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Literary Criticism Canadian

The Montreal Forties

Modernist Poetry in Transition

by (author) Brian Trehearne

Publisher
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Initial publish date
Sep 1999
Category
Canadian, Poetry
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802044525
    Publish Date
    Sep 1999
    List Price
    $75.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442681729
    Publish Date
    Aug 1999
    List Price
    $97.00

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Where to buy it

Out of print

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Description

During the Second World War, a number of young Canadian poets converged on Montreal and, in a few years of little-magazine and small-press publication, rewrote the story of modern English-Canadian poetry. The Montreal Forties establishes a new reading of Canadian modernist poetry in this crucial decade, during which the radical impersonality of high-modernist poetics gave way to an ironic expression of the modern individual in years of unexampled geopolitical and private crisis.

The book discusses four major English-Canadian poets of the forties; P.K. Page, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Louis Dudek. The character of the decade's poetry is explored through close scrutiny of the largely unread work published in the little magazines Preview and First Statement, as well as reference to their criticism, correspondence, and journals. Brian Trehearne shows that the Canadian poets emerging in Montreal in the 1940s faced in common a coherent set of artistic challenges general to poetry in English at that time. Chief among these was the function and value of the striking modernist Image in the 'whole' poem newly demanded of a generation at war, a matter vigorously debated by poets in Britain and the United States as well. The Montreal Forties allows us for the first time to see artists as diverse as Page and Layton, Klein and Dudek as part of a single Canadian and international generation, and breaks new ground for critics of Canadian modernist poetry.

About the author

Brian Trehearne is an associate professor of Canadian Literature at McGill University.

Brian Trehearne's profile page