such a canon had been brought into existence and that it deserved transmission. The process of questioning the Canadian canon evolved gradually during the 1980s through the intervention of feminists, theorists, and those involved in promoting Native and multi-ethnic literatures. Yet the first anthology devoted to Native literature in Canada did not appear until 1991, and the first devoted to multicultural literature was only released in 1996. In the early 1980s, then, challenges to the canon in Canadian anthologies were few and far between. Although new writers might be added

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to anthologies in order to make them more current, the overall picture presented by anthology formation in Canada was that a central canon had emerged. Dozens of alternative anthologies would question this canon and seek to undermine it; that had always been the case. But in terms of the kind of material that was being used in schools and universities across the country, the anthologies produced by companies like Oxford, McClelland and Stewart, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Penguin, and General Publishing dominated the field. And those companies understood that the central market for their anthologies was curricular. The canon was increasingly defined as a subject taught in schools rather than as a body of texts known to the reading public. Because the creation and promotion of the canon had become such a curricular affair, editors and publishers had to be very careful about the strategies they employed in conceiving anthologies. They had to understand how university courses were structured and what kind of material they covered. Given this climate, it might be possible to produce a groundbreaking and innovative anthology that gained no traction because it did not adequately serve the academic marketplace. Two examples of other anthologies that emerged around the same time as those by Bennett and Brown and Lecker and David might serve to illustrate this point. Coach House Press published George Bowering’s The Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology in 1984. The anthology has a decidedly partisan feel. Bowering’s relaxed introduction sings the praises of those poets who are preoccupied with language in itself, and in doing so he reminds us of his own roots in the west-coast, American-inspired poetry scene that influenced his poetry and involvement with TISH in the 1960s. The central aesthetic governing the anthology appears when Bowering says: ‘Diverse as they are, there is one thing these twenty poets hold in common, that being the assumption or belief that the animator of poetry is language. Not politics, not nationalism, not theme, not personality, not humanism, not real life, not the message, not self-expression, not confession, not the nobility of the work, not the spirit of the region, not the Canadian Tradition – but language. The centre & the impetus, the world & the creator of poetry is language’ (2). No one would be surprised to find Bowering supporting an aesthetic centred in the rejection of just about every value that other editors had extolled. And the selections he does make, even if he does not stay completely true to choosing only poets preoccupied with language, are innovative and challenging. This is the first anthology to include substantial

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selections by such poets as bill bissett, Robin Blaser, Victor Coleman, Christopher Dewdney, Brian Fawcett, David McFadden, and George Stanley. It also includes a brief section of essays on language-oriented poetics. But what the book fails to anticipate is the way its determined focus restricted its usefulness as a pedagogical tool. Very few university courses in 1984 were devoted to contemporary, language-based poetics. Even if an instructor were teaching a course on contemporary Canadian poetry, he or she might feel compelled to include works by other poets whose central focus was not language, if only because the prevailing ideology supported poetry that was aligned with so many of the values Bowering rejects in his introduction. One of Bowering’s competitors was Ken Norris, who edited Canadian Poetry Now: 20 Poets of the ’80’s, published by House of Anansi Press in 1984. Norris mentions the TISH group but argues that their work is dated (they have ‘grown older and become the establishment’ [11]) and that it is time to move on to the true new voices of the 1980s. For Norris, contemporary Canadian poetry in the mid-1980s is inspired by feminism, surrealism, and regionalism; it focuses on the daily and the factual. Although Norris and Bowering were editing collections of contemporary Canadian poetry in exactly the same year, and although both books contain the works of forty poets (twenty each), they only agree on a single poet: Christopher Dewdney. And out of the twentyone poems by Dewdney collected in both books, only two poems are represented in both anthologies. This means that in 633 pages of contemporary Canadian poetry appearing in two anthologies published by acclaimed small presses, the editors can agree only on two poems. Another way of putting this is to say that here there is no canonical consensus whatsoever. I am not pointing this out as a critique. On the contrary, the lack of agreement between Norris and Bowering suggests that the field of contemporary Canadian poetry had become highly contested and that there was room, apparently, for those contesting forces to find publication through respected venues. The differences between these books also suggested that the canon was breaking open, that there was little in the way of consensus about which poets were central to the early 1980s. Further proof of the absence of consensus concerning the contemporary Canadian poetry canon is furnished by Dennis Lee’s The New Canadian Poets, 1970–1985 (1985), published by McClelland and Stewart, where Lee worked as a poetry editor from 1981 to 1984. Lee’s introduction is by far the most searching and articulate consideration

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of the state of Canadian poetry at the time. He understands that there are diverse forces at work, and that the generation is best described in terms of its eclecticism. He also understands the difficulty of his task, given that the massive expansion of Canadian poetry publishing in the 1970s led to a breakdown of traditional alignments and communities: ‘the “poetry community” dissolved during the seventies into a series of blurry sub-committees, which seldom overlapped’ (xviii). Lee points out that ‘across the country, emerging poets were more isolated and less visible than ever before – to each other as much as to the reading public. The effect of the explosion of numbers in our poetry was a drastic reduction in the visibility of new poets’ (xviii). Lee’s anthology attempts to redress that situation by including the works of forty-five poets who published their first books after 1970. The first part of the anthology is devoted to more established writers from this period, with several selections from each author’s work. The second part is devoted to newer writers. In this section, Lee provides a shorter selection of representative work. Lee’s thirty-six-page introduction to this anthology is a detailed essay in its own right, a thoughtful consideration of the four features he sees distinguishing contemporary Canadian poetry. The features are ‘content, voice, image, and phenomenological stance’ (xxii). Within the category called ‘content,’ Lee discusses four subcategories: ‘the Prairie documentary,’ the ‘feminist,’ the experience of being an immigrant, and ‘daily work.’ Clearly Lee is attuned to the new emphasis on regionalism evident in Canadian writing, prompted in large part by Kroetsch’s theorizing of prairie literature and by an increasing emphasis on the Canadian long poem. By the mid-1980s, feminist theory had begun to pose serious challenges to established canons, while an influx of immigrants began to change the colour of Canadian writing; it was becoming less and less white. In turning his attention to poets who wrote about ‘daily work,’ Lee became the first editor of a major anthology to recognize labour poetry of the left, a genre that had been systematically ignored by anthology editors up to that point. In stressing the ‘vernacular’ voice employed by so many of these poets, Lee also turns our attention to poets who are unique and self-defining in the way they draw ‘organizing energy from the conventions of conversation’ (xxxvi). Finally, he describes a number of these poets in terms of their ‘phenomenological stance,’ which is about ‘a two-way process, in which the world is known by consciousness and consciousness knows the world’ (xliii).

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Lee’s phenomenological meditation here reminds us of his own philosophical interests as a writer. Because the way one’s consciousness knows the world is also an expression of identity, the phenomenological provides a route to existential grounding. In embracing this phenomenological stance, Lee aligns himself with other Canadian anthologists before him, who understood that the way their anthologies ‘know’ the world is also an expression of being, not just for the editor, but also for the world an editor undertakes to represent through the process of selection. Language creates reality. Each poet in an anthology constructs his or her own phenomenology. But as a group brought together in this communal space, under the rubric ‘new Canadian poets,’ they also construct a phenomenology of the national that is an expression of collective identity. There is an implied collaborative poetic voice, even though each poet’s individual work runs counter to the collective claim. The phenomenological stance draws our attention to the ways in which the country is both constructed and deconstructed through the anthological act. By giving voice to the complex interplay of forces he sees informing contemporary Canadian poetry, Lee also demonstrates his awareness of some of the central theoretical issues in the 1980s. Kroetsch’s ‘For Play and Entrance: The Canadian Long Poem,’ originally published in 1981, drew attention to the ways in which the long poem could be conceived of in post-structuralist and deconstructive terms, a subject discussed in detail at the Long-Liners Conference held at York University in 1986. Along with other theorists, especially Dennis Cooley, Kroetsch influenced a new respect for regionalism and prairie aesthetics. The movement towards the ‘vernacular’ was suggested by many of the critics brought together by Cooley in a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing devoted to prairie writing in 1980. Cooley went on to develop his concept of prairie voice further in The Vernacular Muse (1986). He had written on Lee’s work earlier – in 1979 – when he called him a latter-day Matthew Arnold, no doubt because Cooley felt that Lee was not sensitive to changes in the poetic landscape. But by 1985, Lee had obviously sensitized himself and come to employ the very term – ‘vernacular’ – that would inform Cooley’s critical work. He was also attuned to the shift towards post-structuralist theory that had come to dominate discussions of Canadian literature. In his chapter on ‘Theory and Criticism’ in Canada between 1972 and 1984, Barry Cameron observes that ‘if phenomenological criticism was one of the most influential forces in Canadian critical practice during

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the 1970s and early 1980s, overtaking and displacing systemic criticism, it is clear that structuralist and post-structuralist practice was becoming more frequent by 1984’ (131). The endnotes to Lee’s introduction indicate that he was aware of this shift and that he was familiar with postmodern poetry, French feminist theory, and concepts of self-reflexivity that were being explored in contemporary criticism, and especially in Canada by Linda Hutcheon, whose Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox was published in 1984. All of this indicates that Lee’s anthology appeared at a time when the concept of a national literature was shifting as dramatically as the theoretical language used to describe it. Although Lee’s anthology makes it clear that he was aware of the theoretical and ideological forces challenging monolithic concepts of nationalism, he didn’t go far enough to convince some critics that he was truly interested in reformulating the representation of Canada. Writing in 1992, Frank Davey looked back on the 1980s and identified Lee as one of a number of anthologists who were unable to jettison the ‘aesthetic/humanist ideology’ of their homogeneous and universalist forms of nationalism. Davey criticized these anthologists for ignoring writers who were ‘constructing difference and identity, perceiving conflict and oppression, but doing so within metaphors and grids other than national ones’ (‘Poetry,’ 14). For Davey, the nationalist anthologists of the 1980s ignored the growing forces of regionalism, race and ethnicity, feminism, and leftist politics. They refused to recognize that they were promoting national models at a time characterized by ‘at least the temporary suspension of a national culture and a national literary audience’ (‘Poetry,’ 14). A year after this article appeared, Davey published Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967, in which he advanced a similar argument: discussions about Canadian literature routinely promoted a false connection between literature, culture, and nationalism and assumed the existence of transnational models that served pedagogical needs. These models ignored contestation and debate and specifically literature that questioned the status quo. According to Davey, ‘The shift away from humanism and nationalism’ distinguished Canadian poetry in the mid- to late-1980s and made the ‘national paradigm’ (‘Poetry,’ 15) hard to support, particularly at a time when the very concept of Canadian independence was being challenged by political forces such as the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, ‘transnational ideologies,’ and ‘multinational capi-

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talism’ (‘Poetry,’ 10), not to mention the continuing rise of separatism in Quebec. In one sense Davey was correct. Evidence of contestation and the questioning of national identity appears in many of the anthologies published in the 1980s, mostly by small presses with regional affiliations or with particular ideological agendas of their own. Some of these anthologies, such as Michael Harris’s The Signal Anthology (1993), sought intentionally to interrogate and reform the national canon by introducing a host of new writers (many of them attached to Signal Editions, which operated under Harris’s editorship). Yet at the same time, the anthological tradition of presenting the nation as an identifiable whole through its literature continued with the publication of several collections, each of which was designed for use in courses implicitly focused on a national-literary ideal. Their editors obviously believed that it was still possible to construct an anthology that presented Canada as a coherent and evolving community whose writers represented its historical and contemporary existence. In collections devoted strictly to poetry, the large-scale national anthologies of the late 1980s and 1990s were Geddes and Bruce’s 15 Canadian Poets x 2 (1988), Geddes’s 15 Canadian Poets x 3 (2001), and Lecker and David’s The New Canadian Anthology (1988). It is astonishing to realize that in the ten years following the publication of Brown and Bennett’s An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (1982) and Lecker and David’s Canadian Poetry (1982), there were close to six hundred anthologies of Canadian literature published. But of these, only a handful sought to present a pan-Canadian selection, and even these (Geddes, Harris, and Lecker and David) were focused mainly on modern and contemporary Canadian poetry. From Davey’s perspective, this provides evidence of the breakdown of national ideologies. However, it might be just the opposite: perhaps the enormous success of these few anthologies suggested that the market for national anthologies was alive and well, and that this market had been cornered by the few texts that had been developed to serve it. Perhaps the hundreds of diverse anthologies published in these years were an indication that all kinds of constituencies and ideologies could exist alongside a national ideal represented in those anthologies that had proven their ability to endure and sell in large numbers. A nationalist agenda still existed when it came to anthologies, but the market for these anthologies was controlled by the large companies that could afford to pay permissions costs and produce and promote the titles from coast to coast. The small presses simply could not compete with the marketing, sales, and distri-

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bution power of such companies as McClelland and Stewart (who published Geddes), or Nelson Canada (Lecker and David’s publisher was owned by Thomson International), or Oxford (Brown and Bennett). It is also significant that the influential alternative anthologies to emerge and capture a national market (Moses and Goldie’s An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature [1991] or Kamboureli’s Making a Difference [1996]) were published by Oxford, which led the way in normalizing alternative canons for use in the schools. When it came to fiction, the story was much the same. The number of anthologies produced was huge, but the list of those devoted to representing all of Canadian short fiction was comparatively short and dominated by the major educational publishers. These volumes include W.H. New’s Canadian Short Fiction (Prentice-Hall, 1986), Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (Oxford, 1986), Michael Ondaatje’s From Ink Lake (Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1990), and John Metcalf and J.R. (Tim) Struthers’s How Stories Mean (Porcupine’s Quill, 1993) and Canadian Classics (McGrawHill Ryerson, 1993). Struthers’s two-volume The Possibilities of Story (1992) was also published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson. How did these various anthologies represent the nation? How did they rationalize their status as collections of Canadian poetry, or fiction, or both? The most widely used anthology of Canadian poetry through the 1980s and 1990s was Geddes’s 15 Canadian Poets, originally published in 1970 and revised and updated as 15 Canadian Poets Plus 5 (1978), both co-edited with Phyllis Bruce, followed by 15 Canadian Poets x 2 (1988) and 15 Canadian Poets x 3 (2001). The first edition contained the work of fifteen poets in 300 pages. By 2001, the anthology’s size had grown to 622 pages and contained poems by forty-five writers. Perhaps there was some mystical element involved in retaining the number fifteen as a structuring device for the various editions of this anthology. In an unpublished article in which Geddes reminisces about his editorial work as an anthologist, he confesses: ‘by the time of the final edition in 2001, 15 Canadian Poets x 3, I had become embarrassed by the title, which seemed to invite the ultimate joke, 15 Canadian Poets Squared, both a sly comment on the conservatism of the anthologist and an oddly appropriate notion, given the explosion of extremely fine work from the two generations of poets who had emerged since 1970’ (‘Confessions’). Whatever the rationale for its title, the several editions and widespread adoption of the anthology suggested that Geddes had either understood what teachers wanted in terms of a Canadian

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canon or constructed a canon that was usable by those teachers. Davey describes Geddes as a nationalist anthologist by virtue of his role as editor of Copp Clark’s Studies in Canadian Literature series (Canadian Literary Power, 89), although why his work in this capacity necessarily brands him as a nationalist remains unclear. (Davey’s first book-length work of criticism, a study of Earle Birney, was published in Geddes’s series in 1971. Does this make Davey a nationalist too?) Geddes was still in graduate school at the University of Toronto when the first edition of 15 Canadian Poets appeared. His own first book of poetry appeared in 1971. Although he had edited one anthology for Oxford – 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics (1969) – it doesn’t seem as though Geddes had any more of a pronounced nationalist agenda than many of the other editors who entered the field of Canadian literature in the years immediately following the centennial. But what Geddes did have was a connection with Oxford and a reputation as an editor. And along with his co-editor, Phyllis Bruce, he had a strong sense of the kinds of poets that could be brought together in a volume for use in the schools. Geddes and Bruce also understood that such a volume needed visual appeal. To this end, Geddes commissioned twenty-two-year-old Shelly Grimson to take pictures of the writers selected for inclusion. The result was an anthology that was strikingly contemporary, both in terms of the poets it brought together and in the way the photographs (featured on the cover) made them appear to be part of a unified group. By adding detailed biographical and critical notes at the end of the anthology, the editors had created a powerful pedagogical object at a time when few competitors existed. 15 Canadian Poets was not a collection of experimental poetry. Most of the poets it included had already established reputations in the 1960s. In this sense, it partakes in the tradition of other canonical anthologies, which tend to marginalize or tokenize experimentation. As Douglas Barbour says, ‘the major anthologies in Canada have tended to weigh in on the side of the traditional (and that they do so even to the extent of almost completely erasing the signs of more innovative poetics in the writings of those poets they choose, and of tending to include work by younger poets whose work falls within conventional lyric expectations)’ (‘Poetry Anthologies,’ 161). This kind of erasure has not stopped the success of subsequent editions of the Geddes-Bruce anthology. Barbour adds that as of 1996, the anthology ‘pretty well has the field to itself’ (163). That dominance continues. In a review of another poetry anthology in 2007, Lynn Crosbie said that new anthologies were

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needed, ‘if only to overthrow Gary Geddes’ reign of terror’ (630). By the time 15 Canadian Poets x 2 appeared in 1988, it had ‘begun to “fix” an image of twentieth-century Canadian Poetry in the minds of undergraduates across the country’ (Barbour, ‘Poetry Anthologies,’ 167), and due to its ‘massive adoption on Canadian Literature and Poetry courses’ (Barbour, ‘Poetry Anthologies,’ 173), there were many undergraduates who received this canonical fix, which was fundamentally conservative and writer-oriented. Geddes offers this explanation of his editorial interests: Another of my idiosyncrasies and limitations as an editor had to do with class and ideology. I grew up poor and disadvantaged, so I had a tendency to favour engaged writers whose work addressed issues of the marginalized and disenfranchised. I had a built-in resistance to poetry that was academic or experimental for its own sake. A sad confession to make, as it occurs to me now that what I considered a radical stance many years ago may have had more to do with the ingrained conservatism of the poor. I also found myself championing the poets, instead of the critics. I wanted to provide ammunition for the student who, like myself, had to struggle against the undue authority and privileging of critics and who preferred to spend his or her time with the primary texts rather than secondary materials. The ammunition I had in mind came from an unlikely encounter, a book called The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin, which contained essays by playwrights, painters, scientists, mathematicians, poets, sculptors, musicians and novelists. Reading this collection of jottings by creative individuals was illuminating and awe-inspiring, a visit to Aladdin’s cave of wonders. To read these ‘poetics’ was like being invited into the poet’s living-room for a chat, becoming a confidant. So the project from beginning to end was, for me, to create an intimate encounter between poets and readers and to celebrate poems that had come to mean a lot to me, and to many others. So, wherever possible, I included comments by the poets, not interpretations of their poems but tentative forays, intimate thoughts about the creative process. I believed these brief insights, admissions and asides would draw readers into the poems rather than scaring them off, though I was not oblivious to what we call the pathetic fallacy or Plato’s admonition that the poets are often the least likely to be saying something useful about the craft. (‘Confessions’)

Given the status and success of the 15 Canadian Poets editions and their impact on the Canadian poetry canon, one would think that the

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early anthologies might present some rationale for the selection process, some explanation of the canon it was in the process of forming. However, the Geddes-Bruce anthologies do just the opposite: their stark prefaces and introductions in the early editions say very little about the values informing their selections, and even less about the history and development of Canadian literature or its contemporary features. Yet these anthologies are clearly designed for teaching, even if Geddes and Bruce did not realize the extent to which they would be used in classrooms when the first edition appeared. In that edition, teaching is never mentioned. However, by 1988, 15 Canadian Poets x 2 had become a teaching anthology, with Geddes, now as sole editor, showing his willingness to respond to trends developing in the teaching of Canadian literature and to the growing interest in contemporary literary theory. In the preface to this edition, Geddes explicitly calls the book a ‘teaching anthology of twentieth-century Canadian poetry’ that responds to issues concerning ‘region, gender, and form’ (xvi [1988]). He had revamped the anthology to include more work by women, because Canadian poetry is ‘no longer dominated by men,’ and more work by poets from the prairies and west coast, because ‘Canadian poetry is no longer dominated by a single region’ (xvi). Geddes shows himself willing to open up the canon. And he also demonstrates his familiarity with the growing interest in the long poem by including material that exemplifies what he calls ‘the documentary impulse,’ often inspired by ‘the postmodern sensibility’ (xvii). In addition, Geddes proves that he is aware of post-structuralist theory. He stresses the constructedness of language (referring to Margaret Atwood’s assertion that ‘poetry is not self-expression but a making’ [xvii]). Finally, he apologizes for the obvious omissions from the anthology, for those works left out because they did not serve the anthology’s ‘teaching purposes’ (xviii). Geddes understood that between 1970 and 1988 his audience had radically changed. In the first edition, the audience is only implied: people (probably teachers and students but also a vague reading public) interested in contemporary Canadian poetry. But in 1988, the audience had become professors, and the preface sets out to reassure them that their interests will be served. The editor realizes that the proper home for the poetry canon is in the schools. The photographs of the poets are reduced to thumbnails that accompany the bio-critical notes at the end, mainly because the audience for this collection is not the students so much as their teachers. The notes bring together critique and

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image, as if picturing the poet is somehow synonymous with commenting on his or her work. The status of criticism has increased; the value of the photographs has declined. Yet no assertions are made about the nature of Canadian poetry or about its evolution. Geddes studiously avoids making those kinds of claims, mainly because he understands that his material is there to be used by teachers, and that what they like about his anthology is its open-endedness. At the same time, Geddes knows that in order to serve the needs of his audience, the anthology has to be broader in terms of its historical coverage. What started out as an anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry becomes a more historically centred anthology by 1988, with the inclusion of figures such as E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, and P.K. Page. By 2001, the anthology had expanded even further. It includes forty-five poets. The new additions are mostly younger poets, allowing the collection to be described as an anthology of poetry from the 1930s to the present. Geddes’s preface to this edition is the longest of all and takes the most explicit editorial stand concerning the relationship between anthology making and nation. Thirty years after the first edition, Geddes seems much more prepared to see the anthology as a reflection of national concerns, much more willing to approach it as a mimetic object. Writing in 2001, he recalls the conditions that led to the creation of the original edition. He was teaching a course in Canadian literature while completing his graduate work at University of Toronto. When he found that no anthology existed for use in the course, he voiced his frustration to one of his colleagues, Patricia Owen, who was married to Ivon Owen, the head of Oxford University Press in Canada. Geddes and Owen met and soon signed a contract for the anthology. Geddes was thirty years old. While the first edition of his anthology demonstrates an extraordinary editorial ability to select poets who would become curricular icons, the absence of editorial commentary suggests that in many respects Geddes was simply not ready or willing to make statements about Canada, the Canadian literary tradition, or the role his anthology might play in terms of nation. By 1988, he was prepared to see the anthology as a teaching tool that responded to contemporary theoretical, formal, regional, and political interests related to gender and ethnicity. But he was still reluctant to make definitive claims about Canada and a Canadian poetry anthology. However, with 15 Canadian Poets x 3, in 2001, he becomes much more direct about the relation between literature and nation. He laments the passing of the ‘nation-state’ and

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sees his anthology as a means of preserving some of its threatened values. To this end, he invokes George Grant’s assertion that ‘if you skip the stage of nationalism, you don’t become internationals (there are no such animals), but Americans’ (xv). Geddes argues in his preface: ‘I am more than ever convinced that Canada must preserve its cultural identity, rather than disappear within the larger US culture’ (xv). Part of preserving this culture involves ‘renegotiating land claims with our First Nations, working out a middle ground to protect and nourish the language and culture of the Québécois, struggling to achieve a balance between the provinces and the central government, and trying to adjust to the challenges of our now multicultural world’ (xv). One might logically ask what place comments such as these have in an anthology of Canadian poetry. The answer is that in the eyes of its editor, the anthology has become political. Once an innocent ‘teaching anthology,’ the act of bringing together Canadian poets is now ideologically charged and connected with some of the most pressing issues facing the country. Geddes sees the anthology as part of the process of national self-definition. He comes to embrace the nationalist ideology that inspired his predecessors who also believed that Canada’s poets are ‘traditional keepers of the word-hoard, caretakers of the dialects of the tribe’ (xv). In joining this ‘tribe,’ Geddes becomes lyrical, invoking Robert Kroetsch’s idea that ‘Canada is a poem, a dream we have forgotten, an orphanage of snow’ (xvi). He lists a number of writers who have followed this dream and suggests that their vision, encapsulated in Jan Zwicky’s central question – ‘How to Be Here?’ – is central to his own attempt to find a ‘deep ecology’ of nation through an editorial quest (xvi). Geddes becomes more nationalistic as time goes on. As an editor, he finds that his calling identifies him with many other Canadian editors whose anthologies have involved them in a similar quest. He keeps the code. It is interesting to find Geddes concluding his preface with a digression on the place of the long poem in Canada, mainly because the formal and stylistic elements of the long poem often undermine assumptions about coherence, community, and continuity. In ‘For Play and Entrance: The Canadian Long Poem,’ Kroetsch had celebrated the form as an expression of discontinuity, as an act of deferral that was fundamentally erotic, as a refusal of closure (‘the temptation to write the final book’ [105]). It is difficult to reconcile this view of the long poem with any kind of shared sense of national identity. In many respects, the long poem undermines any dream of Canadian culture. Geddes knows this.

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He struggles with a desire to accommodate the lyric and the long poem. While the long poem raises questions about history, language, and identity, the lyric ‘can be the vehicle for larger truths about all of us, about the human condition in general’ (xvii). Geddes has not abandoned his humanist assumptions. Yet he feels compelled to explain how he can include long poems, knowing that they challenge the lyric’s humanist appeal to the ‘poetic quest for a deeper and, perhaps, a larger truth’ and ‘the human condition.’ He works himself out of this conundrum by asserting that the long poem can simultaneously undermine and affirm: ‘The contemporary Canadian poem may, like the totem pole, appear at first glance to be a series of unrelated, stacked images, but turns out to be much more: a subversive talking-stick, a repository of familiar and submerged stories’ (xvii). From this perspective, contemporary Canadian poetry provides a way back to totemic truths, ‘submerged stories’ that express a national unconscious. Geddes turns the long poem into a form of totemic inquiry. The discourse of his preface turns repeatedly towards the tribal, the communal, the collective, the shared. The anthology becomes an ark in a sea of change. While Geddes sees the long poem as a way back, other editors anthologizing the long poem treat it in distinctly different terms. The prominent anthologies in this context are Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology (1979), and Sharon Thesen’s The New Long Poem Anthology (1991, revised and updated in 2001). Ondaatje avoids making overt nationalist claims; however, he still presents the long poem as a form appropriate to Canada, which is ‘not the country for the haiku’ nor ‘perfect lines about the frog or cricket or eclipse’ (11), by which he means the lyric. Rather, it is the long poem that allows us ‘to come to terms with the vastness of our place or our vast unspoken history’ (11). Implicit in this judgment is the idea that the long poem is an eminently mimetic form that reflects Canadian space. Although poets working with the long poem might employ experimental techniques and truncate conventional views of time and place, in the end ‘these poets – contemporary and experimental – in some way bring their experiments home, establishing in pencil a new bedrock of beliefs’ (17). The emphasis on the word ‘home’ indicates the extent to which Ondaatje sees the long poem in terms of a national-referential aesthetic. And, like Geddes, he maintains that, despite their involvement with experimentation, these poets are still concerned with establishing a ‘bedrock of beliefs,’ much like the long poets of Geddes’s anthology, who articulate the ‘submerged stories’ hiding in the centre of a totemic culture.

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In The New Long Poem Anthology, Thesen explicitly picks up where Ondaatje left off. She argues that ‘the long poem in Canada is often a way of handling that distrust of the “poetic” associated with the lyric voice, seen as a falseness, a colonizing wish overlaid upon the real’ (15). Like Geddes and Ondaatje, Thesen finds it difficult to abandon this belief in ‘the real’ as a force that is somehow at the bottom of things, ready to be revealed through the long poem. In these editors’ hands, the long poem becomes a paradoxical form: it works against convention, against lyric expression, against the idea of realism or historical accuracy, yet at the same time, it provides a means of accessing ‘the real,’ of finding a submerged culture, of capturing the vastness of a landscape that is distinctly Canadian. These editors find themselves drawn to an identification of the long poem that is relatively traditional in its terms of reference, even though the forms they are working with seem distinctly at odds with those terms. As Canadian anthologists, these editors are drawn to a discursive model that is fundamentally representational and nationalistic. They are faced with poems that do not fit the canonical norms, and the challenge for them as editors is to remake those poems in relation to recognizable canonical values. They have to translate experimentation in a way that makes it usable as a canonical force. The most usable canonical force is curricular. Thesen recalls that ‘when the Long-Liners’ Conference was held at York University in 1984, there was a lot of talk about trying to “get the long poem on the curriculum”’ (15). This was a problem, because the very size of long poems made it difficult for them to be accommodated in anthologies used in courses; and if they were condensed for inclusion, the abridgements undermined the original reason for inclusion: these poems were long. In any case, national literature anthologies in the 1990s tended to deal with the problem of including long poems either through truncation or by including complete long poems by very few authors, a decision that resulted in the canonization of particular works that were appropriated as teachable. Through this anthological process of selection, linked as it was to the demands of the classroom, the radical nature of the long poem was defused and finally normalized. Thesen recognizes this normalization in the second edition (2001) of her long poem anthology, in which she says that her first edition ‘has become quite well known’ and that ‘the “new” in it’ has been ‘absorbed or generalized’ (9). If the poets in that edition, published in 1991, had been ‘absorbed,’ then what was the status of the poets collected by Ondaatje in the first long poem anthology in 1979? Thesen

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refers to that collection as ‘the canonical original,’ indicating the extent to which the radicalness of that volume had been institutionalized, and thus tamed. Although Canadian writers working in the long poem form have produced some of the most innovative and challenging works of the past three decades, it is lyric poetry that mobilizes the canon, mainly because the kinds of anthologies used in Canadian literature courses cannot afford to include too many long poems, and very few courses exist that are devoted exclusively to the long poem. In a letter to me dated 4 June 2009, Sharon Thesen notes that over six hundred copies of the second edition of her anthology remain in the publisher’s warehouse. When I suggested that the lack of sales might reflect a decreasing curricular interest in long poems, Thesen responded by saying: ‘I think you’re right, that there might be diminishing curricular interest in the long poem as such; except that I think the long poem includes the category of the contemporary perhaps more than any other form. But there are so many problems attached to a long poem anthology – including excerpting from book-length poems, or really long poems or narrative poems.’ Once again, we see that the cost of anthologizing Canadian poetry has a direct impact on what gets taught, and by extension, on the ways in which students and teachers come to understand Canadian literature. The canon may be the product of editorial selection, but it is equally the product of material factors that affect what can be anthologized and how anthologized works can be effectively used in often constraining course structures that force instructors to cover a certain number of works representing a certain period, genre, or ideology within a given time frame (the semester). Also, the more specialized a course is in its focus, the more it tends to be offered to students at upper levels of study. The canon studied by a freshman is not the same canon studied by a senior. In my own experience, I have found that students tend to be attracted to courses that provide broad coverage and wary of courses that are too specific in their focus, a factor that works against the teaching of experimental works. Forty or more students routinely enrol in my undergraduate course on the development of Canadian poetry since the Second World War, while it is difficult to find fifteen upper-level students who will take a course on contemporary Canadian poetry. Similarly, it is easy to fill a class for a course called ‘Recent Canadian Short Fiction’ but much more difficult to find students interested in a course called ‘The

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Canadian Long Poem.’ (There is never any problem finding students to take a course entitled ‘Freaks, Monsters, and Misfits in Canadian Fiction,’ as I can attest.) When administrators note that enrolment in more specialized courses is weak, they encourage instructors to find topics that will appeal to a greater number of students. The instructor who is permitted to offer ‘The Canadian Long Poem’ to six students in one year (a luxury) might well find that he or she would not be permitted to offer such a low-enrolment course again. The perception of course topics and their ability to draw in crowds therefore has a great deal to do with the ways in which the literature is selected and disseminated. If this is true, then Canada – at least as it is defined by typical curricular patterns – is much more a country of lyric poetry than it is of the long poem, however one-sided that pedagogical framing might be. Just as cost factors and curricular imperatives influence the ways in which long poems are handled, so do they influence the kind of fiction that is selected to represent the canon. Since every printed page costs money, editors have to be constantly aware of the length of the material they are selecting. This makes the process of anthology selection particularly hard on authors who favour the novella. The budgetary constraints that result in space limitations take a big toll on the ways in which that genre is represented. Other national anthologies – particularly the Norton anthologies – try to deal with this issue by including one or more chapters from canonical novels. But in the eyes of the student, these excerpts assume the status of short stories; the anthologizing process tends to reconfigure longer works as shorter works by selecting a chapter to represent the whole or by truncating the original works in other ways, through excerption, condensation, or elision. The net effect on the new reader of the national canon is the sense that canonical works are more or less consistent in length, generally short, and generally not novels. The material conditions affecting selection introduce an unstated bias against longer forms by excluding or modifying length. If The Great Gatsby or Obasan can be reduced to a chapter, something has gone wrong. Material limitations don’t only affect the length of poems or fiction included in anthologies. They affect the range of poems available to editors as they make their choices. For example, Anne Carson is one of Canada’s most accomplished and famous poets, yet her current publisher charges high fees for her most recent work. That publisher, and perhaps Carson herself, has done us a disservice, for faced with these escalating permissions costs, anthologists now turn to her earlier

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work, which can be obtained at a lower cost. The result is that students are not exposed to her most recent poetry and cannot get an accurate sense of her evolution as a poet, mainly because the recent poetry is so seldom seen outside its original book publication, which few students can afford. To make matters worse, Carson frequently employs the long poem form, which to an editor only signals further hurdles to overcome. Often, an editor will not know for certain whether or not a specific author can be included until the entire process of arriving at a final table of contents has run its conflicted course, for only after a tentative table of contents is selected can the ideal table of contents be established. Even then, that ideal table of contents is subject to revision, for only when the ideal contents are established will the publisher actually attempt to determine the permissions costs. If those costs are too high, the contents will have to be modified again and again until the budget ceiling is met. So a convoluted series of editorial negotiations over selection and cost is finally modified by an overarching determination of total cost. In the midst of these negotiations, the abstract idea of literary excellence and representativeness that first mobilized the editor to work on the collection becomes even more distorted than it once was. Editors can’t help but be aware of these material restrictions. If they are not, they will be rudely awakened. For many, this awakening produces some obvious cost-saving strategies. One temptation is to seek out authors whose work is in the public domain and therefore free for anyone to reproduce, a status obtained in North America after fifty years have passed since the author’s death. Since cost is a factor in the creation of any anthology, editors are naturally drawn to material that can be obtained without charge. There is a tension between the desire to use this free material and the realization that it is frequently not the best material and is never current. Other budgetary factors often lead to the exclusion of experimental writers whose work cannot be easily reproduced within the anthology’s given design. Concrete and visual poets such as bpNichol or bill bissett often present their work in very unconventional ways: as paper fragments emerging from a box, as a series of coloured prints or paintings interlaced with printed words, as visual fragments that run across the page or that are housed in books of odd dimensions that can accommodate the visual elements. Contemporary writers such as Lisa Robertson and Erin Mouré use exaggerated fonts to create visual effects, and their writing often challenges conventional book margins. In order to pub-

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lish works of this kind, these poets found friendly publishers who were often as interested in the book as artefact as they were in the poetry those books contained. Design and content went hand in hand. But the large-scale anthology is never friendly to printing and design experimentation. Once the margins are established and the book gutters set, it becomes very expensive to run signatures of the book that defy these overall parameters, just as it becomes costly to introduce colour. Such boundary-breaking works are often made to fit the pre-established anthology mould, or the editor is forced to make selections that will fit that mould. The process robs the work of its subversive elements, or distorts them by civilizing their presence. In many cases, the work that cannot be accommodated is simply left out, so that students gain only a partial sense of the writer’s experimental methods. This is indicative of how ‘material conditions belong to the strategies of restraint that are part and parcel of anthologies as cultural instruments’ and of how those conditions turn anthologies into ‘publishing commodities and pedagogical tools’ (Kamboureli, Making a Difference, x [2007]). The business of anthologizing Canadian fiction since 1982 encounters problems similar to those involving poetry, but here the field is considerably narrower. Although there are dozens of small anthologies of fiction devoted to region, ethnicity, or gender, large-scale anthologies of Canadian fiction are few and far between. Between 1982 and 2007 the prominent anthologies of short fiction were John Metcalf’s Making It New: Contemporary Short Stories (1982), Atwood and Weaver’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986), New’s Canadian Short Fiction (1986), Ondaatje’s From Ink Lake (1990), Struthers’s The Possibilities of Story (1992), Metcalf and Struthers’s Canadian Classics (1993), Bennett and Brown’s Canadian Short Stories (2005), and Jane Urquhart’s The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007). In the two anthologies he published during this period, Metcalf continued to promote a cluster of writers with whom he had associated for many years. At the same time, he sought out new voices and encouraged younger authors. This kind of encouragement became more than anthological after Metcalf became the literary editor at the Porcupine’s Quill publishing house in 1989. Between the start of that position and his departure to assume the role of fiction editor at Biblioasis in 2005, Metcalf was responsible for bringing more than one hundred titles to print, many of them by first-time writers. Although Metcalf’s editorial and critical rhetoric is consistently anti-nationalist, and although he sees great failings in any kind of writerly activity that puts nation

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before style, texture, and form, he is one of Canadian literature’s most influential supporters and there is little doubt that his activities have been driven by the belief that there is value in Canadian culture and that he can discover and promote it. When Mavis Gallant asks him why he has devoted so much energy to anthology making, rather than to his own writing, Metcalf responds: ‘As a writer, citizen, and teacher I feel I have responsibilities to the literature. But there’s nothing particularly virtuous in all this. I’m just very much involved with this society, locked in mortal combat with the bloody place. I feel I have to attempt to shape taste, to encourage younger writers, to edit, to criticize – and anthologies are an expression of that’ (Aesthetic Underground, 138). However one decides to pronounce on Metcalf’s response to nationalism, what remains clear is his strong sense of what makes short fiction work. He tends to favour writers associated with the Montreal Storytellers group (especially Clark Blaise and Hugh Hood), or writers with whom he has co-edited projects (Leon Rooke), or those he has introduced through publication with the Porcupine’s Quill. In addition, Metcalf continually returns to the fiction of Mavis Gallant, Norman Levine, Alice Munro, and Audrey Thomas. Metcalf is a nationalist who refuses to acknowledge that fact, mainly because he believes that great art finds its roots in individuals rather than in culture. Yet for someone who supports this stance and rails against literary nationalism, it is worth remembering that Metcalf’s editorial reputation rests on his ability to identify upcoming Canadian writers and to promote explicitly Canadian writing in the dozens of anthologies he has edited. None of them are anthologies of ‘international’ writing. And even in the anthology published in 1993 – canonically entitled Canadian Classics – Metcalf implicitly endorses the assumption that there are in fact classics, and that they can be Canadian. This is a canonical value judgment grounded in literary nationalism. The ‘classic’ Canadian writers of 1993 are many of the same writers who appeared in Making It New more than a decade earlier. Both anthologies select Clark Blaise, Mavis Gallant, Hugh Hood, Norman Levine, John Metcalf, Alice Munro, and Leon Rooke. Canadian Classics adds Margaret Atwood, Audrey Thomas, and Ray Smith. Of the ten writers deemed to be ‘classic,’ four were members of the Montreal Storytellers group. In Making It New, three of the seven writers included in the anthology were part of the same group. Metcalf’s view of what constitutes anthologizable writing is highly focused on this group, and that focus does not change much between 1982 and 1993.

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In the introduction to Canadian Classics, Metcalf attempts to define the characteristics of the classic Canadian story. Such definitions are risky at best, and Metcalf is writing at a time when literary canons and the concept of literary classics have come under heavy fire. If the canon debate of the 1980s in the United States demonstrated anything, it was that canons and classics tended to reinforce the values of the people who had pronounced them. The ‘classic’ writers in Canadian Classics are all white. Yet Metcalf observes in his introduction that anthology editors ‘have until very recently been hostile to immigrant writers’ (xii). Well, here was a chance to change that. But the bottom line is that no immigrant Canadian writer in 1993 met the criteria Metcalf established in order to be included in the collection, one of the first of which was longevity of appeal. To establish this criterion is automatically to exclude precisely those newcomers whose work might well have found a place in an anthology that did not include the ‘classic’ label. But in adopting and endorsing this label, Metcalf sets up conditions of exclusion that seem contrary to his determination to support new writing. And the definitions of ‘classic’ that he offers return us to the idea of cultural elitism, for even though he argues that literary nationalism has been a negative force in the evolution of Canadian literature, he is also willing to argue that in order to appreciate the classics, ‘we only need to recognize and to appreciate our own’ (viii). This kind of statement is vaguely reminiscent of the literary boosterism we saw in anthologies of the 1930s. It seems out of place in 1993. An entirely different approach to the Canadian short story can be found in W.H. New’s Canadian Short Fiction: From Myth to Modern (1986). Unlike Metcalf’s highly selective collection, New’s anthology is designed to place the Canadian short story in its historical context and to expand that context. He begins his collection with a group of indigenous myths and tales, then moves through stories, sketches, and tales that include fiction from Thomas Chandler Haliburton to Neil Bissoondath. Because the stories are arranged chronologically by the birthdates of their authors, the temporal structure of the anthology is not linear. For example, the first selection, ‘The Raven and the First Men,’ is a Haida creation story retold by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst in 1984. It is followed by selections from Ojibway Chief Buhkwujjenene (ca 1815–1900) and an Inuit tale by Aisa Qupiqrualuk, first published in 1969. While New’s aims in creating this collection are clearly historical and intended to open the canon to Aboriginal and immigrant literature, he does include all of the ten writers deemed to be ‘classics’ by Metcalf

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seven years later. At the same time, he introduces new writers such as Andreas Schroeder, David Adams Richards, and Neil Bissoondath. The extent to which the canon of Canadian short fiction shifted after 1982 is indicated by the selections that compose a number of other influential anthologies published during this period. While some anthologists simply added new entries to the canonical line, others made more direct challenges to the established tradition of Canadian fiction. Atwood and Weaver’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986) punctuates the canonical line with the addition of such writers as Helen Weinzweig, Jane Rule, Austin Clarke, Gloria Sawai, and Bharati Mukherjee. The editors keep their separate introductions short and generally let the stories speak for themselves. Although the anthology seems unassuming, it marks an important break with the way in which Canadian fiction was represented. This break was further accentuated in the revised edition of the anthology that appeared in 1995 as The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. Although that title seems all encompassing, the accent in the revised edition was placed on modern and contemporary fiction while early stories that appeared in the first edition were dropped. This resulted in the exclusion of Isabella Valancy Crawford, Susan Frances Harrison, Charles G.D. Roberts, D.C. Scott, and Stephen Leacock. In making these cuts, and by adding new writers such as Hugh Garner, Rudy Wiebe, Carol Shields, John Metcalf, Barbara Gowdy, Rohinton Mistry, Dionne Brand, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Diane Schoemperlen, Linda Svensen, Neil Bissoondath, and Caroline Adderson, Atwood and Weaver indicated their clear desire to move away from material originating in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While New’s book challenged conventional assumptions about the short-story form by including material not typically considered ‘short fiction’ in the conventional sense, Atwood and Weaver started to let in more voices from the margin. However, they were still reluctant to embrace self-consciously experimental fiction, the kind collected in Beverley Daurio’s Love & Hunger, published by Aya Press in 1988. Daurio tried to bring together short stories on the theme of love and hunger that responded to ‘the more experimental LANGUAGE writing’ as well as to ‘Magic Realism,’ and to ‘self-referentially looking at language’ (7). If most of the names in this anthology were generally unknown, it was because Daurio went to experimental magazines such as what, Now, Impulse, and Rampike in order to find their work. In this way, she provided an important outlet for experimental writing.

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When it appeared in 1990, Michael Ondaatje’s From Ink Lake was the largest anthology of Canadian fiction ever published and represented a considerable investment for its publisher, Lester & Orpen Dennys. The anthology was released by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom and by Viking Penguin in the United States, making its audience broad and its impact considerable, especially given Ondaatje’s own international prominence. Ondaatje sometimes falls back on the mimetic assumptions that influenced his predecessors (‘We must turn to our literature for the truth about ourselves, for a more honest self-portrait’ [xiv]). But at the same time, he is trying to overcome this assumption, and he understands that one way of doing that is to break with ‘the usual Anglo-Saxon portrait of this country that gets depicted in the official histories and collections of fiction’ (xv). He points out that ‘immigrant writers have painted a different image of Canada’ (xv), which he tries to capture by including voices that have been on the periphery, among them Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Alice French, Joy Kogawa, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Rohinton Mistry, Daniel David Moses, Josef Skvorecky, Sean Virgo, and Adele Wiseman. Although the book’s subtitle is An Anthology of Canadian Short Stories, Ondaatje deliberately presents material that forces us to examine the boundaries of the genre. He calls these works ‘outriders’ that ‘give the more traditional stories a context’ and ‘help place them within a real map’ (xvi). To this end, he includes a selection from Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow, part of a memoir by Inuit writer Alice French, a speech by Chief John Kelly, and Glenn Gould’s deconstructive meditation on Petula Clark. This kind of genre bending was unseen a decade earlier. Ondaatje also includes Québécois writing in translation, reversing a trend towards exclusion that appeared in the early 1980s. In retrospect, it seems easy to condemn those anthologists who ignored the powerful writing by non-canonical authors in this period. But at the time, most of those editors were still caught up in the idea of reinforcing the literary traditions – and authors – that other anthologies had empowered, mainly because that act of empowerment seemed to lend credence to the idea of a coherent body of literature that had evolved in an identifiable historical pattern and that testified to the existence of the country. It was only after this model came under direct attack in the early 1990s that Canadian anthologies began to break down. I use this term, ‘break down,’ in a double sense. On one hand, I am referring to the need anthologists felt to include new and different material that more effectively represented the multicultural nation that

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Canada had become. But I am also referring to the ways in which this need triggered anxiety about the breakdown of the traditional canon. For if the predominantly white, English, and representational canon could no longer be innocently disseminated or presented without challenge, what would happen to the idea of nation that was traditionally associated with that canon? The breakdown of the canon signalled a challenge to the concept of nation that had preoccupied anthologists since Dewart. It represented a crisis of faith, an interrogation of identity, a new anxiety about the meaning of home. The breakdown was both textual and existential. The idealized Canada, like the idealized canon, had ceased to exist. Yet at the same time, the federal government was promoting a dream of unity that presented the country much as it had looked at the time of the centennial celebrations in 1967. The ‘Canada 125’ festivities were designed to promote the 125th anniversary of Canada’s formation as a nation. The idea originated with Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government in 1989, which announced in the Throne Speech that one of the government’s aims would be to ‘foster a confident sense of Canada’s cultural and national uniqueness in which Canadians may have a greater sense of their common values and common citizenship’ (qtd. in Mackey, 109). The Conservatives proceeded with their plans for Canada 125 even after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990 and the Oka Crisis in the same year, suggesting just how central the vision of a culturally united country was to the government in the early part of the decade. Looking back on the anthologies that appeared in the canonically liminal zone of the 1980s and early 1990s, we can see how various editors either embraced or ignored the changing nature of the canon, which was always a reflection of the changing nature of the nation. For example, Brown and Bennett’s 1982/3 anthology, with 1300 pages in two volumes, contains only one non-white author: Michael Ondaatje. David and Lecker make the same single choice in the two-volume Canadian Poetry (1982), as does Geddes in 15 Canadian Poets x 2 (1988). By 1990, when they revised their An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, Brown and Bennett added Joy Kogawa, Fred Wah, Rohinton Mistry, and Dionne Brand. With the third edition of their anthology (2002), the number had climbed to eight. It wasn’t just the representation of race that changed during this period. Anthologists included writers from different ethnic backgrounds, along with Aboriginal writers. The gradual accommodation of difference in Canadian anthologies of the 1990s and early 2000s owed a great deal to two crucial collections

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that challenged the canonical norms. These were Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie’s An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (1991, with revised editions in 1998 and 2005), and Smaro Kamboureli’s Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996, revised in 2007). Moses is a Native playwright, poet, and critic. Goldie is widely known for his Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (1989). Both editors were involved in theorizing Native literature in the late 1980s. Their 1991 anthology, the first collection of writing by Native Canadians, speaks amply about a tradition that had been virtually ignored by English-Canadian anthologists. The editors recognized that they were working without a canonical safety net, and they understood that other anthologies had promoted a culture of appropriation because, as Goldie says, ‘there is a sense that white appropriation of Native voice is trying almost to swallow Native culture and have it inside’ (xxii). Moses and Goldie did not make any claims about finding a tradition of Native literature in Canada, nor did they assert that the pieces they collected should find a place in the English-Canadian canon. They simply presented a very wide range of material by authors who had hardly ever been heard of in the context of Canadian literature or literary studies. Appearing at a time when Canadian critics were beginning to question the canon along the lines of their American counterparts, the implications of the anthology could not be ignored: Canadian anthologists had created a partial view of English-Canadian literature that had excluded Native voices. Any anthology that appeared after the publication of Moses and Goldie’s collection would have to deal with this realization. In a similar way, Smaro Kamboureli’s book made it clear that EnglishCanadian anthologists had bypassed multiculturalism at a time when the government of Canada had ostensibly embraced its values. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act was passed in 1988. It proclaimed the government’s decision ‘to recognize all Canadians as full and equal participants in Canadian society.’ By 1996, the year in which Kamboureli’s anthology appeared, 10.2 million respondents to the Canadian census identified themselves with multiple ethnic groups (Burnet). This was one-third of the country’s population. Any anthology that attempted to represent Canada and its literature would have to take account of this fact. That is what Kamboureli did in Making a Difference. This is a groundbreaking anthology that entirely redefined the twentieth-century Cana-

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dian literary tradition and, by extension, the idea of the country itself. Containing selections from seventy-one authors, Kamboureli introduces a range of new voices and mingles those with others that had already found a place in the canon, including Frederick Philip Grove, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Michael Ondaatje. However, simply by placing those established authors in a new context, those authors’ work seems transformed; it may be part of a mainstream tradition, but it also participates in a group of alternative traditions that unite them with other authors, other ethnicities, other otherness. While we may be used to seeing A.M. Klein along with A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, and Canadian modernists, it is very different to see him positioned between the poetry of Rachel Korn and George Faludy, just as it is different to find Irving Layton beside Vera Lysenko and Helen Weinzweig. The anthology forces us to rethink the modern and contemporary canon and to ask why the vast majority of these authors have been left out of most of the major anthologies covering the same period as Kamboureli’s collection. Making a Difference is a crucial anthology because it marks the end of canonical innocence. It replaces that innocence with uncertainty and doubt about the idealized constructions of Canada that informed the country’s national literary anthologies since the nineteenth century. For teachers of Canadian literature – the central keepers of the canon – it meant that the group of texts they valued was no longer the only group and that, as a result, they could no longer privilege the aesthetics and ideology associated with what had once been a white-dominated textual community. That community had been broken open in a moment of anthological anxiety. The norm was gone. Kamboureli devotes considerable attention to explaining why most of the authors in her anthology have been excluded from the EnglishCanadian canon. As she says, their work belongs to ‘the genealogy of Canadian literature,’ yet the authors come from ‘a variety of traditions that used to be kept separate from the so-called main tradition’ (1). They used to be kept separate because of ‘persistent attempts to compose a unified vision of Canadian culture against the reality and cultural understanding of many Canadians, a history that bursts its seams’ (1). Although the received tradition presents a homogeneous vision of Canadian literature and culture, the history reflected in these pages is ‘a history haunted by dissonance’ (1). As I have argued throughout this study, a governing feature of the conventional literary history – embodied in the English-Canadian canon – is an emphasis on realism and mimesis, mainly because the

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literature has always been seen as a vehicle through which authors bore witness to the country. In this context, mimetic literature was a kind of testimony; it provided evidence that the country was real. But the mirror that supported this aesthetic was turned away from many who did not fit the reflection. Kamboureli addresses this issue: ‘The questioning of representation would figure prominently as both one of my primary goals and one of my guiding principles. I believe that we reside forever within the realm of representation: we represent ourselves through language and through our bodies, but we also see ourselves represented by others. No image, no story, no anthology can represent us or others without bringing into play – serious play – differing contexts, places, or people’ (2). She is right, but those differing contexts enter the canon very slowly. Kamboureli says this canon has been changing since the late 1980s: ‘In response to the currency that multiculturalism has achieved in the political, social, and academic arenas, anthologies, critical studies, and course syllabi have gradually begun to include authors who have been traditionally excluded from mainstream representation’ (3). The problem is that by legitimizing these authors, anthologists, teachers, and critics run the risk of treating them as tokens, including a few names in a course or anthology in order to represent ‘other’ cultural groups that diverge from the mainstream, rather than as groups so accepted as part of the mainstream that their marginal status no longer needs to be mentioned. Anthologies such as Making a Difference run the risk, then, of further marginalizing precisely those authors who belong within the context of Canadian writing as a whole. As Kamboureli observes, ‘the unity of Canadian identity is a cultural myth, a myth that can be sustained only by eclipsing the identity of others’ (10). By the 1990s, she writes, the country’s ‘imaginary cohesiveness has already collapsed upon itself’ (12). In the next chapter, I consider the extent to which this collapse is captured in national literature anthologies that appeared after Kamboureli’s work.

Chapter Seven

Keeping the Code, 1996–2010

To what extent did Canadian anthologists after Kamboureli acknowledge or represent the collapse of what she calls the nation’s ‘imaginary cohesiveness’? Although there were dozens of specialized anthologies on specific themes published between 1996 and 2008, collections devoted to poetry and fiction from the entire country were scarce. Few publishers were willing to take the risk of investing in such anthologies, and the diversity of teaching interests among instructors meant it was much harder to make selections that would appeal to a broad enough cross section of teachers to guarantee sufficient sales to offset the huge cost of producing these big collections. It was equally difficult for editors to modify the representation of nation implicit in their works unless they had a substantial budget behind them; those budgets were hard to find. Turning points bring together a jumble of forces. When Kamboureli’s anthology appeared in 1996, it came at a time when literary studies and the conception of Canada were being rapidly transformed by a host of political and economic factors that had emerged in the last decade: the passing of the Canadian-American Free Trade Agreement in 1989, the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, a lengthy recession in the early 1990s that put a damper on Canadian publishing, the introduction of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, and the 1995 referendum in Quebec, to name just a few of the potent events affecting this period. Canada had become a multicultural nation that was a mixture of divergent and often conflicting interests. The idealized and unproblematized country celebrated by earlier generations of anthologists had ceased to exist. It had never existed, of course, but now anthologists could no longer ignore the blatant changes before them. Or could they?

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It is sobering to realize that between 1996 and 2010, only five national literature anthologies appeared that attempted to include both poetry and fiction from the beginnings to the present: two revised versions of Bennett and Brown (2002 and 2010), a revised version of Kamboureli (2007), my Open Country: Canadian Literature in English (2007), and Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss’s Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2009). In addition to these anthologies, collections devoted specifically to Canadian short fiction were Bennett and Brown’s Canadian Short Stories (2005) and Jane Urquhart’s The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007). Other anthologies devoted to specific periods or themes included Joan Thomas and Heidi Harms’s Turn of the Story: Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium (1999), Gary Geddes’s 15 Canadian Poets x 3 (2001), Rob McLennan’s side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (2002), Carmine Starnino’s The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005), Sina Queyras’s Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (2005), Nancy Holmes’s Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (2009), and Brian Trehearne’s Canadian Poetry, 1920–1960 (2010). When they revised the original edition of their 1982/3 anthology, Brown and Bennett were joined by Nathalie Cooke for the 1990 publication. The two volumes were reduced to one. Literary criticism was dropped. The shift in selections was characterized by a movement away from some of the modernist poets associated with Contact Press: Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster were deleted along with another modernist, Anne Wilkinson. Raymond Knister’s and W.W.E. Ross’s imagist poems are nowhere to be found. The editors also distanced themselves from writers of short fiction in Montreal, cutting Hugh Hood and omitting John Metcalf. Although the anthology appeared after a seven-year period in which some of the most prominent experimental writers emerged, little of that experimentation is reflected here. The major change is the addition of a number of women writers (Anna Jameson, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Pauline Johnson, Marjorie Pickthall, Joy Kogawa, Daphne Marlatt, Sandra Birdsell, Paulette Jiles, Lorna Crozier, and Dionne Brand). Other new additions to this edition include Timothy Findley, Mordecai Richler, Fred Wah, and Rohinton Mistry. Bennett, Brown, and Cooke are responding to feminist concerns, but the kinds of issues raised by Kamboureli in relation to the representation of multiculturalism seem marginal to their selections, at best. However, their job was to sharpen the existing canon, to add to it by including a number of writers who had previously been excluded, to maintain the basic structure of the canon as it had developed over

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the last century. As major national literature anthologists, they were keepers of the canon, keepers of the code. Brown, Bennett, and Cooke acknowledge ‘the present expressions of a more confident post-colonial self-awareness’ (xvi) yet still draw attention to the promise of mimesis, to the belief that, in Canada, writers have ‘sought a reality based in or made accessible through daily experience and have therefore made their relationship to place an important element of their writing’ (xvi). This is ‘everyday realism that responds to the need for self-definition’ (xvi). For the editors, ‘the Canadian literary tradition seems to be chiefly made up of ‘realistic’ writing, a literature that, in its tendency to focus on the events of everyday existence, has been shaped by a need for chronicling the Canadian experience and developing a sense of selfidentity’ (xv). Brown, Bennett, and Cooke recognize that Canadian writing sometimes rejects this realist model: ‘The general move away from modernism that begins around the middle of the twentieth century and gains impetus after the sixties is characterized by an emphasis on literary forms that are self-conscious and self-reflexive, and that express ironic doubt about the reality of both the self and the external world as objects of inquiry’ (xvii). However, the anthology does little to represent this shift, choosing instead to remain faithful to an overall emphasis on mimetic values and their relation to ‘Canadian experience’ and ‘selfidentity’ (xv). As the editors say, ‘the question of what constitutes reality, reconceived … is central to the creation of a national identity and literature, because the sense of what is “real” grounds any definition of self’ (xv). The link between realism, national identity, self-identity, and national literature remains firm, even if it is starting to rust. In the introduction to the first edition, Brown and Bennett devoted considerable attention to the relation between literature and ‘the Canadian literary community’ (xi) and the idea of an ‘imaginative continuum’ (xii) uniting a ‘close community of writers’ (xii). The anthology is a means of embodying this community in its writing. Through their selections, the editors provide evidence of community and continuity, keys to national stability. In the second edition, however, this idealized vision is toned down considerably. The editors recognize that new theories of language have challenged many of the assumptions behind realist aesthetics, but they want to hold on to the idea of a realistic continuum in Canadian writing: ‘It would be misleading, however, to suggest that contemporary writing in English Canada has made a radical break with older techniques and aesthetics: a wide range of work that

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has been affected by these concerns nevertheless remains continuous with the literature that has come before. And, even in this recent work, the longstanding interest in mapping out the nature of the Canadian experience and the reality of the Canadian identity often remains visible’ (xvii). This statement is deeply tautological, for the way in which contemporary writing is represented is largely a function of the editors’ selections. If that writing is marginalized in favour of literature that is involved in ‘mapping out the nature of the Canadian experience,’ then it will appear that experimental writing is not central to ‘Canadian experience’ or ‘Canadian identity.’ The simple invocation of these terms ties the editors’ discourse to the prevailing anthological tradition, which has been predominantly concerned with the national-realist literary ‘mapping’ that is essential to the construction of a story called ‘the English-Canadian literary tradition’ (xvii). However, even in the process of affirming this tradition, one central concept has been lost: community. The introduction to the second edition never mentions it. Gradually, the very underpinnings of a national literature anthology – the idea of a coherent literary community – are beginning to dissolve. Yet, if that idea disappears entirely, what then is the task of national literature anthologists, who can no longer make any valid claims about the unity of a particular collection? On behalf of whom do they speak? In relation to what kind of national consciousness? And how is the editorial act that pretends to bind them together in this transient community open to doubt? Perhaps the business of putting together a national literature anthology does a disservice to the nation by organizing its literature into patterns or themes that ultimately turn something that is plural and dissonant into something that is ordered, explicable, and safe. In 2002, Brown and Bennett (working without Nathalie Cooke) published the third edition of their anthology. The back cover copy indicates their awareness of the challenges to the canon that had appeared over the preceding decade. Brown and Bennett speak of the way in which the anthology embraces both the canon and the new voices outside it: ‘Balancing the canon as it has traditionally been presented with the broader perspectives that have emerged in recent years, it highlights the connections between various authors and their works, setting tradition and innovation in dialogue’ (1182). From this perspective, the editors become the balancers, mediators in a productive dialogue between the old and the new. The anthology is predicated on the idea

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that a Canadian canon does indeed exist, that it is a civilized meeting place, and that the way to deal with works outside it is simply to add them. It is the canon plus. Brown and Bennett argue that one way the reader may understand Canadian literature is ‘to focus on the issue of representation’ (xvi). Another way would be to understand Canadian literature in terms of a search for myth, ‘a numinous world within or beneath the quotidian one’ (xvii). They understand realism and mythopoeia as central aesthetics informing Canadian writing, but they also acknowledge here, as they did in 1990, that ‘today, many hold some version of one of these earlier views, but a pervasive wariness has arisen about the limitations of human abilities to describe, generalize, or judge with acuity; a belief in Truth has been challenged by a sense that truths must be plural and may be contingent’ (xvii). These seem to be the ‘broader perspectives’ mentioned earlier. But if it is true that contingency and pluralism are credible forces in 2002, how is it possible to put together a book that embraces the plural, the contingent, the representational, and the mythic, all under the rubric ‘English-Canadian’? The editor who attempts this task must understand him- or herself as a mediator among possible worlds rather than the packager of a specific world. This offers little comfort to the national literature anthologist, who needs to find connections that unite his or her selections in order to rationalize the existence of the anthology in the first place. Nor does it offer comfort to Canadian literature instructors, who need anthologies to teach courses linked to concepts of literary tradition, canon, community, continuity. Like other successful anthologists, Brown and Bennett could not completely reposition the canon. Had they done that, all the instructors who relied on their work would find themselves at a loss. Their ability to introduce new voices was also compromised by the inevitable space restrictions that made it impossible for them to include everyone they might have wanted. This forced them to make some hard choices. The 2002 edition of the anthology adds a number of Native writers, including Saukampee, Maria Campbell, Harry Robinson, Thomas King, and Tomson Highway. More women writers were added as well: J.G. Sime, Emily Carr, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Adele Wiseman, Carol Shields, Anne Carson, Bronwen Wallace, Jan Zwicky, Jane Urquhart, Anne Michaels, and Stephanie Bolster. Regional and ethnic representation were broadened. If one looks back to the first edition of this successful anthology, it is clear that Brown and Bennett were committed to expanding the canon

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and not afraid to exclude some heavily anthologized names (gone were William Wilfred Campbell, Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, John Newlove, and Clark Blaise). Brown and Bennett were clear about the changes they had made: ‘Some of the writers who appear for the first time in this edition of our anthology come out of new writing by individuals of Native descent; some are here as a result of the increased impact of Maritime and Western writers beyond their regions; some are shaped by the continued urbanization of Canada, some by the increased presence of immigrants who trace their descent from areas other than Europe; some have found their voice because of the acknowledgement of greater sexual diversity; and some would previously have been visible only in minority communities’ (xiii). The anthology is presented as an equalizer: it brings together minorities, ethnicities, regional affiliations, and sexual difference. Now more than ever, the country can be celebrated as a true mosaic. Brown and Bennett emphasize the celebratory nature of their enterprise: ‘Although we are acutely conscious of the serious problems now facing Canadian literary publishing and concerned about the future implications of the current inadequacy of arts funding, we can also say that there has never been a better time for Canadian literature’ (xiii). The new writers added to the anthology contribute further to the growth of the Canadian tradition, even though the idea of community and indeed the word ‘community’ itself are no longer used. Like the idealized country it celebrates, the anthology is meant to reflect diverse interests and identities, which are melded into an organically ‘flowering’ entity, a greenhouse that displays its diverse vegetation in an orderly array. In this sense, its function remains mimetic, a means of gathering together those voices who bear witness to the country. By doing so, it also civilizes them, draws them into the fold, makes them part of a vibrant tradition, and so neutralizes a central aspect of the power they once had by being out. At the same time, the editors seem reluctant to include new writing that cannot be easily positioned within the realist canon. There is little in the way of experimentation here. The canon will accommodate difference, but only up to a point. In the most recent edition of their anthology (2010), Brown and Bennett reflect on earlier anthologies, paying tribute to Watson and Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature (1922) and the way it ‘extended the canon beyond poetry’ (xiii) and A.J.M. Smith’s ‘landmark’ The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), which allowed Northrop Frye ‘to glimpse a wholeness in Canadian literature’ (xiv). Brown and Bennett note that after the

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centennial, as critical assessments of Canadian writers began to proliferate, ‘the function of anthologies’ was ‘to capture these assessments and reassessments of Canadian writing and to provide the material for critical narratives of the development of a Canadian literary tradition’ (xiv). In these words, they articulate their understanding that the responsibilities of anthologists and critics are aligned in their focus on developing and explaining tradition. Although they recognize that the canon attached to this tradition is always in flux, they seem comforted by the idea that signs of stability remain: ‘The fact that fifty-five writers who were in the first edition of this anthology reappear in this one and that forty-nine authors have been in all four versions does suggest that the Canadian canon, while changing and expanding over the last twenty-five years, now has a stable core’ (xiv). These comments are not directed towards the student users of the collection, most of whom would have little stake in the canon or in the question of whether or not it is stable. The communication here is designed to assure instructors that the fundamental contract between editor and teacher has not changed. The editors point to the ongoing stability of their choices and suggest an equation between the anthology and the country itself: although both exist in a time of change and challenges to authority, a basic core of values remains unaltered, even after close to thirty years. Their anthology becomes another ark in a sea of change, a testament to ‘wholeness,’ unity, and the permanence associated with canonical order. Brown and Bennett even reverse some of their previous decisions, restoring authors they had previously cut, including Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and John Newlove. The youngest writer in the collection is still Madeleine Thien, born in 1974. A quick glance at three alternative anthologies appearing close to the publication of the third edition of Bennett and Brown indicates the extent to which experimental, anti-mimetic, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-based poetry and fiction are bypassed in A New Anthology of Canadian Literature. None of the writers collected in Andrew Klobucar and Michael Barnholden’s Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing (1999) is included in Bennett and Brown, nor are any of the twenty-eight contributors to Rob McLennan’s side/lines (2002), even though, as McLennan says, many of these writers ‘have been appearing over the past five to fifteen years at readings and series across the country, in anthologies both big and small, working in ways that are not only interesting in themselves, but different than what we have seen with canonized poets and writers of the past’ (back cover).

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McLennan takes a direct shot at Gary Geddes when he writes that ‘by the time Gary Geddes included bpNichol, for example, in his 15x anthologies, it was hard to take the anthologies seriously. Not to mention the long exclusions of Christopher Dewdney, Steve McCaffery, and so many others. It felt in many ways a CanLit truism: the avant-garde as a phase we have to get past, before the serious work can begin’ (9). McLennan is both right and wrong. He is right to say that Geddes’s anthologies, like Brown and Bennett’s, shy away from experimental contemporary writing but wrong to believe that the task of those anthologizers was to challenge the canon in any concerted way. They were national literature anthologizers. They understood the code. Their task was to keep that code, to pass it on, to promote canon and nation, not to write with the intent to challenge the status quo. But if the promotion of the canon was the fundamental responsibility of the national anthology editors supported by big publishing companies like Oxford, the role of editors associated with the small presses was to challenge that canon and to propose alternatives, which is exactly what McLennan did. However, in the end, the publication of his alternative anthology ironically reinforces the canon by identifying conventional national literature anthologies as objects worthy of attack. Conventional national literature anthologies provide editors such as McLennan with a reason for dissent, and by so doing promote the publication of subversive anthologies that might never have seen print if the conventional model was not so omnipresent. A good example of this kind of alternative perspective can be found in Carmine Starnino’s The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005), the title of which is so misleading that one wonders if it is meant to be ironic. This is a collection of contemporary Canadian poetry by fifty Canadian writers born between 1955 and 1975, so its range is intentionally restricted. It is hard to construct a canon from such a group of new voices. The idea that such a construction could be realized simply by putting them together in a book called The New Canon underestimates the factors accounting for canon formation. A canon cannot be pronounced, no matter how enthusiastic its editor might be about the value of the material collected. Starnino’s lengthy introduction attempts to place his anthology in the same context as other books that introduced new voices (he points to A.J.M. Smith’s ‘monumental 1960 Oxford Book of Canadian Poetry’ as an example). However, Starnino’s approach is entirely different than Smith’s. Smith understood that canons advance by accretion. His

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introduction of a new figure like Leonard Cohen held value precisely because that new addition was placed at the end of a canonical line. But to truncate the line, or to pretend that it has little value, is to break the code. Starnino sees his anthology wielding a subversive influence similar to New Provinces (1936) and its ‘earliest replicas’ including Unit of Five (1943), New Wave Canada (1966), and Storm Warning (1971), among others. Yet those anthologies, which Starnino sees as participating in ‘the trend of relentless novelty-mongering’ (15) that began with New Provinces, hardly had canonical impact. As previously discussed, New Provinces received little attention when it was first published, so its impact could not have been ‘profound,’ and the influence of the other anthologies Starnino names was limited or local at best. Since he classes his own anthology with these ‘pathologically optimistic’ and ‘gatecrashing’ books, is there any reason not to believe that this collection will simply become part of the ‘novelty-mongering’ that Starnino associates with anthologies that are ultimately ‘slapdash, exclusive, narrow-minded, and divisive’ (15)? Will these be the kind of works that create an effective ‘bid for a new kind of canon,’ which Starnino says is ‘a canon not handed down from above, but offered up from within the fray’ (16)? While the self-empowering editor might like to believe that he can invent a new canon that demonstrates ‘a genuine eccentricity of outlook’ (17), he misunderstands the fundamental requirement of any canonical anthology that calls itself Canadian: it must pay homage to the real and must resolve difference and eccentricity within an idealized whole. Canonical anthologies in Canada are not about division, difference, or ‘gatecrashing.’ They are allegories of order, safe havens in the midst of a perpetual storm. One might expect the introduction to turn towards radical assertions about the contemporary poet’s ability to rename the world, but in fact the claims that Starnino makes for the poets in his book sound much like the claims made by other editors in the past. These poets, he says, suggest that ‘we also need sane ideas, durable ideas – ideas that will challenge Canadian poets to remember that there is more to poetry than being a poet, that the most vital and unpredictable part of our business is actually the creation of art’ (18). The poets he brings together have trained their eyes to ‘accurately register the texture of things’ (the mimetic ideal); they pursue ‘a more aggressive musicality, a more active cadence’ (‘cadence’ is one of Dennis Lee’s most powerful terms); they are aware of historical associations, social habits, syntactic traditions (all major concerns of the New Provinces and Other Canadians groups in

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the 1930s and 1940s); they experiment with lines that are ‘colloquially open, sprawled and pell-mell’ (22) (words that could easily describe Al Purdy’s or Robert Kroetsch’s lines). Starnino claims that his anthology follows through ‘on what Canadian poetry anthologies often promise but fail to provide – it intends to honour the aesthetic success that poets prize more than anything: the living utterance, the perfected expression of a sensibility in language’ (23). Here Starnino begins to sound like A.J.M. Smith, with his emphasis on the living ‘urgency’ of vital poetry and his calls for sensibility and intelligence. But even that word ‘sensibility’ seems rooted in an earlier aesthetic, something that might have appeared in the eighteenth century, for example. Starnino says that fresh approaches to Canadian poetry stopped with TISH and that ‘we have, effectively, restarted the clock’ (20), a statement that manages to dismiss in a single sweeping statement the originality of any Canadian poetry published between 1965 and the twenty-first century. The contradictions in Starnino’s introduction serve the purpose of underlining how slowly change actually takes place in the canon. For all his rhetoric, Starnino finds that, ultimately, he is caught in a canonical mirror. He would like to reject the idea that the canon is connected with an idealization of the country. His poets ‘see themselves less as “Canadian” than as part of a total English-language culture’ (26) (how far is this from Smith’s cosmopolitanism and his ‘universal civilizing culture of ideas’?). But at the same time, they force us ‘to retrieve a new national line’ (25) while they promote ‘a new Canadianism’ (23). They are less Canadian and more Canadian, all at once. The New Canon was published the same year as Sina Queyras’s Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. Queyras grew up in Canada but moved to the United States to teach creative writing at Rutgers University four years before her anthology was published by Persea Books in New York. There is little overlap between her collection and Starnino’s. Of the eighty poets appearing in both volumes, Starnino and Queyras agree on only seven names: Ken Babstock, Christian Bök, George Elliott Clarke, Joe Denham, Anne Simpson, Karen Solie, and Todd Swift. This means there are seventy-three names they don’t agree on, a fact that suggests the new canon may be more elusive than Starnino might wish, if consensus and canon making are related terms. One of the problems in reaching consensus stems from the term ‘contemporary.’ For Starnino it means poetry by authors born after 1955. In his anthology, then, a contemporary poet cannot be older than fifty. But

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there is a difference between ‘young’ and ‘contemporary.’ A seventyyear-old poet might be more contemporary than a poet in his or her thirties. Defining the contemporary in terms of age puts an unnatural restriction on the meaning of the term. It also forces Starnino to omit contemporary writers such as Christopher Dewdney, A.F. Moritz, Mary Dalton, and Anne Carson. Queyras has more freedom in using the term because she does not create this kind of artificial restriction. She accepts the idea of a Canadian poetry canon and explains that the purpose of her anthology is to introduce it to American readers because ‘Canadian poetry as a whole – as a canon – has not achieved wide distribution outside its country’s borders’ (xv). Perhaps because she saw this canon from a distance, while she was teaching in the United States, Queyras seems removed from the political infighting that colours Starnino’s work, which is determined to create a new canon of personal favourites, rather than building on a recognized base. Queyras’s anthology introduces a number of young writers, but it also expands the meaning of contemporary by connecting them to a historical group who had a profound influence in shaping contemporary Canadian writing, including Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Dionne Brand, Christopher Dewdney, Daphne Marlatt, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, Fred Wah, and Jan Zwicky. All of those writers are too old to be included in Starnino’s New Canon. Queyras doesn’t endorse any particular theory in explaining her selections. That task is left to the prominent poet and editor Molly Peacock, who provides a revealing foreword to the book. While Queyras’s anthology is put together from the perspective of a Canadian living in the United States, Peacock’s foreword is written from the point of view of an American who now lives in Canada. Having completed this move north, Peacock adopts, whether consciously or not, much of the anthological rhetoric and many of the anthological motifs we find in other anthologies of Canadian literature. Peacock traces her growing awareness of the distinctions between Canada and the United States back to 1991, when she started commuting between New York and London, Ontario. Years later, after exploring Canadian culture, she realized that ‘the American idea of the melting pot does not exist in Canada. There is no ethos or mythology that asks all citizens to merge. The model is the national mosaic, individual pieces living side by side’ (xiii). Peacock soon makes the traditional link between Canadian literature and identity that appears in so many Canadian anthologies: ‘The disparate poets in this volume all partake

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of the very strong notion that Canadian literature defines the Canadian identity, and this idea is shared by broadcasters and government officials, who speak of how Canadian literature creates (both among Canadians and on the world stage) powerful images of what this country is and means’ (xiii). Peacock might be a bit too idealistic when she claims that ‘legislators understand that the making of literature is the making of a national identity – they have put their money into it’ (xiii), or that Canadian poetry might even save the world (‘it carries cultural ideas that might help us all as we ride the storms of the twenty-first century’ [xiv]). This idealized perspective is not new. It simply restates the assumption shared by most editors who claim to be anthologizing the nation: Canadian literature and identity are linked, and that linkage carries within it the seeds of salvation. Canadian poets make the country recognizable – they are ‘the ears and eyes on the national face’ (xiv). They make it real. While there are many anthologies devoted to different aspects of Canadian fiction, only two twenty-first-century anthologies claim to respond to the entire field. These are Brown and Bennett’s Canadian Short Stories (2005) and Jane Urquhart’s The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007). Both of these books are highly commercial ventures, and both are published by Penguin, a sign that a big publisher still believed it could recoup its expenses by selling anthologies by editors with name recognition, and in formats that would encourage widespread sales. Brown and Bennett’s Canadian Short Stories was clearly designed for classroom use, produced as it was by Pearson Education Canada, the academic publishing division of Penguin Canada. The company’s website emphasizes the ways in which the series is designed for students: ‘We’ve created the Penguin Academics series with ease of use in mind – the books are conveniently portable and highly readable, with engaging typefaces and interior designs. Concise yet thorough in their coverage of the basics, Penguin Academics titles are ideal for use either by themselves or in combination with other books.’ At the time of the publication of Canadian Short Stories, other titles in the Penguin Academic series included four ‘pocket’ anthologies of literature, fiction, poetry, and drama. Penguin understood the material factors at play in creating an anthology designed primarily for use in courses. Oxymoronically ‘compact yet complete,’ the series announces itself as eminently student-friendly: portable, readable, engagingly designed, concise, and at the same time, ‘thorough.’ The business of anthologizing Canadian fic-

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tion becomes a matter of packaging, accessibility, and consumer appeal. It is designed for convenient consumption. In contracting Brown and Bennett to produce this anthology, Penguin had found exactly the right team. With their three previous Oxford anthologies, Brown and Bennett had shown their ability to understand the market for Canadian literature as well as the critical discourse that instructors would invest in when it came time to choose texts for their courses. This would in no way be a challenge to the canon. It was not meant to be. The anthology would be tied to Canadian identity and tradition, thereby affirming the editors’ involvement with the Canadian anthological code. The anthology is organized chronologically, beginning with Thomas Chandler Haliburton and ending with Madeleine Thien. Brown and Bennett have expanded the coverage of fiction in the 2002 edition of their Oxford anthology by adding Thomas Raddall, Sandra Birdsell, Isabel Huggan, Antanas Sileika, André Alexis, Timothy Taylor, Lisa Moore, Michael Crummey, Michael Redhill, Eden Robinson, David Bezmozgis, and Madeleine Thien. Although the anthology is intended to represent the Canadian short-story tradition, it strangely omits works by Susanna Moodie, Charles G.D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, Raymond Knister, Hugh Hood, Clark Blaise, and John Metcalf, among others. This is a truncated tradition, then, one that bypasses the literary sketches practised by Moodie, the animal-story genre embodied in the work of Roberts and Seton, Knister’s early experiments in modernism, and the Montreal short-story school of Hood, Blaise, and Metcalf. The thirty-nine stories ‘show writers responding to all of the regions of Canada, to both rural and urban settings, and to a wide variety of culture – as well as to their thirty-nine different internal landscapes’ (xv). This claim to democratic coverage that respects difference is a way of indicating how the anthology responds to an idealized concept of Canada as a country that respects various identities and regions. Yet these distinctive features are still connected to each other, and it is this connection that creates ‘tradition.’ In this context, Harry Robinson’s Okanagan tales are linked to Thomas King’s fiction through a common interest in oral storytelling. Thomas Haliburton, Michael Crummey, Lisa Moore are united because they are influenced by tall tales. Alistair MacLeod’s narrator in ‘The Closing Down of Summer’ draws on ‘a spoken art passed down from Celtic bards’ and is therefore tied to Alice Munro, whose ‘“Open Secrets” shows a current event passing from anecdote into folklore’ (2). Some of these connections seem to be stretching it a bit, to be sure,

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but the stretching is the result of Brown and Bennett’s desire to create lines of descent that show the anthologized writers to be members of a family, a more recent variation of the community they announced in the first edition of their Oxford anthology in 1982. Although the family may have differences within it, the line of influence is crucial, because without that line, tradition cannot be asserted. This is why they say that ‘as it developed, the Canadian story drew on a wide range of influences and aesthetics, yet these traits inherited from its early history have remained within our literary tradition and can still be seen shaping the stories of writers such as Margaret Laurence, Sandra Birdsell, Isabel Huggan, Bronwen Wallace, and Antanas Sileika’ (5). The family can accommodate all kinds of writers and all genres within the continuum of ‘our literary tradition,’ the collective symbol of national unity. Brown and Bennett’s suggestions for the ways in which these stories can be read further reinforce the relation between reading practices and national identity. The stories demonstrate ‘the sense of the past impinging on, even inhabiting, the present’; they suggest ‘much about how Canadians understand their relationship to history’ (7). Together, the stories also respond to ‘feelings of displacement and loss – and the questions of identity they provoke’ (7). Because ‘the Canadian story has so often responded to the experience of coming to a new land’ (7), it provides a way of dealing with the ‘emotional desolation’ (7) that immigrants feel. In other words, the Canadian short story reflects the immigrants’ experience and allows them to realize that they are not alone. The stories provide a means of delivering them from their desolation and of integrating them into a new culture. Stories organize understanding. Literary tradition plays a crucial function in this organizing process. Tradition says that Canada has history, that it has substance, that a new lineage can be found for those who have experienced the ‘heartbreak’ of coming to a new land (Brown and Bennett italicize the word). Yet the question remains, how many of these stories reflecting Canadian experience would be of use to the newcomer if so few of them presented the Canadian experiences of other immigrants who had already made the voyage? While Brown and Bennett do add a number of new voices to this collection, their anthology still identifies the Canadian short-story tradition as predominantly white and rooted in early writing that bypasses a considerable amount of immigrant fiction. In comparing the short-story writers included in the second edition of Smaro Kamboureli’s Making a Difference (2007), which was published

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just two years after Brown and Bennett’s collection, one can make a long list of those chosen by Kamboureli that Brown and Bennett (and other anthologists after them) opted to omit or ignore: Austin Clarke, Joy Kogawa, Wayson Choy, J.J. Steinfeld, H. Nigel Thomas, M.G. Vassanji, Tomson Highway, Alootook Ipellie, Sky Lee, Ven Begamudré, Yasmin Ladha, Shani Mootoo, Nice Rodriguez, Nalo Hopkinson, Ashok Mathur, Phinder Dulai, Larissa Lai, and Tamas Dobozy, to name just a few. Are these writers part of ‘the tradition’? Or is the tradition mainly reserved for the recognized names, along with some new entrants whose presence testifies to the tradition’s willingness to embrace difference? Some of the writers included in Kamboureli’s second edition are new to that volume, but even if we look at the first edition of her anthology, published in 1996, we can see that the vast majority of short-story writers included in that edition simply did not make it into Brown and Bennett’s work almost a decade later, even though many of them had continued to be productive and respected. Why did this happen? Kamboureli provides some answers. Writing a decade after the publication of the original edition, she reflects on the ways in which anthologies function as ‘cultural instruments’ that both ‘frame’ and ‘arrest’ what they represent. They can act as ‘instruments of modernization’ by ‘outing’ literature that has been repressed or marginalized; but at the same time, they are ‘normalizing instruments’ bound to dominant cultural and pedagogical values (ix). While anthologies ‘are often necessitated by the desire to delegitimate existing canonical formations’ (xi), they also enable pedagogical mediations that resolve and thus neutralize the distinctions between centre and other. The integration of minority writers into the canon does not signal a fundamental shift in that canon so much as it indicates the degree to which minority authors ‘were managed – read instrumentalized – by dominant culture’ (xiii). The successful integration of some of those authors into the canon becomes an anthological act of colonialism that reflects a broader colonialism linked to Canada’s history, ‘not as a thing of the past or as a mere spectral presence haunting Canadian literature and criticism, but as a condition that is still present in institutional and critical practices today’ (xiii). Kamboureli argues that this condition creates a literary institution that responds to ‘the trauma of its own belatedness’ (xiii). This kind of trauma may prompt anthologists, teachers, and critics to embrace otherness, but at the same time, ‘many of the ways in which this gesture is being practiced help promote the state’s cultural capital’ (xv).

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In affirming the existence and continuity of an English-Canadian literary canon, Brown and Bennett are not alone: they join other Canadian anthologists in creating what Kamboureli calls ‘normalizing instruments’ – texts that disseminate and consolidate existing values even while they act as ‘instruments of modernization’ that ostensibly question such values. In this sense, they serve a ‘disciplinary function’ (xi) by reinforcing a narrative of ‘belatedness’ that makes editors and critics anxious about the process of challenging the canon: ‘This belatedness signals at once the ideology of liberalism that permeates Canadian society and culture and the institutional limits of Canadian postcolonial practice today’ (xiv). While this kind of belatedness helps explain the English-Canadian anthologist’s historical resistance to non-canonical material, it can also be explained by considering Benedict’s conception of the ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ sides of anthology publishing. National literature anthologies are too big and too specialized to be used in high schools. From the 1960s onward, they were typically designed for use in university courses on Canadian literature. But could Kamboureli’s anthology be used in a course called ‘The Canadian Short Story’? That seems unlikely, because it rejects the conventional idea of canon and tradition that had dominated Canadian anthologies for more than a century. It could be used – and highly valued – in a course on minority literature in Canada, but few instructors would adopt it as the central text in a mainstream Canadian literature course, mainly because it intentionally bypasses the canonical norms. Instructors are accustomed to these norms and organize their courses around them. (I am not speaking here about specialized courses but about courses structured as historical and representative surveys.) These courses rely on the existence of a generally recognized canon, and the literary histories and critical works are predicated on its existence. Anthologists preparing texts for these courses can express dissent from the tradition by introducing new voices, but the main focus has to remain on the canonical line. Cultural capital is transmitted through teaching methods, course syllabi, text adoptions, professorial gender and rank, teaching salaries, research funding, graduate studies, permissions costs, publishers’ budgets, marketing and sales initiatives, cultural blogs, government policy, arts councils, international conferences, and a host of other forces. In the case of literature, the main textual vehicle for transmitting cultural capital is the teaching anthology. But these anthologies often seem lost in time. As Kamboureli points out, numerous political events

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that changed the face of Canada occurred in the decade following the first edition of her work (xii). Yet, looking at the anthologies published in the twenty-first century, one gets the impression that very little has changed, that anthologists have studiously avoided placing their collections in the context of shattering domestic and international events, as if they existed in some kind of idealized vacuum, removed from the real world they so often claim to represent through their selections. The reader of Brown and Bennett’s Canadian Short Stories or Starnino’s The New Canon would have no idea that they appeared after 9/11, or the Quebec referendum, or the Oka Crisis, to name just a few of the events detailed by Kamboureli. Instead, Canadian anthologists remained preoccupied with their particular agenda – the valorization of Canadian identity, history, and tradition. If there were disputes among anthologists, they tended to be about those issues, rather than about the larger question of how Canadian anthologies could ever be the same after these traumatic events or about how they could accommodate a shifting nation composed of multiple voices. One of the most recent examples of Canadian anthologists’ passivity in the face of change is Jane Urquhart’s The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007). The publication of this anthology drew an inordinate amount of criticism from several quarters and sparked a debate about the canon that was taken up by the popular media. Soon after its appearance, in the summer of 2008, two small literary journals – the New Quarterly (under the editorship of Kim Jernigan) and Canadian Notes and Queries (CNQ, edited by Daniel Wells) – joined forces in the creation of what they called a ‘Salon des Refusés’ issue, an alternative anthology of contemporary Canadian short fiction. Their title invokes the 1863 Paris display of avant-garde works that were rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon, as well as the idea that innovative works occupy a continuing Salons des Refusés tradition – the exhibition of distinctive works that are fundamentally anti-canonical. The joint issue presented stories by twenty writers excluded from Urquhart’s collection and included attacks on her work by Wells and CNQ’s senior editor, John Metcalf. The debate about Urquhart’s anthology centres on four issues: (1) the worthiness of the actual writers she selected or left out; (2) the way in which she presented the short story form; (3) the way in which she decided to structure the book; and (4) how she explained the importance of her collection. In his introductory essay, Wells complains that ‘many of the most tal-

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ented, most celebrated, most technically virtuosic, most wildly inventive, have not made the Penguin cut’ (3) while a number of the writers included in the anthology were not really working in the short-story form – Urquhart included memoirs, excerpts from novels, and descriptive material. Urquhart did this, Wells argues, because her training and sensibility is that of the novelist, and he suggests that she paints the short story ‘as a lesser form, the novel’s backward and weak-minded country cousin, the domain of younger writers before they move on to the serious work of novel-writing’ (3). Wells recognizes that the fundamental issue involves the Canadian canon. He asks: ‘How does a canon get formed? Why and how do editors get selected?’ (4). A rudimentary answer to these questions is that anthology editors do play a large part in canon formation. They have power. And that power is enhanced when the editor has a strong commercial or academic profile – name recognition. Urquhart certainly has that: she is the author of several successful novels and has received a stack of prestigious awards, including the Governor General’s Award for fiction. The combination of her name with the Penguin logo created an editorial project that few other publishers could match in terms of its sheer commercial potential; as well, the book is beautifully designed and authoritative looking. This kind of power creates sales. But it also has the potential to expose the forces vying for canonical control in a way that can lead to self-destruction. Metcalf was less generous than Wells. This might be expected, not only because Metcalf has always been an outspoken critic, but also because he is an experienced anthologist with his own turf to guard. He notes that in choosing Urquhart, Penguin Canada ‘chose the path of touting “celebrity”’ (‘Thinking about Penguins,’ 5), a dangerous decision that would create a negative impression of Canadian short stories around the world, simply because of the Penguin imprimatur. He calls Urquhart ‘a popular entertainer’ (7). The central argument Metcalf has against Urquhart concerns her apparent ignorance of the short-story form. He has little patience for her claim that she wanted to ‘open up’ the definition of the short story and make it ‘more interesting,’ and in the process of arriving at her selections, she became aware that ‘the Canadian short story is more than sufficiently interesting all on its own’ (5). Metcalf’s scorn is worth quoting: ‘What appalling arrogance in Urquhart (and ignorance) that she desired to “open up” and “make more interesting the definition of the short story.” What naiveté, what groping dimness about short story history and development. How revealing that she would combine stories with memoirs – not an aes-

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thetic idea in her head! Not a clue that short stories are the pinnacle of artistic form’ (5). Metcalf takes Urquhart to task for making poor selections and ignoring the work of numerous contemporary writers (many of whom he has championed through his own editorial projects). He would have ‘got rid of’ M.G. Vassanji, W.D. Valgardson, Vincent Lam, Adrienne Clarkson, Timothy Findley, Stephen Leacock, Charles G.D. Roberts, Sinclair Ross, Morley Callaghan, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Hugh Garner, Ernest Buckler, and Virgil Burnett (6–7). Yet in his own anthologies, including the eminently successful Sixteen by Twelve, Metcalf includes Callaghan and Garner, and his Kaleidoscope includes Callaghan, Garner, and Ross, so how bad could they be? Metcalf wanted Urquhart to create an anthology of contemporary Canadian fiction. However, she put together a historical anthology that brings together the earlier writers Metcalf would have jettisoned, even though he considered them legitimate at one point in his career. Also, she did not include him. While it may have been clear to the editors of the ‘Salon des Refusés’ that the writers included in their special issue all deserved a place in Urquhart’s anthology, this conclusion was not evident to other editors looking at the short-story landscape. Brown and Bennett’s anthology, which appeared just two years earlier, also missed many of the writers who seem so crucial to the contributors to CNQ. In fact, they do not include a single one of the authors whom Wells identifies as being shockingly absent from Urquhart’s book: ‘Terry Griggs. John Metcalf. Elizabeth Harvor. Douglas Glover. Mark Anthony Jarman. Diane Schoemperlen. Clark Blaise. Steven Heighton. Sharon English. Norman Levine. Cynthia Flood. Ray Smith. Patricia Robertson. Libby Creelman. Mike Barnes. Susan Kerslake. Hugh Hood. The list goes on and on’ (3). Yes, it does. Contemporary anthologists often disagree about who should be in and who should be out. So why did no one complain about the absence of these writers in Brown and Bennett? Because, unlike Urquhart, they understood the code, and were operating from a position of relative safety within the profession and the University of Toronto. They had armour. In their hands, the exclusion of these writers said something about their canonical value or lack of it. There were few complaints. But Urquhart was a public figure, easy to challenge. Yet the fact that Brown and Bennett exclude many of the writers showcased in the CNQ issue should prompt its contributors to ask why CNQ did not publish the issue three years earlier, when the Brown and Bennett anthology appeared. They might also ask themselves why, given that the first edition of Kamboureli’s anthology had appeared in 1996 with a

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revised version in 2007, none of the contributors took Urquhart to task for omitting many of the writers included in Kamboureli’s anthology. Those writers were also excluded from the ‘Salon des Refusés,’ which showed itself to be just as parochial and exclusive as the anthology it criticized for being parochial and exclusive. While some contributors to the joint issue complained that Urquhart had included her friends in the anthology, or influential people who were actually inferior writers, or authors who were teaching at the same university where she held the post of writer-in-residence, they never stopped to ask whether anthology making had ever been any different. Every anthologist can be accused of including material that probably should have been left out, simply because that material was written by a friend, or an important connection, or the cousin of the publisher. Why should it be any different in 2007? Why should Urquhart be held to a standard that has never applied in the past? Are the complaints voiced by the contributors to the ‘Salon des Refusés’ fundamentally different than the complaints voiced by those who contributed to John Sutherland’s Other Canadians in 1947? It was the ‘Salon des Refusés’ of its time. The central problem in Urquhart’s anthology is not with her selections. As my comments above indicate, anthological selections can be all over the map, especially when the material is contemporary. It is true that her definition of the short story displays an astonishing lack of insight into the form, true that her recent discovery of the beauty of the short story makes her seem predisposed towards the novel, and true that much of what she says about Canadian short stories seems off the cuff, not really the product of the kind of experience and exposure one needs in order to make authoritative selections. But again, many editors of Canadian anthologies have been in similar shoes. The mistake that Urquhart made was in not knowing the code. She was too honest. Perhaps she should not have admitted that the experience she gained in preparing the volume amounted to a mere ‘year and a half of constant reading’ (x). An editor who takes on a project of this scope runs a grave risk by admitting that she has recently discovered how ‘startlingly fresh and original’ (ix) Canadian short stories are, or that she gained her knowledge of these stories, not by reading the original collections, but by reading ‘dozens of anthologies’ (x). Her reading and absorption of those anthologies – she singles out their introductions – was a means of introducing her to the canonical values they transmit. What she neglected

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to do was to alter that canonical discourse to fit a contemporary frame. Although she stressed that the writers she was collecting were more contemporary than they were historic, the terms she uses to describe them seem pulled from some Victorian magazine. They are ‘singing in a pure voice simply because they feel there is a need for music, a need for song’ (ix). She compares her interest in these writers to ‘the canoeist (to use a Canadian metaphor) about to journey beyond the lakes and rivers she knew well and into unfamiliar waters bordered by beautiful and oddly shaped shores’ (ix). This sounds exactly like William Douw Lighthall in 1889 (‘And now, the canoes are packed, our voyageurs are waiting for us, the paddles are ready, let us start!’). It also sounds like Pierre Elliott Trudeau in ‘Exhaustion and Fulfilment: The Ascetic in a Canoe’ (1944). Trudeau wrote about the mystical nature of canoeing and its ability to join the present with the past. He said that ‘although it assumes the breaking of ties, its purpose is not to destroy the past, but to lay a foundation for the future. From now on, every living act will be built on this step, which will serve as a base long after the return of the expedition’ (3). Urquhart may not be familiar with Trudeau’s essay, but she has clearly absorbed the transcendental values he associates with the canoe metaphor, which blends mystical and spiritual questions with patriotism. Urquhart’s editorial project is framed in several contexts aligned with transcendence, patriotism, and revelation. She sees the Canadian tradition illuminated by a literary Star of David shining in the heavens over England. Canadian literature reflects ‘the light that one hundred years ago travelled like that of a star from Britain’s literary tradition to our shores [and] has hit the beveled edge of the looking glass’ (ix–x). Note that even in this mixed metaphor, the starlit tradition remains doggedly mimetic: the looking glass is always there, on earth, as it is in heaven. Urquhart decided to structure her anthology into five theme-based sections, rather than in chronological order, the conventional method. In making this choice, however, she again demonstrated her ignorance of the ways in which literature was taught and therefore how her anthology might or might not be pedagogically useful. Ever since Frank Davey attacked Margaret Atwood’s Survival in ‘Surviving the Paraphrase’ (1976), there had been a growing rejection of thematic criticism and an increasing wariness about organizing anthologies in relation to overriding themes. The approach seemed reductive. Academics understood this. There was a revolt. After Davey published his essay, the term ‘theme’ had to be used with caution. Brown and Bennett use it,

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but they are careful to leave its application open-ended for the student and teacher, and they structure their anthologies along conventional historic lines. Urquhart has entirely missed this shift; it shows in the weakness of her description of each thematic section and in how those sections distort the selections by placing them in frames they seldom seem to fit. It is an unnatural organization, one of little use in a university classroom where the emphasis is often placed on tradition and historical development. Urquhart says little about this tradition – one suspects because she does not fully understand it. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Urquhart’s book, especially insofar as this study is concerned, is the terms she uses to explain its very presence. Because she does not have the historical grounding shared by academics teaching Canadian literature, Urquhart has to rely on her own subjective response to the material, and to her reading of those dozens of anthologies, in order to explain why these works are brought together in her book. If I am correct in arguing that there is a prevailing canonical discourse that informs Canadian anthologies, and if I am also correct in arguing that this discourse conjoins nation, identity, and writing, then we should be able to find ample evidence of this conception in The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, even if Urquhart cannot explain how it got there. It is precisely because she cannot explain how the discourse got there that its appearance is so fascinating. By reading dozens of Canadian literary anthologies, she has unconsciously absorbed their prevailing anthological values and imported them into her work, even though the very terms she uses to describe those values are woefully out of date. Writing in 2007, Urquhart presents a totally unproblematized vision of a harmonious nation unified by its literature. The language she uses to convey this vision replicates the values inherent in ‘the introductions to dozens of anthologies’ she says she read in preparing her own collection (x). She is the wanderer, the explorer, the mapper of a new world called Canada. Her voyage will be a celebratory exploration of identity and multiculturalism: ‘The country in which I was born and raised spent a great deal of time and energy bemoaning its lack of identity’ (ix), but now it ‘celebrates the multiplicity of its identities’ (ix). At this point, we are somewhere in the 1990s. Familiar tropes begin to tumble out. Urquhart steps back in time. We move to the mid-1970s: ‘now we are being read and heard all over the world’ (ix). But then the time frame takes us back further as Urquhart begins to use the terms employed by anthologists in the 1940s and 1950s. The terms get convo-

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luted: ‘Canada – with its lack of official history, lack of rigidly defined identity, and with the super-consciousness of its largely uninhabited wilderness north, its vast Arctic, and its settlers (for, unless we are Aboriginal, we are still, and maybe always will be, settlers) from across the globe – is simply the perfect geography for something as fluid as the imagination’ (ix). This is the ‘perfect geography’ of the north celebrated by so many anthologists and artists. In Urquhart’s hands it becomes a symbol of the local and the universal (‘because we know now, at least in terms of literature, that here is anywhere and everywhere’ [ix]). The true north is heaven in a grain of sand. Urquhart’s introduction accepts without question that there can be such a thing as a ‘perfect geography,’ that it is possible to ‘know’ something with certainty, if only in literature (are the other arts less certain?), and that literature and these stories can help us understand ‘who we think we are’ (x). The anthologist who credits this kind of understanding necessarily sees literature as a means of deliverance, as a force that can shape consciousness and transform our very being. Canadian literature, and the anthologies that house it, can provide an epiphanic conversion experience that is sung out by the writers in these pages: ‘a singular act of revelation joins with another and then another and then another and the question of where the voice is coming from is kept alive, beautiful because it can never be fully or accurately answered’ (x). Urquhart might as well be describing a meeting of believers singing hymns in church. The way she tells it, the literary experience uniting these writers is fundamentally sacred; they join each other in a beautiful moment of song that reveals the presence of a mysterious voice calling to them from somewhere distant. We are all in this congregation together, and so are the stories. The anthology ‘allows them to live together, under one roof’ (xiv). The anthology is an ark, a church. Urquhart may have picked up this quasi-religious vocabulary from some of the early twentieth-century anthologies she consulted. She has been possessed by a spirit in the form of stories. The act of bringing them together is personally transformative, an editorial process that has affected her very being, almost as if she had been penetrated by the divine: ‘All the stories in this collection have gone into me in some way or another. I know that I either already have or will have them with me always, and that I have recalled or will recall them – either in reflective repose or during certain emotionally significant moments in my life – and that in this way they either have continued or will continue to

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provide both pleasure and comfort’ (xi). They are connected, she says, ‘to all that is miraculous’ (xiv). Urquhart pictures herself before these stories, seated ‘in reflective repose.’ She says they will remain with her ‘always.’ Eternity and transcendence reign. The stories are ‘prismatic,’ ‘gorgeous,’ and ‘endless’ (x). The pleasure she derives from these stories comes, she says, ‘from being in communion with a work of art’ (xi). The experience of reading many of these stories is also an act of confession. As Urquhart says, ‘another of my paths into the anthology would be connected to memoir, that open sharing of secrets and memories which, at least on the surface, seem to be an engagement with complete disclosure’ (xi). In figuring her own experience of the anthology as a voyage, with its editor following a path of revelation and self-discovery that is evoked by the selection process, Urquhart places herself in the context of earlier Canadian anthologists who similarly pictured their editorial acts as excursions into a wilderness, which she calls ‘the new land, the country of arrival’ (xii). For earlier anthologists, the act of collecting stories and poems was a form of mapping that would deliver them from the unknown, while their emphasis on and predilection for mimetic literature was a means of assuring themselves that the territory they were charting was real, knowable, and therefore ultimately safe. They did not welcome literature of the ‘unnamed whale,’ the kind that haunts Margaret Atwood’s ‘Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer.’ They wanted to create an inventory, to have evidence of weight and solidity, to be able to prove that the land existed, that it could be caught in a mirror. This was also an expression of their desire to frame themselves, to find a means of asserting that they were both present and real. Mimesis would do the framing; mimesis would provide the mirror (this is Urquhart’s ‘looking glass’). When she discusses the five-part structure of the anthology, Urquhart emphasizes ‘the realism of each of the stories’ and also ‘the sense’ she ‘got from their skilful rendering that this really had happened’ (xiii). Unquestioned in these words is the assumption that literature can render truth, and that the illusion of finding truth is preferable to literature that plays with the idea of reality or that challenges mimetic assumptions. Urquhart believes in a transcendent humanism rooted in representation: ‘Short stories such as these also bring us to a clearer understanding of this brief, beautiful thing called human life, of our need to see it mirrored in art, and of our desire to hold it up to the light. We want to freeze the moment of engagement, the “hand brushing

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the edge of folded silk,” in order to keep the texture – the shine of the material, the darkness of the creases, the vanished hand itself – in our minds ‘until the last rag of it fades, with the daylight’ (xv). Urquhart is overcome by the beauty of what she has collected, by the ability of the stories to stop time, preserve beauty, express immortality. They are beautiful barricades against darkness and death. The anthology supports a value system rooted in the equation between religion, literature, and citizenship that dominated English studies in Canada in the early part of the twentieth century. Urquhart’s distance from the academic institution is revealed by the ease with which she promotes this equation at a time when its very assumptions were being shredded by critics from across the country. At the Trans.Can.Lit conference held in Vancouver in June 2005, numerous participants sought to examine the relation between Canadian literature and the concept of nation, the nature of institutional practice and the canon of Canadian literature, globalization and its effects on literary study, the anxiety of Canadian literary discourse, and the ‘feigned plenitude’ of CanLit (Kamboureli and Miki, ix). A selection of conference proceedings edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki was published in 2007, the same year as Urquhart’s book appeared, but many of those proceedings had been available online for more than a year. Urquhart’s unproblematized vision of Canadian literary history, her quasi-religious evocation of an untroubled tradition, and her projection of Canada as a new-world tabula rasa awaiting discovery by contemporary voyageur-readers stands in sharp contrast to the Trans. Can.Lit narrative, which sees Canadian literature occupying a field of ‘occlusion and repression’ superimposed on a ‘troubled trajectory’ that contests the country itself (ix). In Kamboureli’s words, ‘Canada is an unimaginable community, that is, a community constituted in excess of the knowledge of itself, always transitioning’ (x). The opening essay in the Trans.Can.Lit collection, Diana Brydon’s ‘Metamorphoses of a Discipline,’ makes it clear that, in years leading up to the conference, ideas about Canadian literature, nation, citizenship, and pedagogy have moved into a state of massive flux. As Brydon says, ‘cultural and literary citizenship need to be thought together on a range of scales’ (11). But any sense of the troubled nature of literary citizenship, or the repositioning of the canon and Canadian literary studies, or the paradoxical pull between national and global identities is entirely missing from Urquhart’s book. Urquhart insists that ‘the old world does not disappear as quickly as you might think’ (2). Mean-

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while, the critics in Trans.Can.Lit are questioning the very nature of that old world and arguing that it needs to be viewed sceptically because ‘it organizes and promotes its continuance through formally institutionalized structures,’ to use Brydon’s words (5). This interrogation of those institutionalized structures is central to the work of Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss, who co-edited the twovolume Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2008). It is ironic that such a detailed and interrogative anthology could be published by the textbook arm of Penguin a year after the same company’s commercial division released Urquhart’s short-story anthology. The disjunction between the two anthologies provides further indication of the distance separating academic and trade approaches to Canadian literature. Urquhart’s book might make a nice gift – the packaging is swank – but the dubious and dated claims of its introduction would make it of little use in the classroom. In contrast, Sugars and Moss’s anthology is explicitly designed for classroom use and is the product of their joint desire to produce a new kind of anthology that would allow them to teach canonical and non-canonical Canadian literature in relation to the visual material and contextual documents that illustrate ‘shifting notions of national identity’ (vol. 1, xi). With a total page count of 1291, this anthology is just a few pages longer than my own Open Country (2007), which I deal with at this chapter’s close. On its website, the publisher describes the Sugars and Moss anthology this way: This new anthology, Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, is a comprehensive, multi-genre Canadian literature text that strives to give a broad, complete picture of the history of English-Canadian poetry, short fiction, pamphlets, nonfiction, and essays, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present. The text includes important writings by canonical and noncanonical, literary and ‘non-literary’ Canadian authors for each time period, and combines these with visual materials and contextual pieces such as political speeches, government documents, maps, photographs, paintings, newspaper articles, cartoons, autobiographical statements, songs, and popular culture texts. Introductory essays begin each chronological section, providing historical, cultural, and literary context. The works included represent a broad diversity of writers, including women and Native writers from early periods, and careful attention has been paid to finding works that make intertextual references to each other, allowing students to chart the central debates surrounding the formation of Canadian national literary and cultural traditions. (‘Canadian Literature in English’)

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Sugars’s thinking in preparing the anthology was undoubtedly influenced by her work as the editor of a wide-ranging collection of essays on post-colonialism, pedagogy, and Canadian literature entitled HomeWork (2004). Her aim there was to highlight ‘the agonistic intersection of Canadian culture and pedagogy’ (11). Similarly, Moss edited a collection of essays entitled Is Canada Postcolonial? (2003), in which she sought to situate Canadian literature ‘in the ongoing debates about culture, identity, and globalization’ and to explore the implications of ‘applying the slippery term of postcolonialism to Canadian literature’ (‘Is Canada Postcolonial?’). Both volumes of the Sugars-Moss anthology are filled with images, cross-references, and historical material that intentionally complicate Canadian literary history, showing it to be problematic, intertextual, and subject to constant redefinition. The inclusion of extensive visual material necessarily means that some of the authors one might expect to find in such an anthology have been dropped. Their absence speaks to the ways in which Sugars and Moss are attempting to redefine the canon, even as they question it. Notable absences include Marjorie Pickthall, Ethel Wilson, W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Knister, Sheila Watson, Anne Wilkinson, Raymond Souster, Robin Blaser, Phyllis Webb, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Leon Rooke, Joy Kogawa, Claire Harris, John Metcalf, bill bissett, Clark Blaise, Tim Lilburn, Erin Mouré, Lisa Robertson, and Lisa Moore. It is hard to find a strand linking these excluded writers, but given the way in which Sugars and Moss present the anthology as their ideal teaching anthology, one might surmise that they do not work with these authors in their classes on a regular enough basis to warrant inclusion. On the other hand, the omission of these authors is offset by the inclusion of a wide range of material that makes this anthology of Canadian literature look distinctly different. In conception, then, Canadian Literature in English marks a radical departure. Its theoretical underpinnings are quite up to date. But to what extent will the challenges it poses to the canon – both in terms of its form and content – be accepted by teachers of Canadian literature, the book’s primary target buyers? This is really another way of asking if a large-scale Canadian literature anthology published in 2009 can transcend the codes that have inspired other national literature anthologies published after Dewart’s 1864 collection. In order to validate such a shift, the editors need the cooperation of the professors who will decide whether or not to adopt the book. That cooperation will depend, in large part, on the extent to which those instructors are

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willing or able to abandon the national dream embedded in a more conventional and accreted Canadian literary canon. It will also depend on much more practical matters, like the way in which historic surveys of Canadian literature tend to be structured, the demands placed upon instructors by course schedules, and the technology available in particular institutions. While instructors can make changes to accommodate different texts, they are often constrained by curricular requirements that force them to cover a certain period and even by the territorial demands of their colleagues, who may claim ownership of certain existing literary-historical periods or writers and who may prove unwilling to cede that claim to ownership. This influences the books and anthologies and even the poems or stories that instructors choose to place on their course syllabi, and it affects the amount of material they are able to teach. Even more practically, instructors often think about what they teach in mathematical terms: this many weeks, this many authors to cover, this much time on each author. The instructor who has made this calculation might find it difficult to integrate the contextual material supplied by Sugars and Moss, if only because it presents him or her with an extensive range of documents that are not usually part of practical considerations about what will fit into a one-semester course. Who chooses the contexts in which literature can be placed, anyhow? Can they be chosen? Should all of those contexts be Canadian in a Canadian literature anthology? If they are all Canadian, do they contribute to what Eva Mackey calls ‘pedagogies of patriotism’ (59)? Would the Sugars and Moss selections have benefited from the inclusion of international contexts, rather than those which are strictly Canadian? After all, Canadian authors do not write in a Canadian vacuum; they are always affected by international movements and events influencing culture and the arts. As Sugars and Moss say, ‘Canadian literature has never been produced in a national vacuum. Canadian writers have been keenly informed about international literary and cultural movements for centuries’ (vol. 2, 537). Moreover, they point out that many of the issues explored by contemporary Canadian writers do not exist in strictly Canadian contexts: ‘many of these topics transcend borders and are not limited to specific territorial considerations. They are not only Canadian issues, but issues that affect people on local, national, and global levels everywhere’ (vol. 2, 518). If this is the case, then the anthology’s presentation of Canadian poetry and fiction in relation to contexts that are uniquely Canadian distorts these global connections and con-

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veys the idea that Canada exists in a contextual vacuum. In the sections on literary history that precede each of the anthology’s sections, the editors make it clear that they understand the effect of global forces on Canadian writing. But at the same time, the structure of the anthology presents a different picture. It defines Canadian literature and culture in explicitly national contexts. In this sense, it partakes in the canonical connection it claims to transcend – the idea that Canadian literature is best understood in relation to Canadian contexts. The endings of anthologies are as telling as their beginnings. Often, the last selection in an anthology provides a kind of summing up, even if the anthologist is unaware of weighting the selection this way. The last selection in Brown and Bennett’s 2002 anthology is Stephanie Bolster’s ‘Train Windows’ (2002), a moving poem about self-discovery, metaphorical travel, and the nature of perception. Geddes’s 15 Canadian Poets x 3 closes with an excerpt from Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow (1998), a multi-voiced song about tribal history, memory, and self-recovery. Sugars and Moss’s anthology ends with a beer commercial: they reproduce the ‘I Am Canadian’ advertising rant created by Molson Canada brewing company in 2000. Through the introduction of this ‘context,’ the final expression of Canadian identity in this book is what the editors call ‘a national rallying cry’ (vol. 2, 702). Sugars and Moss point out that ‘average Canadian Joe’s’ rant is aligned with other expressions of anti-Americanism and Canada’s colonial history. In the final analysis, beer and national identity merge. However, beer aside, it is still a battle cry for national identity that closes this big anthology. In this sense, and even in the context of a beer advertisement, how much have the anthological values changed? Sugars and Moss end their book with an intentionally clichéd version of what it means to be Canadian. Yet, the preoccupation with Canadian identity is still there. They may challenge the prevailing models, but ultimately, they remain concerned with the same questions about identity voiced by their predecessors. They write: ‘many of the issues that dominated the 1960s and 1970s in Canada – nationalism, feminism, First Nations self-government, Quebec sovereignty, sexual rights, civil rights, protection for Canadian culture, and historical revisionism – are still prominent today, albeit in different forms’ (vol. 2, 517). Nationalism lives on. Not surprisingly, then, their book closes with a Canadaloving cheer. Unconventional as its use of contexts might be, the book is still framed, at least by its publisher, as offering a vision of canonical plenitude, completion, and fullness attached to the idea of study-

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ing Canadian literature. Its contents are ‘comprehensive,’ ‘broad,’ and ‘complete.’ It represents a ‘broad diversity of writers.’ It explores ‘Canadian national literary and cultural traditions.’ In keeping with the values associated with this canonical copy, the cover of volume 2 displays a canonical Canadian image: Alex Colville’s Horse and Train is probably the artist’s best-known work. Significantly, the painting is an example of extreme mimesis; it is hyper-real. How much has really changed? It’s easy to take issue with any anthologist, or to suggest the ways in which his or her choices might compromise the ideals that brought them to the project in the first place. It’s not so easy to stand back and evaluate one’s own work as a Canadian anthologist. Although my Open Country (2007) was published a year earlier than the Sugars-Moss anthology, it seems appropriate to conclude this chapter with a short reflection on this work in relation to some of the ideas developed in this study, mainly because doing so allows me the luxury of retrospect. The comments that follow are necessarily subjective and partial. Open Country was published by International Thomson Nelson (now Nelson). It is a large book, at 1271 pages. Nelson had decided to undertake an anthology that would compete with Brown and Bennett’s. In order to determine what kind of anthology would best serve the needs of professors, a detailed questionnaire was sent to dozens of instructors around the country. The results were tabulated and finally shared with me after I signed on as editor of the project. What impressed me in looking at this data in 2006 was the extent to which instructors were committed to what I roughly understood to be the trajectory of the English-Canadian canon as it had been embodied in most of the largescale anthologies. There were certainly demands to add to the canon by including more representation of region, ethnicity, sexual identity, and literary experimentation. At the same time, none of the respondents suggested that any of the canonical figures be removed. The consensus was not that the canon should be rethought; instead, the consensus was that it be expanded. Given the interrogations of nation, canon, and representation that had characterized the discussion of Canadian literature for more than two decades, I was struck by the relative conservatism of the responses. I began to understand that if anthologies did in fact embody a canon, shifts in that canon would be gradual rather than sudden. At the same time, what became very clear was that the respondents valued their pedagogical freedom when it came to the material. They wanted to be able to situate the literature in relation to their own

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versions of history, to bring in their own contextual information. What they wanted most was a lot of selections presented with footnotes that would assist students, along with brief commentaries on each author. The challenge of creating this anthology was to meet that demand. This is easier said than done. What I learned in the process was that anthologies can both construct a national literary canon and distort it. As editor, I became familiar with a range of issues related to the material conditions influencing my selections – issues that usually remain invisible to the readers of anthologies in their final, published form. Yet, these material factors were crucial to the kinds of selections I made, and they also accounted for the reality that users of the anthology – mainly students and their professors – would be denied access to much of the literature that could contribute to a redefinition of canon and nation. Despite the best intentions of editors, material conditions and limitations inevitably lead to decisions that distort the canon and literary history. This may result in the creation of bold and creative anthologies, but it will in no way result in a selection that accurately represents the larger picture, which is ironic given that anthologies are usually perceived, in terms of synecdoche, as vehicles that use parts to represent the whole. Another way of saying this is to assert that national literature anthologies paradoxically become the opposite of what they are designed to be. So when we use such anthologies to introduce students to Canadian literature, we are really introducing them to a severely compromised narrative governed largely by material concerns. When I was approached to edit the anthology, I was told that it would contain 1200 pages, divided about equally between poetry and fiction. Unaware of what the actual permissions costs might be, I proceeded to make my selections based on a series of criteria I had established. But no sooner had I started on this process than the first problem appeared. One of the most prominent genres in Canadian poetry is the long poem, or serial poem. Many of Canada’s most accomplished poets have done their best work in this form, and some of these poems can run to forty pages or more. They are short books. The typical way of dealing with this problem is to use an excerpt. But then professors complain that their students don’t really see the entire landscape, and that what started out as a long poem can in fact look like a much shorter poem in its excerpted form. Ironically, the book budget has contributed to the erasure of the long poem and in doing so has denied students exposure to a crucial genre of Canadian poetry. I wanted to avoid this kind of truncation, so I pleaded with the publisher to allow me another

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two hundred pages so that I could include the full text of such poems as Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie or Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue (or many other poems too numerous to list here). The answer came back all too quickly: the budget was set, the book could not be bigger, I would have to compromise. So I chose to include complete long poems, but was forced to include fewer of them. Just as cost factors influence the ways in which long poems are handled, so do they influence the kind of fiction that is selected to represent the canon. Since every printed page costs money, editors have to be constantly aware of the length of the material they are selecting. This makes the process of anthology selection particularly hard on authors who favour the novella. (The difficulties inherent in representing novels in anthologies are explored in chapter 6.) Examples include Eden Robinson and John Metcalf. I wanted to include Robinson’s Traplines in my collection (I did), but I had forgotten that it ran close to twenty pages. If I included it, whose work would it displace? By the same token, I was drawn to Metcalf’s more recent stories, which are closer to novellas, but their length forced me back to his earlier short fiction. Other painful decisions had to be made. Take Alice Munro. Some of her finest material is quite recent, but it is also quite long. In this case, I got indignant and decided to include ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain,’ even though it rang in at a whopping twenty-seven pages – certainly a number destined to displace another worthy entry. But once I decided to include this story, which verges on a novella, how could I justify the exclusion of the slightly longer pieces by other writers? To the uninitiated reader, the canon would seem lopsided indeed. As my struggle to include recent work by Anne Carson demonstrates (see chapter 6), material limitations affect not only the length of the work an anthologist is able to represent but also the range. When I spoke with another editor about the Carson poems I hoped to use, he gave me this quick bit of advice: ‘Don’t even bother asking for the later poems. The prices are through the roof.’ So I didn’t bother, and instead looked for a much earlier short Carson poem. Of course, I could have left her out entirely, but then people would have complained that the anthology was unrepresentative. But how representative is it, now that she is in? Students are not exposed to her most recent work, and so fail to gain a clear sense of her evolution as a poet. In this case Carson made the cut, but the final selections in an anthology – even selections that are already the result of compromise – don’t always work out the way the editor planned. Whether an anthology’s

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selections are renegotiated as a result of the peer review process or overruns on permissions costs, every decision has ramifications for how the canon is represented. I wanted to create an anthology that was a little less dependent on these earlier works while emphasizing the material of younger writers who might not be that well known to the general public. I thought that wouldn’t cost me too much, since the younger writers don’t charge an arm and a leg, like Anne Carson does now. But if I included too many of those relatively inexpensive new writers, what would happen to the more established but expensive ones? Should they be pushed out? Obviously Margaret Atwood needs to be in, and so does Alice Munro, but must this be at the expense of a great young short-story writer who is just happy to have her story in the collection and who will let me use it gratis? Producing an anthology with an emphasis on contemporary writing might appeal to some users, but others will object to its taking space away from the more established writers, who are seen as crucial markers of the national canon. Up to this point, I’ve been discussing what may seem to be some of the more obvious material conditions that account for the distortion of national literary canons through the anthologizing process. Yet most discussions of anthology formation scarcely mention these material concerns, as if they were somehow secondary to the process of selection rather than inextricably linked to that process. If we examine the supply side with a bit more cynicism, it becomes clear that there are even crasser material factors at work in the creation of national literary canons, as they are exemplified by these national literature anthologies. Consider the issue of weight. I am not talking about the weightiness of ideas here. I am talking about pure physical poundage. In the peer review of my own anthology, I was made all too aware of how important weight is. My reviewers reminded the publisher repeatedly that the final anthology must not be too heavy. One said it should be designed in such a way as to fit comfortably into a backpack. And the paper should not be too thin. But it had to be acid-free and environmentally friendly. And lots of room should be left on the pages for notes. Somehow I had to fill 1200 pages, but I had to make sure that the final book weighed less than those of my competitors, which were deemed ‘too heavy.’ I needed to create the Weight Watcher’s version of a national literary canon. Perhaps we could use a thinner paper, anything to slim down the book. But I knew the idea would fall on deaf ears: certain industry-sanctioned papers would have to be used. What else could be done with this canonical waistline? Chop an inch off the overall dimensions

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of the book? That’s good for the backpack, but it reduces the margins inside, which would be bad for note takers, bad for the experimental poets who like to play with the distinction between margin and centre, and bad for the overall look of the book, which would then seem cramped. Every book encounters design limitations, but in this case, I would argue that the material appearance of one anthology – which is itself the result of mediation and compromise – transmits a different sense of the canon than another anthology that appears in a different physical form, even if the contents are identical. National literary canons truly can be perceived in terms of physical dimensions and design, and one’s response to holding that collection or stuffing it into a backpack is directly related to the kind of reception that canon will receive. The gross materiality of the product contributes to its reception just as much as the content itself. The same holds true for the nation embodied in that anthology. Will it be slim or chubby? Backpackable or not? To add to this perception of the book’s value, we could also consider such material factors as the kind of artwork selected for the anthology’s cover (my suggestions were rejected), the technology involved in printing and binding the book in a cost-efficient manner, the amount allocated to marketing and promoting the title, and so on. When I felt depressed about the monetary issues that inevitably compromised my selections, I always turned back to the selections themselves, trying to reassure myself that, in the end, a viable collection would emerge. And just when I entered the dream state of believing that my anthology would be representative and fair, I was brought back to reality by the voices of my anonymous assessors (there were seven of them), who insisted on reminding me how tainted a product I was bound to produce. Some of them applauded the poetry selections but thought the fiction choices were weak. Some liked the fiction but thought I should include more selections by Aboriginal writers. Some thought my inclusion of Aboriginal writers was just an example of political correctness. Two reviewers said my choices were far too canonical. Others disagreed. In the end, the mixture was inevitably a tortured compromise, a compromise mediated further by the host of material conditions that would remain invisible to those who might consult the book. When I began editing this anthology, my working title was Canadian Literature in English (the same title chosen by Sugars and Moss). But I had to find something else, mainly because it seemed to have little to

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do with how I felt about the country and its literature. The final title reflected what I thought was the ambivalent and unsettled nature of nation. I called it Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. I kept the introduction short, tried to make as few claims as possible, and left it up to the reader to imagine the country through the selections. That was my little leap to freedom. But as I have tried to argue here, it was a very small leap. Ultimately, the open country I wanted to create was compromised by a host of factors that contributed to my construction of a literary representation of nation. No sooner was the book published than I wanted to start again. The process of completing Open Country convinced me that the relation between anthologies and nation is never static, that the canon is always shifting, and that the most effective methods of establishing a correspondence between literature and identity remain elusive, at best. This is why I wrote: National literature anthologies are the product of extensive negotiations. Their editors wrestle with questions about how the nation is represented through its literature and about the extent to which its literary canon should be repudiated or reproduced. They are also forced to make difficult decisions about representing genre, gender, chronology, region, revision, abridgement, and the repertoire of every single author to be included in the chosen group, to name only a few of the contexts that vie with each other for anthological presence. While national literature anthologies may assert various forms of objectivity, in truth such anthologies contribute to a commodification of writing that distorts history and warps our understanding of the relation between a nation and its literature. Any anthology that pretends otherwise is caught in a canonical dream. (xxii)

Somehow, large anthologies of English-Canadian literature continue to appear; there have been a number of these in the past decade alone. The editors involved in producing these anthologies – whether their texts uphold or undermine the canon – still believe that Canada and its literature are worth investing in. They share this belief because their endeavours are mobilized by a nationalist impulse articulated by the earliest Canadian anthologists. Although some question the meaning and value of nationalism and use their anthologies to demonstrate how conceptions of nation and literature have changed, at heart they are prompted by the sense that they are dealing with a unique body of literature, and that collecting it valorizes their particular conceptions

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of nation. Canadian anthologists have always seen their task as one of bearing witness to the nation – whatever its current form. This editorial act of witnessing lies at the heart of all the anthologies I have examined here. It is almost as if the impulse to affirm the nation is genetically encoded, part of the Canadian anthologist’s DNA. More than 3000 anthologies of Canadian literature have been published since Edward Hartley Dewart asserted that ‘a national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character.’ The sheer number of anthologies indicates that the subject in question – EnglishCanadian literature – is unstable and multiple. For this reason, any editor of a national anthology who attempts to collect ‘the best’ or what is ‘representative’ or ‘original’ is self-deceived. Such terms, being relative, are largely irrelevant. Here I feel drawn to quote from the introduction to Open Country again: ‘Every anthology is nothing more or less than the narrative record of a series of intense negotiations about literary value at a given historical moment. Every national literature anthology is nothing more or less than the anxious attempt to create a selective narrative of nation, against all odds. I think of these anthologies as multi-faceted jewels on an unfinished necklace, the stories and poems changing with the light’ (xxiii). When I finished editing Open Country, I realized that my activities in putting together the volume brought me into a tradition that I knew practically nothing about. I had read many different anthologies and had used a variety of them in my classes over the years. I was aware of the controversies surrounding some of the central anthologies and had at one point begun to assemble a library of Canadian anthologies. And because I had edited other anthologies before Open Country, I had experienced many of the material limitations that inevitably frustrate anthological desire. But now, perhaps because of the scope of the Open Country project, I began to think about others who faced the same challenge, and I began to see patterns emerging in the way they talked about their books. I saw that I was part of the pattern. Their discourse focused on certain recurring ideas: personal and national identity, discovery, exploration, transformation, voyaging, locating oneself in the land. These were more than collections of Canadian literature. They were the records of their editors’ own existential attempts to come to terms with the nation whose literature they had entered. They were documents that recorded the emergence of a community of editors who shared a vision of the country as a place that was worth representing through its literature. And they under-

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stood – at least most of them did – that this vision was flawed, partial, incomplete, and that in some ways they were self-deceived. It was not a question of perfecting that vision, or of believing that such perfection could ever be found. What these editors powerfully shared was their anxiety about bringing together texts that were tied to a country in perpetual formation. The whole project of anthologizing Canadian literature, I began to realize, was not energized by the certainty of editorial selection or the transmission of canonical value but by anxiety over the whole process, by the editors’ deep-seated sense that they did not know where they were going, or where was here, despite all their assertions to the contrary. What drew me into a strange communion with this group was my own initiation into that uncertainty, my sense that I had completed this project out of a profound sense of nationalism that I did not really understand and that I thought the editorial activity might help clarify. It didn’t. But it made me realize that others had been there before, that others had invested in this literature, and that however shaky the final product, becoming involved in the uncertainty of it meant embracing a kind of beautiful flawed strength. It also made me realize that entering into this literature had been a process of self-discovery. I wanted to trace that process further, to find out more about this community I had joined, even though I understood little about its mandate and even less about how its members spoke. This study is part of my attempt to discover that community and to know its members, with all their squabbles, their idiosyncrasies, their good intentions, their failed attempts to unite the literature and to bring it home. Their anthologies tell a story. They move together in the name of a nation. Together, they keep the code.

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Works Cited

Anthologies of Canadian Literature (by date of publication) 1837 Simpson, John, ed. The Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII. Niagara: Thomas Sewell. 1864 Dewart, Edward Hartley, ed. Selections from Canadian Poets with Occasional Critical and Biographical Notes and an Introductory Essay on Canadian Poetry by Edward Hartley Dewart. Montreal: Lovell. 1871 Borthwick, J. Douglas, ed. The Harp of Canaan; or, Selections from the Best Poets on Biblical Subjects. Montreal: Desbarats. 1876 Shannon, William, ed. The Dominion Orange Harmonist. Toronto: Maclear. 1887 Seranus [Susan Frances Harrison], ed. The Canadian Birthday Book with Poetical Selections for Everyday in the Year from Canadian Writers, English and French. Toronto: Robinson. 1889 Lighthall, William Douw, ed. Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada. London: Walter Scott. 1891 Denison, George T., ed. Raise the Flag and Other Patriotic Canadian Songs and Poems. Toronto: Rose. 1892 Lighthall, William Douw, ed. Canadian Songs and Poems: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada. London: Walter Scott. 1893 Ross, George W., ed. Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises. Toronto: Warwick & Rutter. 1893 Wetherell, J.E., ed. Later Canadian Poems. Toronto: Copp Clark. 1894 Lighthall, William Douw, ed. Canadian Poems and Lays: Selections of Native Verse Reflecting the Seasons, Legends and Life of the Dominion. Toronto: Musson. 1900 Rand, Theodore H., ed. A Treasury of Canadian Verse. Toronto: Ryerson. 1909 Hardy, E.A., ed. Selections from the Canadian Poets. Toronto: Morang.

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1913 Gribble, Wilfred, ed. Rhymes of Revolt. Vancouver: Clarion. 1913 Campbell, William Wilfred, ed. The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1916 Garvin, John, ed. Canadian Poets. Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart. 1916 Holman, Carrie Ellen, ed. In the Day of Battle: Poems of the Great War. Toronto: William Briggs. 1918 Garvin, John, ed. Canadian Poems of the Great War. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1922 Watson, Albert Durrant, and Lorne Pierce, eds. Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse. Toronto: Ryerson. 1923 Broadus, Edmund Kemper, and Eleanor Hammond Broadus, eds. A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse. Toronto: Macmillan. 1926 Garvin, John, ed. Canadian Poets. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1926 Stephen, A.M., ed. The Voice of Canada: Canadian Prose and Poetry for Schools. London and Toronto: Dent. 1928 Knister, Raymond, ed. Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Macmillan. 1928 Stephen, A.M., ed. The Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse. Toronto: Dent. 1930 Benson, Nathaniel A., ed. Modern Canadian Poetry. Ottawa: Graphic. 1934 Broadus, Edmund Kemper, and Eleanor Hammond Broadus, eds. A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse. 2nd ed. Toronto: Macmillan. 1934 Carman, Bliss, Lorne Pierce, and V.B. Rhodenizer, eds. Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Ryerson. 1935 Carman, Bliss, and Lorne Pierce, eds. Our Canadian Literature: Representative Verse, English and French. Toronto: Ryerson. 1936 New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors. Toronto: Macmillan. 1938 Becker, May Lamberton. Golden Tales of Canada. New York: Dodd, Mead. 1938 Creighton, Alan, and Hilda M. Ridley, eds. A New Canadian Anthology. Toronto: Crucible. 1938 Bennett, Ethel Hume, ed. New Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918–1938. Toronto: Macmillan. 1942 King, Amabel, ed. Voices of Victory: Representative Poetry of Canada in WarTime. Toronto: Macmillan. 1942 Gustafson, Ralph, ed. Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. 1943 Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1944 Gustafson, Ralph, ed. Canadian Accent: A Collection of Stories and Poems by Contemporary Writers from Canada. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. 1944 Hambleton, Ronald, ed. Unit of Five: Louis Dudek, Ronald Hambleton, P.K. Page, Raymond Souster, and James Wreford. Toronto: Ryerson.

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1946 Robins, John D., ed. A Pocketful of Canada. Toronto: Collins. 1947 Pacey, Desmond, ed. A Book of Canadian Stories. Toronto: Ryerson. 1947 Sutherland, John, ed. Other Canadians: An Anthology of New Poetry in Canada, 1940–1946. Montreal: First Statement. 1948 Percival, W.P., ed. Leading Canadian Poets. Toronto: Ryerson. 1948 Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1952 Dudek, Louis, and Irving Layton, eds. Canadian Poems, 1850–1952. Toronto: Contact. 1952 Dudek, Louis, Irving Layton, and Raymond Souster. Cerberus: Poems. Toronto: Contact. 1952 Weaver, Robert, and Helen James, eds. Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1953 Birney, Earle, ed. Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry: An Anthology with Introduction and Notes by Earle Birney. Toronto: Ryerson. 1954 Carman, Bliss, Lorne Pierce, and V.B. Rhodenizer, eds. Canadian Poetry in English. Rev. ed. Toronto: Ryerson. 1955 Klinck, C.F., and R.E. Watters, eds. Canadian Anthology. Toronto: Gage. 1956 Souster, Raymond, ed. Poets 56: Ten Younger English-Canadians. Toronto: Contact. 1957 Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology. 3rd ed. Toronto: Gage. 1958 Gustafson, Ralph, ed. The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. 1960 Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English and French. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1960 Weaver, Robert, ed. Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1961 Mandel, Eli, and Jean-Guy Pilon, eds. Poetry 62. Toronto: Ryerson. 1962 Pacey, Desmond, ed. A Book of Canadian Stories. 4th ed. Toronto: Ryerson. 1963 Godbout, Jacques, and John Robert Colombo, eds. Poésie/Poetry 64. Montreal: Editions du Jour; Toronto: Ryerson, 1963. 1965 Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Book of Canadian Prose: Early Beginnings to Confederation. Vol. 1. Toronto: Gage. 1966 Klinck, Carl F., and R.E. Watters, eds. Canadian Anthology. 2nd ed. Toronto: Gage. 1966 Rimanelli, Giose, and Roberto Ruberto, eds. Modern Canadian Stories. Toronto: Ryerson. 1966 Souster, Raymond, ed. New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry. Toronto: Contact. 1967 Farmiloe, Dorothy, Len Gasparini, and Eugene McNamara, eds. 21 x 3:

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1967 1967 1967 1967 1968 1968 1968 1969 1969 1969 1970 1970

1970 1970 1970 1970 1971 1971 1971

Works Cited Poems by Dorothy Farmiloe, Len Gasparini, and Eugene McNamara. Windsor, ON: Gryphon. Green, H. Gordon, and Guy Sylvestre, eds. A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne. Toronto: Ryerson; Montreal: HMH. Gustafson, Ralph, ed. The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Mantz, Douglas K., ed. Four Perspectives: Poems by John Ramsden and Others. Whitby, ON: Carlyle. Smith, A.J.M., ed. Modern Canadian Verse in English and French. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Purdy, Al, ed. The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S. Edmonton: Hurtig. Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Weaver, Robert, ed. Canadian Short Stories. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Fetherling, George, ed. Thumbprints: An Anthology of Hitchhiking Poems. Toronto: Peter Martin. Geddes, Gary, ed. 20th Century Poetry & Poetics. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Purdy, Al, ed. Fifteen Winds: A Selection of Modern Canadian Poems. Toronto: Ryerson. Cogswell, Fred, ed. One Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec. Fredericton: Fiddlehead. Colombo, John Robert, ed. How Do I Love Thee: Sixty Poets of Canada (and Quebec) Select and Introduce Their Favourite Poems from Their Own Work. Edmonton: Hurtig. Geddes, Gary, and Phyllis Bruce, eds. 15 Canadian Poets. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Mandel, Eli, ed. Five Modern Canadian Poets. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Metcalf, John, ed. Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by Canadian Writers. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Yates, J. Michael, ed. Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia. Vancouver: Sono Nis. Helwig, David, and Tom Marshall, eds. Fourteen Stories High. Ottawa: Oberon. Houtman, H., ed. Six Days: An Anthology of Canadian Christian Poetry. Toronto: Wedge. Keon, Wayne, ed. Sweetgrass: An Anthology of Indian Poetry. Elliot Lake, ON: W.O.K.

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1971 Lewis, Richard, ed. I Breathe a New Song: Poems of the Eskimo. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1971 Livesay, Dorothy, ed. 40 Women Poets of Canada. Montreal: Ingluvin. 1971 Purdy, Al, ed. Storm Warning: The New Canadian Poets. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1971 Sutherland, Fraser, and Terrance MacCormack, eds. Northern Journey. Ottawa: Ampersand. 1972 Heibert, Gerry, et al., eds. Around You: An Anthology of Southern Albertans’ Literature. Lethbridge, AB: Paramount. 1972 Mandel, Eli, ed. Eight More Canadian Poets. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1972 Mandel, Eli, ed. Poets of Contemporary Canada, 1960–1970. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1972 Metcalf, John, ed. Kaleidoscope: Canadian Stories. Toronto: Van Nostrand. 1972 Metcalf, John, ed. The Narrative Voice: Stories and Reflections by Canadian Authors. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. 1973 Denham, Paul, ed. The Evolution of Canadian Literature in English: 1945–1970. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1973 Gill, Elaine, ed. Mountain Moving Day: Poems by Women. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing. 1973 Haynes, Camille, ed. Black Chat: An Anthology of Black Poets. Montreal: Black and Third World Students’ Association, Dawson College. 1973 Heath, Caroline, ed. An Anthology of Poetry by Saskatoon Poets. Saskatoon, SK: Craft Litho. 1973 Mickleburg, Brita, ed. Canadian Literature: Two Centuries in Prose. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1973 Shute, Allan, ed. 39 Below: The Anthology of Greater Edmonton Poetry. Edmonton: Tree Frog. 1973 Weaver, Robert, and William Toye, eds. The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1973 Cameron, Donald, ed. Voices Down East: A Collection of New Canadian Writing from the Atlantic Provinces. Halifax: Fourth Estate. 1974 Cockburn, Robert, ed. Ninety Seasons: Modern Poems from the Maritimes. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1974 Cogswell, Fred, ed. A Second Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec. Fredericton: Fiddlehead. 1974 De Fehr, William, et al., eds. Harvest: Anthology of Mennonite Writing in Canada, 1874–1974. Winnipeg: Centennial Committee of the Mennonite Historical Society of Manitoba. 1974 Garnet, Eldon, ed. w)here? the other Canadian poetry. Erin, ON: Porcépic.

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1974 Klinck, C.F., and R.E. Watters, eds. Canadian Anthology. 3rd ed. Toronto: Gage. 1974 McLay, Catherine M., ed. Canadian Literature: The Beginnings to the Twentieth Century. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1974 Miska, John P., ed. The Sound of Time: Anthology of Canadian-Hungarian Authors. Lethbridge, AB: Canadian-Hungarian Authors’ Association. 1975 Geddes, Gary, ed. Skookum Wawa: Writings of the Canadian Northwest. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1975 Hargreaves, H.A., ed. North by 2000: A Collection of Canadian Science Fiction. Toronto: Peter Martin. 1975 Leyland, Winston, ed. Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology. San Francisco: Panjandrum. 1975 Stevens, John, ed. The Urban Experience. Toronto: Macmillan. 1976 Davis, N. Brian, ed. The Poetry of the Canadian People, 1720–1920: Two Hundred Years of Hard Work. Toronto: NC Press. 1976 Fraser, Raymond, Clyde Rose, and Jim Stewart, eds. East of Canada: An Atlantic Anthology. Portugal Cove, NL: Breakwater Books. 1976 Hesse, M.G., ed. Women in Canadian Literature. Ottawa: Borealis. 1976 Stories from Pangnirtung. Edmonton: Hurtig. 1976 New Provinces. Reprinted with an introduction by Michael Gnarowski and the inclusion of ‘A Rejected Preface’ by A.J.M. Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1976 Purdy, Al, ed. Storm Warning 2: The New Canadian Poets. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1976 Ricou, Laurence, ed. Twelve Prairie Poets. Ottawa: Oberon. 1976 Rose, Clyde, ed. Baffles of Wind and Tide: A Selection of Newfoundland Writings. Portugal Cove, NL: Breakwater Books. 1976 Words from Inside ’76: An Annual Publication of the Prison Arts Foundation. Brantford, ON: Prison Arts Foundation. 1977 Gatenby, Greg, ed. Whale Sound: An Anthology of Poems about Whales and Dolphins. Toronto: Douglas. 1978 Metcalf, John, and Clark Blaise, eds. 78: Best Canadian Stories. Ottawa: Oberon. 1977 Newlove, John, ed. Canadian Poetry: The Modern Era. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1978 Colombo, John Robert, ed. The Poets of Canada. Edmonton: Hurtig. 1978 Daymond, Douglas, and Leslie Monkman, eds. Literature in Canada. 2 vols. Toronto: Gage. 1978 Geddes, Gary, and Phyllis Bruce, eds. 15 Canadian Poets Plus 5. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Works Cited

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1978 Owen, Ivon, and Morris Wolfe, eds. The Best Modern Canadian Short Stories. Edmonton: Hurtig. 1979 Inalienable Rice: A Chinese and Japanese Canadian Anthology. Vancouver: Powell Street Revue, Chinese Canadian Writers Workshop. 1979 Fowler, Adrian, and Al Pittman, eds. Thirty-One Newfoundland Poets. St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books. 1979 Ondaatje, Michael, ed. The Long Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House. 1979 Phillips, Donna, ed. Voices of Discord: Canadian Short Stories from the 1930s. Toronto: New Hogtown. 1980 Bowering, George, ed. Fiction of Contemporary Canada. Toronto: Coach House. 1980 Gedalof, Robin, ed. Paper Stays Put: A Collection of Inuit Writing. Edmonton: Hurtig. 1980 Metcalf, John, ed. First Impressions. Ottawa: Oberon. 1981 Bell, John, and Lesley Choyce, eds. Visions from the Edge: An Anthology of Atlantic Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Porters Lake, NS: Pottersfield. 1981 Metcalf, John, ed. Second Impressions. Ottawa: Oberon. 1981 Weaver, Robert, and William Toye, eds. The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1982 Atwood, Margaret, ed. The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1982/3 Brown, Russell, and Donna Bennett, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. 2 vols. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1982 David, Jack, and Robert Lecker, eds. Canadian Poetry. 2 vols. Toronto: General and ECW. 1982 Grady, Wayne, ed. The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories. Markham, ON: Penguin. 1982 Metcalf, John, ed. Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stories. Toronto: Methuen. 1984 Bowering, George, ed. The Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House. 1984 Norris, Ken, ed. Canadian Poetry Now: 20 Poets of the ’80’s. Toronto: Anansi. 1985 Lee, Dennis, ed. The New Canadian Poets, 1970–1985. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1986 Atwood, Margaret, and Robert Weaver, eds. The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1986 New, W.H., ed. Canadian Short Fiction: From Myth to Modern. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall.

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Works Cited

1987 Balan, Jars, and Yuri Klynovy, eds. Yarmarok: Ukrainian Writing in Canada since the Second World War. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. 1988 Daurio, Beverley, ed. Love & Hunger: An Anthology of New Fiction. Toronto: Aya. 1988 Geddes, Gary, ed. 15 Canadian Poets x 2. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1988 Lecker, Robert, and Jack David, eds. The New Canadian Anthology: Poetry and Short Fiction in English. Scarborough, ON: Nelson Canada. 1989 Rostom, Kamal A., ed. Arab-Canadian Writing: Stories, Memoirs, and Reminiscences. Fredericton: York. 1990 Brown, Russell, Donna Bennett, and Nathalie Cooke, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1990 Ondaatje, Michael, ed. From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories Selected by Michael Ondaatje. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys. 1991 Moses, Daniel David, and Terry Goldie, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1991 Thesen, Sharon, ed. The New Long Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House. 1993 Harris, Michael, ed. The Signal Anthology: Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Montreal: Véhicule Press. 1993 Metcalf, John, and J.R. Struthers, eds. How Stories Mean. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill. 1993 Metcalf, John, and J.R. Struthers, eds. Canadian Classics: An Anthology of Short Stories. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. 1995 Atwood, Margaret, and Robert Weaver, eds. The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1996 Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1998 Moses, Daniel David, and Terry Goldie, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1999 Klobucar, Andrew, and Michael Barnholden, eds. Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing. Vancouver: New Star Books. 1999 Sullivan, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1999 Thomas, Joan, and Heidi Harms, eds. Turn of the Story: Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium. Toronto: Anansi. 2001 Geddes, Gary, ed. 15 Canadian Poets x 3. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

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2001 Thesen, Sharon, ed. The New Long Poem Anthology. 2nd ed. Vancouver: Talonbooks. 2002 Bennett, Donna, and Russell Brown, eds. A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 2002 McLennan, Rob, ed. side/lines: a new Canadian poetics. Toronto: Insomniac Press. 2005 Bennett, Donna, and Russell Brown, eds. Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Pearson Longman. 2005 Moses, Daniel David, and Terry Goldie, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. 3rd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 2005 Queyras, Sina, ed. Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. New York: Persea Books. 2005 Starnino, Carmine, ed. The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. Montreal: Signal Editions. 2007 Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 2007 Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Thomson Nelson. 2007 Urquhart, Jane, ed. The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Penguin Canada. 2009 Holmes, Nancy, ed. Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 2009 Sugars, Cynthia, and Laura Moss, eds. Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Toronto: Pearson Longman. 2010 Bennett, Donna, and Russell Brown, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. 3rd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 2010 Trehearne, Brian, ed. Canadian Poetry, 1920–1960. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

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– Robert Norwood. Makers of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Ryerson, 1923. Watt, Frank W. ‘Climate of Unrest: Periodicals in the Twenties and Thirties.’ Canadian Literature 12 (1962): 15–27. – ‘Radicalism in English Canadian Literature since Confederation.’ PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1957. Weaver, Robert. ‘John Sutherland and Northern Review.’ Tamarack Review 2 (1957): 65–9. Reprinted in Dudek and Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, 80–3. Weir, Lorraine. ‘The Discourse of “Civility”: Strategies of Containment in Literary Histories of English Canadian Literature.’ In Problems of Literary Reception/Problèmes de réception littéraire, edited by E.D. Blodgett and A.G. Purdy, 24–39. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, 1988. Wells, Daniel. ‘Tweaking the Beak.’ Canadian Notes and Queries 74 (2008): 3–4. Wenman, Robert. ‘Canada Council.’ Hansard. 2 December 1977, 1487–98. Westfall, William. Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Wetherell, J.E. Papers. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Whalley, George, ed. Writing in Canada: Proceedings of the Canadian Writers’ Conference, Queen’s University, 28–31 July 1955. Toronto: Macmillan, 1956. Whiteman, Bruce, ed. The Letters of John Sutherland, 1942–1956. Toronto: ECW, 1992. Whitridge, Margaret. ‘The Distaff Side of the Confederation Group: Women’s Contribution to Early Nationalist Canadian Literature.’ Atlantis 4 (1978): 30–9. Wilson, Milton. ‘Other Canadians and After.’ In Masks of Poetry: Canadian Critics on Canadian Verse, edited by A.J.M Smith, 123–38. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962. Wilson, W.R. ‘Francis Bond Head, Part 1.’ Historical Narratives of Early Canada. http://www.uppercanadahistory.ca/tt/tt2.html. Wilt, Judith. Review of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot, by Leah Price. Nineteenth-Century Literature 56.3 (2001): 411–14. Wise, Sydney Francis. ‘Head, Sir Francis Bond.’ In Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, edited by John English and Réal Belanger. Toronto: University of Toronto; Quebec: Laval University; Ottawa: Library and Archives Canada. Wright, Donald. ‘W. D. Lighthall and David Ross McCord: Antimodernism and English-Canadian Imperialism, 1880s–1918.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 32.2 (1997): 134–53.

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Credits

We wish to thank the following individuals and publishers for permission to use the material indicated. We have not been able to determine the copyright status of all the works in this volume, and welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments. CANADA (A CENTENNIAL SONG). Words and Music by BOBBY GIMBY. © 1967 (Renewed) GORDON V. THOMPSON MUSIC (SOCAN). All Rights Administered by WB MUSIC CORP. Exclusive Print Rights Administered by ALFRED MUSIC PUBLISHING CO., INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC PUBLISHING CO., INC. Chaudiere Books granted permission to reprint “By the Church Wall,” by John Newlove, from A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2007). © 2007 Chaudiere Books. Jean-Guy Pilon, “Je murmure le nom de mon pays,” Comme eau retenue, Typo, 1991. © 1991 Éditions Typo et Jean-Guy Pilon. The Estate of Audrey Alexandra Brown granted permission to reprint “A Dryad in Nanaimo,” by Audrey Alexandra Brown, from New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (1936). The four lines from F.R. Scott’s “Overture” have been reprinted with the permission of William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F.R. Scott.

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Index

Ackerman, Rudolph, 26 Adams, Helen Maude, 156–7 Adderson, Caroline, 299 advertisements, 161, 333 age, 56, 63, 77, 90, 119, 120, 121, 125, 130, 133, 139, 141, 169, 205, 207, 240, 244, 315 Alexander, W.J., 87 Alexis, André, 317 Allen, Donald, 205, 206 Allen, Richard, 102 Alline, Henry, 75 Almey, Kerrigan, 239 Altieri, Charles, 7 Anderson, Patrick, 175, 183 Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology (Leyland), 216 annuals, 23, 26–8, 58. See also gift books Anson, Peter, 224 anthologies: alternative, 204, 252, 279, 284; as arks, 291, 327; and Canadian literature, 25, 39, 58, 64, 185; as commodities, 6, 219, 223, 249, 252–3, 267, 319; as conversion experience, 10, 12, 21; and course packs, 20; in libraries, 220–2; as long poems, 171; materiality of, 6,

27, 40, 61, 121, 252, 274, 293, 294–6, 316–17, 330, 334–7; as narratives, 156, 201, 218; nonCanadian studies of, 7; rate of production of, 215, 252, 284; regional or theme-based, 216–17, 275–6, 283; in relation to American literature, 26, 28, 93, 121, 144, 170, 171, 200, 239; and representativeness, 13, 76, 83, 89–90, 102, 115, 126, 260, 275, 309, 340; teaching with, 8–9, 16, 37, 59–60, 65–7, 70, 72–3, 75, 110, 122–3, 124, 185, 191, 200, 233, 239, 244, 247, 251, 255, 258, 267–8, 270, 274, 278–80, 286– 8, 311, 316, 320, 330–2, 334; and undermining of national identity, 8, 230, 232; as weapons, 218, 225. See also annuals; birthday books; gift books; religion and religiosity anthologists: as archetypal wanderers, 20, 232, 245, 270–1, 326, 328; debates among, 112, 147–9, 160, 176, 177, 179, 182–4, 311, 322–3; and their conflicted positions, 167, 171, 180, 228, 232; as conquerors, 201; as defenders, 238; as explor-

370

Index

ers, 219, 227, 241, 245, 257; of the late nineteenth century, 70; as mediators, 308–9; as storytellers, 11; as tour guides, 261; as traitors, 171 Anthology (Weaver): 192–4; as broadcast only, 208 Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, An (Bennett and Brown and, in 1990, Cooke) 17, 254, 258, 267–7, 284, 301, 306, 307–11 Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, An (Moses and Goldie), 18, 285, 302 Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English) (Gustafson), 13, 14, 157–63 Anthology of Poetry by Saskatoon Poets, An (Heath), 216 anthropogeography, 116 anti-canonical aesthetics or aims, 17, 18, 93, 157, 204, 206, 218, 224, 227, 244, 245, 251, 267, 278, 279, 298, 299, 312–3, 321. See also canonization antimodernism. See modernism anxiety, 3, 4, 8 apologies, 3 Applebaum-Hébert Report, The, 215, 258 Arab-Canadian Writing: Stories, Memoirs, and Reminiscences (Rostom), 216–17 Arnold, Matthew, 13, 47–8, 87, 99, 100, 282 Around You: An Anthology of Southern Albertans’ Literature (Heibert), 216 Atwood, Margaret, 244, 254, 272, 288, 297, 315, 325, 337; on Canadian literary history, 193–4; and mythopoeia, 211–12; The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in

English, 16, 215, 258, 264–6, 276; and nordicity, 235; The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, 299; and survival/Survival, 116, 182, 221, 234, 236, 240–3 Avison, Margaret, 190 Babstock, Ken, 314 Baffles of Wind and Tide: A Selection of Newfoundland Writings (Rose), 216 Bailey, Jacob, 205 Baker, Ray Palmer, 109 Baldick, Chris, 99 Baldwin, Robert, 22 Ballstadt, Carl, 32 Barbour, Douglas, 224, 255, 286 Barnholden, Michael, 311 Bathurst, J.K., 91, 92 Beattie, Munro, 92 Becker, May Lamberton, 134 Begamudré, Ven, 319 Belaney, Archibald (pseud. Grey Owl), 111, 270–1 Belford, Ken, 239 Benedict, Barbara M., 6, 7 Bennett, Donna, 17, 223, 254, 258, 267–77, 284, 301, 306, 307–11, 316–18, 320 Bennett, Ethel Hume, 154 Bennett, R.B., 136 Benson, Eugene, 164 Benson, Nathaniel, 136–9, 140 Bentley, D.M.R., 62, 65, 77, 79, 139 Berger, Carl, 44, 45, 59, 60, 82, 108 Berton, Pierre, 235 Best Canadian Stories (Metcalf), 223, 248 Best Modern Canadian Short Stories (Owen and Wolfe), 262 Bezmozgis, David, 317 bibliographies, 16

Index binaries, 14, 144, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174, 178, 179–80, 187, 232, 264 Birdsell, Sandra, 306, 317, 318 Birney, Earle, 160, 161, 187, 193, 202, 209 birthday books, 37–9 Bissell, Claude, 93, 193 bissett, bill, 222, 239, 258, 280, 295 Bissoondath, Neil, 298, 299 Black Chat: An Anthology of Black Poets (Haynes), 216 Blair, Lyle, 193 Blaise, Clark, 275, 297, 310, 317, 323 Blake, Edward, 103 Blaser, Robin, 280 Blewett, Jean, 75 Blodgett, E.D., 39, 53, 262 Bök, Christian, 314 Bolster, Stephanie, 309, 333 Book of Canadian Poetry, The (Smith), 14, 57, 143, 144, 147, 158, 165, 166–77, 180, 181, 182, 188, 189, 199, 204, 243, 254, 309 Book of Canadian Prose, The (Smith), 181 Book of Canadian Prose and Verse, A (Broadus and Broadus), 13, 117, 139, 151 Book of Canadian Stories, A (Pacey), 15, 190, 197, 263 Borden, Robert Laird, 76, 103, 117 Borson, Roo, 264, 275 Borthwick, J. Douglas, 36–7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6 Bowering, George, 206, 210, 211, 212, 224, 244, 247, 262, 279–80, 315 Bowman, Louise Morey, 120 Boxer, Avi, 204 Brand, Dionne, 299, 300–1, 306, 315 Brewster, Elizabeth, 190

371

Bringhurst, Robert, 275, 298 Broadus, Edmund Kemper, 13–14, 104, 110, 111–18, 121, 122, 124, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 156 Broadus, Eleanor Hammond, 13–14, 110, 111–18, 121, 122, 124, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 156 Brooke, Frances, 202 Brown, Alan, 162 Brown, Audrey Alexandra, 141, 151 Brown, E.K., 184 Brown, Russell, 17, 254, 258, 267– 77, 284, 301, 306, 307–11, 316–18, 320 Bruce, Phyllis, 224, 254–5, 284–6, 288 Brydon, Diana, 329–30 Buckler, Ernest, 323 Buhkwujjenene, Chief, 298 Burke, Anne, 129 Burnett, Virgil, 323 Call, Frank Oliver, 93, 113, 120, 162 Callaghan, Morley, 111, 129, 132, 133, 134, 141, 192, 193, 210, 247, 323 Cameron, Barry, 282 Campbell, Maria, 309 Campbell, Sandra, 79, 105 Campbell, William Wilfred, 52, 56, 62, 63, 64, 73, 75, 76, 140, 144, 159 Canada Council, 16, 194, 196, 198, 204, 217, 222, 250 Canada First: A Mare Usque ad Edmonton (Anson), 216, 224 Canadian Accent: A Collection of Stories and Poems by Contemporary Writers from Canada (Gustafson), 164 Canadian Anthology (Klinck and Watters), 15, 200, 201, 202, 204–6, 268 Canadian Authors Association, 41, 71, 95, 108, 122, 149, 226, 240

372

Index

Canadian Birthday Book, The (Harrison), 37, 38 Canadian Classics (Metcalf and Struthers), 296, 297–8 Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII (Simpson), 12, 21, 22, 26, 28, 69, 101 Canadian literature: beginnings of, 24, 28, 40, 86; boom years of 193–6, 199, 220, 221–3; branding of, 249–50, 252; diversity of, 223, 224–6, 233, 281, 284, 302–4, 310, 319; early dominance of poetry in, 68; as field of study, 16, 65, 276; as myth and related to myth, 19, 225, 233, 234, 272; recognition and reputation of, 63, 64, 183, 256, 315; teaching of, 9–10, 16, 37, 65, 70, 109, 110, 123, 197, 198, 199, 204, 217, 218, 222, 223, 236, 276, 278, 293–4 Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (Sugars and Moss), 306, 330–4 Canadian Literature: The Beginnings to the Twentieth Century (McLay), 260 Canadian Literature: Two Centuries in Prose (Mickleburgh), 241–2 Canadian Poems, 1850–1952 (Dudek and Layton), 195 Canadian Poems of the Great War (Garvin), 91 Canadian Poetry (Lecker and David), 276–7, 284, 301 Canadian Poetry, 1920–1960 (Trehearne), 306 Canadian Poetry in English (Carman, Pierce, and Rhodenizer), 139, 188 Canadian Poetry Now: 20 Poets of the ’80’s (Norris), 280

Canadian Poetry: The Modern Era (Newlove), 224 Canadian Poets (Garvin), 73, 91, 118, 120, 121, 263 Canadian Short Fiction: From Myth to Modern (New), 285, 296, 298–9 Canadian Short Stories (Bennett and Brown), 296, 306, 316–18 Canadian Short Stories (Knister), 14, 15, 128, 133, 190, 193 Canadian Short Stories (Weaver and James), 192–3, 208, 254, 255, 260 Canadian Songs and Poems: Voices from the Forests [...] (Lighthall), 40 Canadian Stories (Pacey), 193 Canadian Writing Today (Richler), 260 canoeing, 53, 57, 325 canons, 5, 6–7, 17, 121, 135, 139, 228, 232, 249–53, 267, 268, 274, 278, 280, 286, 293, 300, 308–9, 312–13, 320, 324–6, 333–4; breakdown of, 300–3; and British literature, 117; and libraries, 221–2; and the lyric, 291, 293; and major/minor distinctions, 199–201, 274, 286, 307; and merit (‘the best’), 3, 4, 64, 86, 163, 191, 228, 244, 340; and the nation, 20, 69, 225, 244; and normalization, 258, 285, 292–3, 302, 310, 319–20; and novels, 294; opening of, 278, 280, 288, 298, 303; of poetry, 38, 56, 125, 166; and political change, 143; of prose fiction, 74, 247, 296; and regionalism, 251, 275–6, 281; in religious contexts, 10, 226; slow changes in, 20, 278, 304, 314; of women, 163. See also anthologies; anti-canonical aesthetics Cappon, James, 76

Index Carman, Bliss, 38, 56, 57, 90, 118, 125, 126, 140, 160, 202, 310, 311; Canadian Poetry in English, 188–9; and canoeing, 53; and Confederation poets, 62–3, 75–6, 181; and FrenchCanadian literature, 226; Our Canadian Literature, 139–40, 163; and the twentieth century, 75–6, 181 Carr, Emily, 309 Carsley, Sara E., 154 Carson, Anne, 294–5, 309, 315, 336–7 Cavell, Janice, 196 centennial, the, 16, 208, 213, 214, 215, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 235. See also Confederation; patriation of the constitution Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne, A (Green and Sylvestre), 16, 223, 226–32, 259–60 Cerberus (Dudek, Layton, and Souster), 187, 195 Choy, Wayson, 319 Clark, Harry Hayden, 200, 202 Clark, Penney, 66 Clarke, Austin, 299, 300, 319 Clarke, George Elliott, 314 Clarkson, Adrienne, 323 Cohen, Leonard, 205, 244 Coleman, Victor, 212, 280, 313 collaboration, 128, 146–7, 277 Colman, Mary Elizabeth, 154 Colombo, John Robert, 211, 212, 260–2 colonialism, 15, 26, 40, 56, 83, 117, 167, 171, 177, 178, 184. See also imperialism Compton, Anne, 181 Confederation, 67, 107, 139, 161, 228; after, 35, 41, 44, 47, 51, 58,

373

68, 73, 85, 214, 229; before, 12, 25, 31–2, 34, 58, 69, 73, 85, 272. See also centennial; patriation of the constitution Confederation poets, 34, 62, 63, 69, 140, 162, 180–2. See also Confederation conference on literature: the 1955 Kingston, 194, 197–8; the 1963 Vancouver, 206; the 1978 Calgary, 250–1, 267; the 2005 Trans.Can.Lit., 20, 328 Connor, Frank, 76 Connor, Ralph (Charles Gordon), 104, 125 conservatism, 5, 16, 17, 22–3, 28, 32, 112, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 142, 155, 164, 165, 178, 188, 189, 201, 205, 207, 222, 233, 258, 285, 287, 334 Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology, The (Bowering), 279–80 Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia (Yates), 251 Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Mandel), 224 Cook, Ramsay, 79 Cooke, Nathalie, 306, 307 copyright, 12, 27, 30, 35, 58, 61, 110, 126, 253. See also imperialism; permission Corinth, H., 96 cosmopolitan: and Britain, 57; and colonialism, 179, 189; and native, 14, 15, 81, 144, 167–72, 187, 230, 250, 251; and Pacey, 192; and Smith, 57, 81, 144, 167–72, 176–81, 187, 232, 254, 314; and Sutherland, 176–81; and the United States, 57, 170–1; and Watson, 78, 81.

374

Index

Coulborn, A.P.R., 120 Crawford, Isabella Valancy, 37, 52, 53, 56, 57, 65, 75, 80, 140, 161, 203, 336 Creighton, Alan, 139, 154, 155, 156, 157 Crosbie, Lynn, 286–7 Crozier, Lorna, 306 Crummey, Michael, 317 Curzon, Sarah Anne, 43, 49 Daniells, Roy, 57, 107 Daurio, Beverley, 299 Davey, Frank, 18, 206, 211, 212, 234, 251, 258, 263, 273, 275, 283–4 David, Jack, 276, 284, 301 Davies, Gwendolyn, 33 Davies, Robertson, 207 Davis, Brian, 252 Davis, Scott, 212 Dawson, David, 206, 212 Day, Frank Parker, 141 Daymond, Douglas, 258, 260, 268 Day of Battle: Poems of the Great War, In the (Holman), 94–5 Deacon, William Arthur, 160 Denham, Joe, 314 Denham, Paul, 241, 242, 257, 258 Denison, George Taylor, 59–60, 69 Denison, Merrill, 129, 132 Dettmar, Kevin, 253 Dewart, Edward Hartley, 5, 12, 19, 21, 29–34, 36, 37, 46, 47, 69, 80, 84, 123, 126, 163, 164, 166, 218, 225, 243, 263 Dewdney, Christopher, 258, 280, 312, 315 Dickinson, C.H., 105 Di Leo, Jeffrey R., 5 Dobbs, Kildare, 193 Dobozy, Tamas, 319

Dominion Orange Harmonist, The (Shannon), 36 Donnell, David, 275 Doren, Mark van, 162 Dragland, Stan, 134 Drummond, William Henry, 37, 140 Dudek, Louis, 163, 164, 172, 175, 176, 183, 184, 187, 193, 194, 204 Dufferin, Lord (Frederick HamiltonTemple-Blackwood), 76, 103 Dulai, Phinder, 319 Duncan, Norman, 76, 104 Duncan, Sara Jeannette, 65, 306 Dunlop, William, 205 East of Canada: An Atlantic Anthology (Fraser, Rose, and Stewart) 252 Eayrs, Hugh, 110, 111, 129, 136, 145, 154 Edel, Leon, 120, 121, 143 Edgar, James David, 91, 92 Egerton, Helen M., 91, 92 Eight More Canadian Poets (Mandel), 219 Eleven Canadian Novelists (Gibson), 219 Eliot, T.S., 93, 148, 152, 175, 178, 189 Endicott, Norman, 193 Everson, R.G., 120, 195 Evolution of Canadian Literature in English, The (Denham), 241, 257, 258 experimentation, 112, 113, 119, 192, 193, 205, 206, 221, 234, 293, 295–6, 312; and alternative criticism, 15, 190, 217; antipathy towards, 93, 112, 114, 117, 188, 207, 258, 286; in the canon, 334; and free verse, 94, 113; and funding of, 222; and the long poem, 291; and major/minor distinctions, 201; and modernism,

Index 155; and nationalism, 258, 292, 308; and poetry, 211; profitability of, 190, 222, 295; and prose fiction, 299; and realism, 4–5, 9, 94, 194, 195, 310, 311; and representativeness, 90; and scarcity of publishing venues, 192 ,194, 208, 217; and small magazines and presses, 208, 211, 224, 299; and social order, 96, 222 External Affairs, 196–7 Faludy, George, 303 Faulkner, R.A., 159 Fawcett, Brian, 280 Faxon, Frederick Winthrop, 27 Fee, Margery, 4, 31, 78, 108, 146, 164, 173, 196, 240 feminist theory, 6 Ferguson, John J., 91, 92 Ferne, Doris, 154 Fetherling, Doug, 239 Fiamengo, Marya, 204 Fiction of Contemporary Canada (Bowering), 224, 262 Fidelis. See Machar, Agnes Maule 15 Canadian Poets (Geddes and Bruce), 224, 254, 255, 285, 286 15 Canadian Poets Plus 5 (Geddes and Bruce), 260, 285 15 Canadian Poets x 2 (Geddes), 224, 284, 285, 287, 288, 301, 312 15 Canadian Poets x 3 (Geddes), 284, 285, 289, 306, 312, 333 Fifteen Winds (Purdy), 238 Finch, Robert, 143, 148–52, 154, 156–7, 163, 182, 202 Findley, Timothy, 306, 323, 331 First Impressions (Metcalf), 248 Five Modern Canadian Poets (Mandel), 219

375

40 Women Poets of Canada (Livesay), 219, 252 Fournier, William, 204 Four Perspectives (Mantz), 219 Fourteen Stories High (Helwig and Marshall), 219 Francis, Wynne, 175, 176 Fraser, Dana, 239 Fraser, Raymond, 252 Frazer, James George, 189 Fréchette, Louis, 85 free verse, 94, 112, 113, 114, 119, 120, 124, 137. See also modernism French, Alice, 300 French, Donald G., 37, 40–1, 46, 54, 73, 109 French-Canadian literature: antimodernism of, 42–3, 51; assimilation into English-Canadian anthologies, 85; and A Century of Canadian Literature/Un siècle de littérature canadienne, 226–32, 259; and English-Canadian literature, 16, 38, 260–4, 268; first anthology of, 58; and the French-English divide, 226, 256–7, 260–4; and nationalism, 103; in translation, 85, 113, 300 Friskney, Janet, 72, 223 From Ink Lake: An Anthology of Canadian Short Stories (Ondaatje), 285, 296, 300 Frye, Northrop, 14; on Anthology, 193; and Arnoldian tradition, 100; building on the native-cosmopolitan binary, 178; and the garrison mentality, 116, 241; and Literary History of Canada, 174, 207, 221, 236, 243, 250; and mythopoeia, 206; and nordicity, 182, 236; and post-war writers, 275; and the

376

Index

question of being ‘here,’ 266, 272; and realism, 250–1; reviewing The Book of Canadian Poetry, 172–5, 310; and thematic criticism, 221 Fulford, Robert, 236 Fulton, Ellen, 154 Gadpaille, Michelle, 134 Gallant, Mavis, 208, 275, 297 Gallichan, Gilles, 25 Garner, Hugh, 193, 247, 299, 323 Garnet, Eldon, 224, 252 Garvie, Peter, 193 Garvin, John W., 74, 122, 124, 129, 144, 148, 159; boosterism of, 112, 118, 126; and Canadian Poems of the Great War, 91, 94; and Canadian Poets, 73, 76, 91–2, 263; and the First World War, 73; on free verse, 119, 120; influence of, 91, 126, 149, 156; and the Master-Works of Canadian Authors series, 121; selections by, 120, 149, 163; and theosophy, 118–19 Gates, Henry Louis, 7 Geddes, Gary, 224, 254–5, 260, 275, 284, 285–91, 301, 306, 312 Gerson, Carole, 33, 68, 163, 185, 186, 223 Gervais, C.H., 239 Gibson, John, 30 gift books, 26–7 Gilbert, Gerry, 212 Gill, E. Lakshmi, 212 Gimby, Bobby, 214, 215, 225 Glickman, Susan, 46 globalization, 17, 18, 230, 232, 283, 329 Gnarowski, Michael, 143, 163, 164, 172, 175, 184

Godbout, Jacques, 211, 212 Godfrey, Dave, 258 Golden Tales of Canada (Becker), 134 Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse, The (Stephen), 122, 124, 125, 127, 163 Goldie, Terry, 18, 285, 302 Golding, Alan C., 26, 93 Goldsmith, Oliver, 75, 140, 180 Golfman, Noreen, 153 Gould, Glenn, 235, 300 Governor General’s Awards, 197 Gowdy, Barbara, 299 Grace, Sherrill, 235 Grady, Wayne, 260, 262–3 Grant, George Monro, 59, 103, 290 Great Depression, 14, 128, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 148, 193 Green, H. Gordon, 16, 223, 226–32, 259 Grey Owl. See Belaney, Archibald Gribble, Wilfred, 97 Group of Seven, the, 77, 95, 109, 113, 129 Grove, Frederick Philip, 111, 125, 141, 192, 210, 303 Guillory, John, 7 Gustafson, Ralph, 13, 157–64, 204, 235, 236 Hadow, G.E., 74 Hadow, W.H., 74 Hainsworth, Norman, 138 Hale, Katherine, 89 Halfe, Louise Bernice, 333 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 76, 104, 202, 298, 317 Hallberg, Robert von, 6 Halpern, Howard, 239 Hambleton, Ronald, 160, 161, 193 Hardy, E.A., 72–3

Index Harms, Heidi, 306 Harp of Canaan; or, Selections from the Best Poets on Biblical Subjects, The (Borthwick), 36 Harris, Lawren, 77, 113, 185 Harris, Michael, 284 Harrison, Susan Frances (pseud. Seranus), 34, 37–9, 51, 65, 69 Harvest: Anthology of Mennonite Writing in Canada (De Fehr), 216 Hawkins, William, 212 Hayman, Robert, 264 Head, Francis Bond, 22–3, 28, 69 Heavysege, Charles, 34, 37, 75 Hémon, Louis, 85, 111 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 93, 120 Henderson, Anna, 154 Herk, Aritha van, 271 Hesse, M.G., 252 Highway, Tomson, 309, 319 Hine, Daryl, 204 historiography, 6 Hodgins, Jack, 258 Hogg, Robert, 212 Holman, Carrie Ellen, 94 Holmes, James, 33 Hood, Hugh, 208, 247, 297 Hooke, Hilda Mary, 91, 92 Hopkinson, Nalo, 319 How Do I Love Thee (Colombo), 260 Howe, Joseph, 76, 117 How Stories Mean (Metcalf and Struthers), 285 Hudson, W.H., 74 Huggan, Isabel, 317, 318 Hurtig, Mel, 237 Hutchison, Bruce, 169, 205 I Breathe a New Song: Poems of the Eskimo (Lewis), 216

377

Imperial Conference, 125–6 imperialism, 13, 58, 71, 81–2, 180; and Britain, 22–3, 24–5, 30, 42–5, 48–50, 59, 60, 61, 67–9, 107, 108, 115–16, 125–6; and the United States, 81, 171, 236–7. See also colonialism; copyright; Imperial Conference; nationalism; Quebec Conference Inalienable Rice: A Chinese and Japanese Canadian Anthology, 217 Ingersoll, Will E., 132 Ipellie, Alootook, 319 Irvine, Dean, 155, 196 Irving, Crawford, 114 Jackson, A.Y., 109 Jameson, Anna, 104, 306 Jasen, Patricia, 47, 48, 98, 100 Jiles, Paulette, 306 Johnson, E. Pauline, 38, 53, 56, 62, 65, 140, 306 Jonas, George, 212 Jones, D.G., 195, 204, 205 journals. See magazines Kaleidoscope (Metcalf), 247, 248, 323 Kamboureli, Smaro, 18, 20, 216, 218, 285, 302–4, 305, 306, 318–21, 329 Katzmann, M.J., 49 Kearns, Lionel, 212 Keefer, Janice Kulyk, 299 Keith, Marian, 76, 104 Keith, W.J., 146, 153 Keitner, Wendy, 163 Kelly, Chief John, 300 Kennedy, Leo, 120, 129, 134, 140, 141, 143, 145, 148, 152, 154, 157, 163 Kertzer, J.M., 31 King, Amabel, 184

378

Index

King, Basil, 76 King, Mackenzie, 108, 117, 136 King, Thomas, 309, 317 Kinsella, W.P., 258 Kirby, William, 61, 76 Kittler, Friedrich A., 7 Klein, A.M., 143, 148, 152, 153, 160, 163, 202, 303 Klinck, Carl F., 15, 198, 199–208, 224, 268 Klobucar, Andrew, 311 Knister, Raymond, 125, 158, 160, 163, 193, 306, 317, 331; on Canadian magazines, 131; and Canadian Short Stories, 14, 84, 104, 128–9, 136, 190; and the Great Depression, 136; and modernism, 113, 120, 128, 129, 133; and prose fiction, 128–30; and realism, 104, 130, 132, 135, 190, 192; and regionalism, 84; selections by, 132–4 Kogawa, Joy, 300, 301, 306, 319 Kokotailo, Philip, 170 Kolbas, E. Dean, 278 Korn, Rachel, 303 Kreisel, Henry, 208, 275 Kroetsch, Robert, 225, 269, 270, 273, 275, 281, 282, 290, 336 Lacombe, Michele, 77, 81 Ladha, Yasmin, 319 Ladoo, Harold Sonny, 300 Lai, Larissa, 319 Lam, Vincent, 323 Lampman, Archibald, 38, 53, 56, 57, 75, 121, 138, 140, 202; and Confederation poets, 63, 180; and mysticism, 94 Lane, Patrick, 258, 275 Later Canadian Poems (Wetherell), 62–4

Latham, A.B., 120 Laurence, Margaret, 208, 247, 318 Laut, Agnes, 76 Lauter, Paul, 6–7, 278 Layton, Irving, 175–6, 183, 193, 194, 210, 211, 244, 275, 303 Leacock, Stephen, 76, 104, 111, 125, 129, 202, 210, 323 Leading Canadian Poets (Percival), 188 League of Nations, 108 Lears, T.J. Jackson, 42 Lecker, Robert, 5, 250–1, 276, 284, 301, 306, 339 Lee, Dennis, 236, 240, 275, 280–3 Lee, Sky, 319 LePan, Douglas, 206, 275 Leprohon, Rosanna, 29, 34, 37, 75 Levine, Norman, 297 Library and Archives Canada, 21 Lighthall, William Douw, 12, 39, 40–58, 69, 73, 109, 125, 163, 164, 218, 226 Lipert, Peter, 23 Literature in Canada (Daymond and Monkman), 258, 260, 268 Litt, Paul, 218 Livesay, Dorothy, 120, 139, 140, 154, 156, 193, 202, 252, 289 Lloyd, Cecil Francis, 107–8, 140 Logan, John Daniel, 37, 40–1, 46, 54, 73, 76, 102, 109, 110 Logan, John E., 52, 159 long poem, the, 11, 291–3 Long Poem Anthology, The (Ondaatje), 291 Lord, Barry, 212 Lorne, Lord, 103 Love & Hunger: An Anthology of New Fiction (Daurio), 299 Lovell, John, 30, 58–9, 61

Index Lynch, Gerald, 132 Lysenko, Vera, 303 MacBeth, R.G., 76, 98 MacCormack, Terrance, 217 MacDonald, J.E.H., 91, 92, 94, 162 MacDonald, Mary Lu, 25 MacDonald, Wilson, 91, 113, 163 MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 205, 207, 211, 212, 244 Machar, Agnes Maule (pseud. Fidelis), 49, 50, 56, 61, 65, 75, 125 MacInnes, Tom, 162 Mackay, Isabel Ecclestone, 88, 162 Mackenzie, Alexander, 36 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 22, 24–6, 29 Mackey, Eva, 53, 332 MacLaren, Eli, 30, 35 Maclean, Kate Seymour, 37 MacLennan, Hugh, 210 MacLeod, Alistair, 275, 317 MacMechan, Archibald, 109 Macpherson, Jay, 204, 205, 206 MacSkimming, Roy, 136, 190, 212, 246, 247, 253–4 magazines, 29, 141, 160, 168, 188, 194, 197, 208, 212, 267, 299; Canadian Forum, 109, 114, 144, 155, 188; Canadian Notes and Queries, 321, 323; Contact, 194, 195; Contemporary Verse, 157, 165; Crucible, 155; Family Herald, 226; First Statement, 157, 165, 175–6, 177, 182–3, 186; Literary Garland, 29, 30, 58; Northern Review, 176, 182–3, 188; Preview, 157, 165, 175–6, 182–5; TISH, 206, 208, 212, 279, 280, 314. See also publishing houses; publishing industry

379

Maillet, Antonine, 258 Mair, Charles, 34, 44, 51, 59, 61, 75, 140, 180 Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (Kamboureli), 18, 20, 285, 302–4, 318–19 Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stories (Metcalf), 262, 296, 297 Mandel, Eli, 11, 166, 171, 205, 206, 211, 218, 219, 224 Marlatt, Daphne, 212, 258, 275, 306, 315 Marriott, Anne, 160, 162 Marshall, William E., 159 Marty, Sid, 239 Marx, Leo, 51 Massey Commission, 14, 185, 186–7, 190, 195, 196, 197, 217, 218, 220, 259 Mathur, Ashok, 319 Matteo, Sante, 209 McArthur, Peter, 76, 104 McCaffery, Steve, 201, 312 McCarthy, Dermot, 146, 163, 164 McClelland, John, 110, 111 McClung, Nellie, 76, 104 McCrae, John, 159, 162 McDougall, Joseph Easton, 138 McFadden, David, 212, 280 McFarlane, Leslie, 133, 134 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 31, 32, 44, 117 McInnis, Edgar, 138 McLachlan, Alexander, 34, 75, 97 McLay, Catherine M., 243, 260 McLennan, Rob, 306, 311–12 McNaught, Kenneth, 103 Metcalf, John, 208, 223, 245–9, 262, 285, 296–8, 299, 322–3, 336 Meynell, Alice, 119 Michaels, Anne, 309

380

Index

Michele, Mary di, 275 Mickleburgh, Brita, 241–2 Miki, Roy, 243, 255 militarism, 43, 49, 50, 54, 60. See also war military, Canadian, 14, 159 Miller, H.T., 92 mimesis. See realism Mistry, Rohinton, 299, 300, 301, 306 Mitchell, W.O., 275 Modern Canadian Poetry (Benson), 136 Modern Canadian Stories (Rimanelli and Ruberto), 208–11 Modern Canadian Verse: In English and French (Smith), 182, 232–3, 254, 260 modernism, 155, 175; and Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English), 162–3; beginnings of Canadian, 14, 42, 73, 108, 109, 114, 120, 193, 273; in British anthologies, 141–3; in Brown, Bennett, and Cooke, 307; in Canadian Anthology, 205–6; in Canadian poetry, 120, 129, 134; in Canadian prose fiction, 128, 134; and Klein, 303; and New Provinces, 146–7, 156, 163; and Pound, 114; and Pratt, 114–15, 119; and realism, 73, 108, 134; and Romantic nationalism, 108; and Smith, 129, 135; and theology, 79. See also experimentation; free verse; modernity modernity, 42, 50, 174–5. See also modernism Monkman, Leslie, 164, 240, 258, 260, 268 Monroe, Harriet, 93, 120 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 309, 323 Moodie, Susanna, 34, 38, 56, 76, 104, 203

Moore, Brian, 208 Moore, Lisa, 317 Mootoo, Shani, 319 Morley, Patricia, 121 Moses, Daniel David, 18, 285, 300, 302 Moss, Laura, 306, 330–4 Mount, Nick, 36 Mountain Moving Day: Poems by Women (Gill), 216 Mouré, Erin, 258, 275, 295 Mukherjee, Bharati, 299 Müller, Klaus Peter, 30 Mulroney, Brian, 301 multiculturalism, 6, 17, 18, 215, 216, 278, 300, 302, 306 Munro, Alice, 208, 247, 297, 317, 336 Murdoch, William, 205 Murtha, Thomas, 132, 133, 134 mythopoeia, 180, 206, 212, 272, 309 Narrative Voice, The (Metcalf), 247 national identity, 4, 44, 45, 46, 81, 101, 123, 173, 182, 185, 230, 235, 243, 267, 270, 282, 290, 301, 304, 307–8, 315–16, 333; and landscape, 21, 38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 72, 116, 151–2, 168, 174, 180, 211, 219, 227, 236–7, 271, 272. See also nordicity nationalism, 3–5, 31–4, 103, 105, 112, 123, 147, 178, 188–9, 191, 195, 226–7, 232, 236–7, 257, 289; in anthologies, 27–8, 33, 37, 58, 64, 67, 69, 71, 76, 95, 185, 195, 224, 238, 243, 283, 284, 286; anti-, 296–7; and Britain, 30–1, 59, 81–2, 103, 108–9; and the CBC, 259; and Confederation, 25; and France, 209; and Germany, 67; and nordicity, 44–5; in painting, 218; and poetry, 65, 254,

Index 283, 291; in politics, 31, 34, 59, 95, 103, 196, 214–15, 290, 333; in prose fiction, 68, 105, 209; in Quebec, 18, 103, 112, 215, 226–7, 229–30, 235, 255, 258–9, 284, 333; and religion, 12, 19, 77, 79, 87, 99; Romantic, 4, 9–10, 12, 23, 108, 126, 136–7, 146, 165, 173, 196; in schools, 65, 67; and the United States, 30, 59, 81, 103, 108–9, 220, 235–7, 240, 290, 333; and war, 34, 95, 103, 123, 164, 192. See also centennial; national identity; postnationalism; realism native, 243. See also cosmopolitan. Native literature and culture, 43, 45, 50, 51, 53, 161, 271, 278, 290, 298, 302, 309, 333, 338 New, W.H., 35, 132, 285, 296, 298 New Anthology of Canadian Literature, A (Bennett and Brown), 311 New Canadian Anthology, A (Creighton and Ridley), 139, 154, 156, 157 New Canadian Anthology, The (Lecker and David), 284 New Canadian Library, 16, 196, 198, 204, 205, 241, 250, 277 New Canadian Poets, 1970–1985, The (Lee), 280 New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, The (Starnino), 306, 312–14, 321 New Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918–1938 (Bennett), 154 New Long Poem Anthology, The (Thesen), 291–3 Newlove, John, 206, 224, 230–1, 311 New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, The (Atwood and Weaver), 299

381

New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, The (Atwood), 16, 215, 258, 264–6 New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (various), 14, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147–54, 156–8, 160, 163, 168, 169, 189, 313 New Romans, The (Purdy), 237–9 New Wave Canada (Souster), 212–14, 313 Nichol, bp, 212, 258, 275, 295, 315 Ninety Seasons, 219 nordicity, 44–5, 94, 98, 139, 180, 181, 182, 235–7, 261, 270 Norris, Ken, 280 North, Anison, 104 North by 2000: A Collection of Canadian Science Fiction (Hargreaves), 216 Northern Journey (Sutherland and MacCormack), 217 Norwood, Robert, 92, 94 Nowlan, Alden, 205, 210, 211 Noyes, Henry, 159 Odell, Jonathan, 75, 140 Ondaatje, Michael, 212, 213, 277, 285, 290, 300, 301, 303, 315 One Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec (Cogswell), 219 Open Country: Canadian Literature in English (Lecker), 21, 306, 334–40 Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Queyras), 306, 314–15 Open Water (Stringer), 93, 113, 119, 124 Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (Holmes), 306 Osborn, Margot, 154 Ostenso, Martha, 125 Other Canadians (Sutherland), 14,

382

Index

177, 178, 182, 185, 186, 187, 189, 324 Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse (Carman and Pierce), 13, 71, 74–5, 78, 83–91, 93–7, 101, 104–6, 130, 139, 309 Owen, Ivon, 262, 289 Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature, The (Weaver and Toye), 223, 242, 254, 255–8 Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, The (Atwood and Weaver), 254, 285, 296, 299 Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, The (Campbell), 73, 148, 254 Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English and French, The (Smith), 181, 204, 230 Pacey, Desmond, 15, 177, 185, 187, 190–2, 194, 209, 211, 263 Page, P.K., 160, 161, 183, 202, 289 Palgrave, Francis Turner, 30, 31 Paper Stays Put: A Collection of Inuit Writing, 217 Parker, George L., 29–30, 35 Parker, Gilbert, 76, 133, 134 patriation of the constitution, 16, 215, 256, 259 Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises, 66–8 patriotism. See nationalism Peacock, Molly, 315, 316 Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (Urquhart), 263, 296, 306, 316, 321–9 Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, The (Gustafson), 204, 235 Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories, The (Grady), 260, 262–3

Percival, W.P., 188 permission: fees, 89, 126–7, 220, 252, 253, 284, 294–5, 335; reprinting, 27. See also copyright Peterman, Michael, 26, 75 Phelps, Arthur, 91, 92, 93 phenomenology, 210, 211, 282 Phillips, David, 239 Phillips, Donna, 252 photography, 63, 64 Pickthall, Marjorie, 114, 120, 125, 140, 162, 306 Pierce, Lorne: on book sales, 127; on British and American influence, 189; European ideals of, 84–5; and French-Canadian writers, 85; and the Makers of Canadian Literature series, 111; and Our Canadian Literature, 13, 71, 74–5, 78, 83–91, 93–7, 101, 104–6, 130, 139, 309; and poetry, 99, 105; on the prairies, 98; and prose fiction, 74, 104, 130; and regionalism, 104; and relationship to Watson, 77–8, 83, 88; religion of, 78–80, 87, 98, 99; and selections by, 76, 84, 88, 98–9, 101, 102–5, 107; and The Teaching of English in England, 100; on the United States, 86 Pilon, Jean-Guy, 211, 232 Pocketful of Canada, A (Robins), 185, 186, 197 Poésie/Poetry 64 (Godbout and Colombo), 211, 212 Poetry 62 (Mandel and Pilon), 211 Poetry of the Canadian People, The (Davis), 252 Poets 56: Ten Younger English-Canadians (Souster), 204 Poets of Canada, The (Colombo), 260–2

Index Poets of Contemporary Canada (Mandel), 224 Possibilities of Story, The (Struthers), 285, 296 postmodernism, 180, 210, 234, 261, 273–4 postnationalism, 18, 230, 240, 283 Pound, Ezra, 93, 114, 119, 134, 157, 195, 212 Pratt, E.J., 91, 93, 111, 114, 119, 129, 143, 145, 146, 148, 156, 157, 160, 163, 181, 202, 289 Precosky, Don, 183 Primrose, Olive, 154 prose fiction, 68, 74, 106, 117, 128, 130–2, 134, 190, 192, 202, 208, 284 publishing houses, 15, 17, 187, 194, 196, 197, 217, 224, 267, 284; Anansi, 224, 280; Coach House, 212, 224; Contact, 187, 194–5, 306; ECW, 276; General Publishing, 276, 279; Macmillan, 110–11, 122, 129, 136, 145, 154; McClelland and Stewart, 110–11, 122, 136, 196, 234, 239, 245, 250, 277, 279, 285; Oxford, 234, 253–4, 255, 265, 270, 276, 285, 289, 312; Penguin, 158, 160–1, 164, 279, 300, 316, 322, 330; Ryerson, 13, 77, 78–9, 83, 100, 106, 111, 129, 176, 209, 212, 220, 238, 248, 279. See also magazines; publishing industry publishing industry: 22, 25, 36, 58, 61, 66, 103, 110, 136, 176, 187, 190, 194, 196, 197, 217, 220, 234, 238, 246–9, 252. See also magazines; publishing houses Purdy, Al, 190, 205, 237–40, 244–5, 251 Quebec Conference, 32 Queyras, Sina, 306, 314–15

383

Qupiqrualuk, Aisa, 298 Raddall, Thomas, 317 Raise the Flag and Other Patriotic Songs and Poems, 59–61 Rand, Theodore H., 68, 71–2, 75, 91, 92 Reade, John, 37, 49 realism: Canadian beginnings of, 191, 194; and experimentation, 4, 9, 193, 194, 273, 310; and gift books, 23; and humanism, 328; and the land, 236–7; and metaphysics, 179; and modernism, 73, 186, 79; and mythopoeia, 309; as nationalism, 5, 9, 10, 15, 104–5, 178, 180, 191, 244, 249, 251, 291–2, 300, 303–4, 307, 308; and naturalism, 128, 181, 182; and poetry, 69, 93, 134, 177, 180, 254, 292; and prose fiction, 99, 104, 105, 131, 134, 190, 191, 192; psychological, 134, 181, 211; and regionalism, 69, 168, 254; resistance to, 125, 210, 307; and secular acts of faith, 10; social, 94, 131–2, 175, 179–80, 181, 185; socialistic, 141 Reaney, James, 190, 193, 195, 202, 206 Redhill, Michael, 317 Redpath, Beatrice, 88 Reeves, John, 204 referendum. See sovereignty Reid, James, 206, 212 religion and religiosity, 21, 32–3, 40, 47, 49, 68, 72, 78–9, 82, 99, 105, 118–19, 123, 127, 178, 218, 225, 226, 247, 327–8. See also anthologies; secularism Rhodenizer, Vernon B., 109, 110, 123, 127, 139, 188–90

384

Index

Rhymes of Revolt (Gribble), 97 Richards, David Adams, 299 Richardson, John, 29, 76 Richler, Mordecai, 208, 247, 260, 306 Ridley, Hilda, 139, 154, 155, 157 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 157 Rimanelli, Giose, 208–11, 248 Roberts, Charles G.D., 37, 38, 50, 52, 53, 56, 61, 65, 76, 90, 121, 134, 140, 157, 160, 202, 311, 323; and the Confederation poets, 62–3, 75, 180; and copyright, 126; on cosmopolitanism, 57; and experimentation, 133 Roberts, Michael, 141, 142 Roberts, Theodore Goodrich, 162 Robins, John D., 185, 186, 197 Robinson, Eden, 317, 336 Robinson, Harry, 309, 317 Roche, Mazo de la, 111, 141, 202, 205 Rodriguez, Nice, 319 Rooke, Leon, 275, 297 Rose, Clyde, 252 Rose, Ellen Cronan, 7 Ross, George W., 66–7, 69 Ross, Malcolm, 193, 198, 241–2 Ross, Sinclair, 192, 193, 323 Ross, W.W.E., 120, 158, 160, 163 Rothwell, Annie, 43, 49 Roy, Camille, 229 Roy, Gabrielle, 263 Ruberto, Roberto, 208 Rule, Jane, 299 Ryerson, Egerton, 76 Said, Edward, 7 Salverson, Laura Goodman, 125 Sangster, Charles, 29, 34, 38, 50, 75, 140, 180 Saukampee, 309

Sawai, Gloria, 299 Schiff, Mortimer, 204 Schoeck, Ellen, 111–12 Schoemperlen, Diane, 299 Schroeder, Andreas, 299 Schull, Joseph, 154 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 56, 62, 63, 75, 88, 94, 120, 133, 134, 140, 202, 210 Scott, Frank R., 120, 129, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153, 154, 163, 184, 202, 289 Scott, Frederick George, 44, 51, 55, 62, 63, 64, 88 Scott, Peter, 204 Second Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec, A, 219 secularism, 10, 12, 19, 33, 37–9, 47, 69 Selections from Canadian Poets (Dewart), 12, 19, 29–30, 243, 263 Selections from the Canadian Poets, 72 Seranus. See Harrison, Susan Frances Shannon, William, 36 Sharp, William, 40 Sheard, Virna, 89 Shields, Carol, 299, 309 side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (McLennan), 306, 311 Signal Anthology, The (Harris), 284 Sileika, Antanas, 317, 318 Silverberg, Mark, 244 Sime, J.G., 76, 101, 309 Simpson, Anne, 314 Simpson, John, 12, 21, 22–8, 69, 101 Simpson, Kate B., 52 Sitwell, Edith, 150, 151 Six Days: An Anthology of Canadian Christian Poetry, 216 Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by

Index Canadian Writers (Metcalf), 219, 223, 246, 247, 323 Sixty Poets of Canada (and Quebec), 219 Skinner, Constance Lindsay, 120 Skookum Wawa: Writings of the Canadian Northwest, 216 Skvorecky, Josef, 300 Smith, A.J.M., 34, 56, 93, 112, 120, 150, 154, 160, 162, 163, 176, 186–9, 193, 199, 202, 214, 243, 261, 263, 303; and The Book of Canadian Poetry, 57, 143, 144, 147, 149, 158, 165, 166–84, 187, 188, 204; on the Canadian Authors Association, 71–2, 74; and the centennial, 270; and cosmopolitanism, 81, 144, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 179–80, 232, 254, 314; and experimentation, 134; and globalism/globalization, 232; influence of, 128, 134, 135–6, 166, 172, 177, 179, 184, 224, 254, 265–6, 310, 312; and major/minor distinctions, 73–4; and modernism, 93, 121, 127, 128–9, 134, 148, 174–5, 179, 181; and New Provinces, 14–15, 143, 144, 147, 148–9, 153; and nordicity, 182; and overlooked agreements with Sutherland, 182– 3; and The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, 181, 230; poetry of, 135; and the poetry scene in Canada, 170; and realism, 179–81; selections by, 230–1; and self-reliance, 48 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 26 Smith, Goldwin, 76 Smith, Kay, 187 Smith, Mary Barry, 49 Smith, Ray, 258, 297 Smith, William Wye, 50

385

Société des écrivains canadiens, La, 226 Solecki, Sam, 215–16 Solie, Karen, 314 Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada (Lighthall), 12, 39, 40, 41, 43–4, 46, 50, 55–6, 64 Sound of Time: Anthology of CanadianHungarian Authors, The (Miska), 216 Souster, Raymond, 183, 186, 187, 188, 193, 194, 204, 212–14 sovereignty, 16, 18, 20, 95, 237, 259, 333 Stanley, George, 280 Stansbury, Joseph, 140 Starnino, Carmine, 306, 312–14, 315, 321 Stead, Robert, 91, 92, 115, 125 Stegner, Wallace, 300 Steinfeld, J.J., 319 Stephen, Alexander Maitland, 14, 104, 110, 122, 123–7, 129, 133 Stevens, John, 223 Stevenson, Lionel, 109, 123, 125, 128 Stewart, Jim, 252 Stories from Pangnirtung, 217 Storm Warning (Purdy), 238–40, 245 Storm Warning 2 (Purdy), 238, 244, 245 Stratford, Philip, 207 Straton, Barry, 50 Stringer, Arthur, 93, 94, 113–14, 119, 124, 162 Struthers, J.R. (Tim), 285, 296 Sugars, Cynthia, 85, 306, 330–4 Suknaski, Andrew, 239, 258, 275 Sutherland, Fraser, 217 Sutherland, John, 14, 15, 175–87, 190, 196, 197, 198, 324

386

Index

Svensen, Linda, 299 Sweetgrass: An Anthology of Indian Poetry, 216 Swift, Todd, 314 Sylvestre, Guy, 16, 223, 226–32, 259 Szumigalski, Anne, 258 Taché, Jean, 38 taste, 6, 86, 93, 107, 125, 167–8 Taylor, Timothy, 317 thematic criticism, 203, 221, 234, 240, 242, 325 Thesen, Sharon, 291–3 Thibaudeau, Colleen, 195 Thien, Madeleine, 311, 317 39 Below: The Anthology of Greater Edmonton Poetry (Shute), 216, 219 Thirty-One Newfoundland Poets (Fowler and Pittman), 219 Thomas, Audrey, 275, 297 Thomas, Clara, 244 Thomas, H. Nigel, 319 Thomas, Joan, 306 Thompson, Ralph, 23, 27 Thomson, E.W., 104 Thumbprints: An Anthology of Hitchhiking Poems (Fetherling), 216 Toye, William, 164, 223, 224, 242, 254, 255–8, 264, 265 Traill, Catharine Parr, 76, 104 Traquair, Ramsay, 114 Treasury of Canadian Verse, A (Rand), 68, 71 Trehearne, Brian, 79, 108, 146, 149, 150, 176, 306 Trotter, Bernard Freeman, 114, 193 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 216, 258, 325 Turnbull, Gael, 193 Turn of the Story: Canadian Short

Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium (Thomas and Harms), 306 Twelve Prairie Poets (Ricou), 219 Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry (Birney), 187 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics (Geddes), 286 21 x 3 (Farmiloe), 219 Urban Experience, The (Stevens), 223 Urquhart, Jane, 263, 296, 306, 309, 316, 321–9 Valgardson, W.D., 258, 275, 323 Vassanji, M.G., 319, 323 Victoria, Queen, 108 Vipond, Mary, 108 Virgo, Sean, 300 Visions from the Edge: An Anthology of Atlantic Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Bell and Choyce), 217 Voice of Canada: Canadian Prose and Poetry for Schools, The (Stephen), 122, 124, 127, 130 Voices Down East: A Collection of New Canadian Writing from the Atlantic Provinces (Cameron), 216 Voices of Discord: Canadian Short Stories from the 1930s (Phillips), 252 Voices of Victory (King), 184 Waddington, Miriam, 187 Wah, Fred, 206, 212, 258, 306, 315 Wallace, Bronwen, 309, 318 war: of 1812, 34, 59; Battle of Grand Pré, 55; Battle of Queenston Heights, 59, 61; First World War, 13, 73, 74, 75, 91, 95, 103, 107–8, 110, 111, 117, 118; Northwest Rebellion, 55, 98; Red River Rebel-

Index lion, 34, 98; Second World War, 101, 136, 146, 160, 165, 166, 169, 184–6, 188, 190, 194, 274; Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions, 22, 29; Vietnam, 218, 237, 238. See also militarism Watson, Albert Durrant: European ideals of, 84; on free verse, 94; and French-Canadian writers, 85; and imperialism, 81–2; and Our Canadian Literature, 13, 71, 74–5, 78, 83–91, 93–7, 101, 104–6, 130, 139, 309; and poetry, 83; and relationship to Pierce, 77–8, 83, 88; and representativeness, 89–91, 115; and selections by, 75–6, 80, 83, 88–9, 91, 98, 102, 107; and theosophy, 77–8, 79, 81, 90–1 Watt, F.W., 107, 142 Watters, Reginald E., 15, 193, 198, 200–8, 224, 268 Wayman, Tom, 239, 258 Weaver, Robert, 186, 223, 224, 242, 254; and Canadian Short Stories, 192–3, 208; and CBC Radio, 192–3; and experimentation, 194; and French-Canadian literature, 256–7, 262; and The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature, 242, 255–6; and The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, 299; on prose fiction, 208; and publics, 194; and realism, 193, 201; selections by, 193, 194, 208, 258, 299 Webb, Phyllis, 193, 195, 206, 275 Weinzweig, Helen, 299, 303 Weir, Lorraine, 5, 226 Weir, R. Stanley, 127 Wells, Daniel, 321–2, 323 Westfall, William, 25

387

Weston, Jessie, 189 Wetherald, Ethelwyn, 65 Wetherell, J.E., 62–4, 69, 70, 71, 73, 140, 163 Whale Sound: An Anthology of Poems about Whales and Dolphins (Gatenby), 217 w)here? the other Canadian poetry (Garnet), 224, 252 Whipple, George, 204 Whiteman, Bruce, 185 Wiebe, Rudy, 275, 299 wilderness, 16–17, 33, 40, 174, 219, 227, 242, 243, 328 Wilkinson, Anne, 193, 202 Wilson, Ethel, 193, 210 Wilt, Judith, 39 Winnipeg General Strike, 95–7, 102 Wise, Sydney, 23 Wiseman, Adele, 208, 300, 309 Wolfe, Morris, 262 Women in Canadian Literature (Hesse), 252 women: included in anthologies, 64–5, 95, 155, 163, 230–1, 306 Wood, S.T., 104 Woodcock, George, 244, 275, 276, 277 Woodrow, Constance, 154 Words from Inside ’76: An Annual Publication of the Prison Arts Foundation, 217 Wright, Donald, 41–4, 54 Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing (Klobucar and Barnholden), 311 Wrong, George, 76 Yarmarok: Ukrainian Writing in Canada since the Second World War (Balan and Klynovy), 217

388

Index

Yates, J. Michael, 251 Yule, Pamelia Vining, 75 Zichy, Francis, 152 Zwicky, Jan, 290, 309, 315