Broadcast May–June 1971
From tapes in the CBC Radio Archives, reference nos. 710522-2, 710529-2, 710605-4, 710612-3, and 710619-5, transcribed by Monika Lee. This seven-part program on recent poets of Canada, prepared and introduced by broadcaster and writer Allan Anderson for the CBC’s Anthology, included comments by Frye in five of its parts.
22 May 1971
ANDERSON: “Are you a Canadian poet?” I asked the seventy poets I interviewed for this series. It’s a question that’s been asked again and again in this country. Is there something distinctively Canadian, specifically identifiable about our poetry, or some of it at least? Well, various poets I talked to found this query infinitely tedious, while others had surprisingly varied answers. Seventeen of the poets who answered are heard tonight, plus a couple of literary critics. I’ll introduce each in turn. * * * Northrop Frye:
FRYE: It’s true that Canada is an environment; that is, it’s a place where an imagination grows up and takes root. I’ve always felt that there is something vegetable about the imagination—that it takes root in a landscape. Certainly no quality, whether national or regional, is ever given by content. That is, you don’t become an Australian poet by writing about kangaroos. I think, though, that you cannot avoid the imaginative influences of the place where you grew up in your impressionable years. Just as you will always have a recognizable accent if you were born in a certain district, so you’ll have a recognizable imaginative outlook in the same way and for the same reason. That is the kind of thing that does emerge in Canadian literature. I find it impossible to distinguish Canadians from Americans as long as I’m in Canada, but as soon as I leave Canada—if I’m in England, for example, listening to the North American accents—I can pick out the Canadians very quickly. The same thing is true about literary experience: if you can get outside it a bit, you begin to see that there is a recognizable tone and accent which you can pick up, whether it’s in Victoria, B.C., or Cape Race, Newfoundland.
29 May 1971
ANDERSON: Tonight, we have an informal, many-faceted history of Canadian poetry [since 1920]—Canadian poetry viewed by six individuals, themselves involved as critics or as critics and poets. Together they cover the full range of poetic activity over the five decades the programs cover. * * * We start tonight’s program with literary critic Northrop Frye.
FRYE: There is a tradition in poetry, but a good deal of it is established unconsciously. One of the first things that struck me when I was dealing with the history and the traditions of Canadian poetry was the extent to which poets had concentrated on narrative. There are so few good lyrical poems before Roberts’s Orion of 1880, and yet long before that there were many very ambitious and very striking narratives. Pratt, when he started, became a narrative poet. I’m quite certain that Pratt knew very little about his traditions in Canadian poetry, and I don’t think they influenced him if he did know about them. Nevertheless, he unconsciously established a kind of kinship with them. Similarly, every generation of poets that I’ve watched since then has assumed that the previous generation was producing stuff that was just too damn corny for words, and that Canadian poetry really started with them. That’s a perfectly natural way to feel, but as they develop and find their own styles and their own authority, they begin to establish, in a rather mysterious way, a link with the tradition before them.
I think that Canadian poetry is likely to become increasingly self-conscious about its tradition, simply because there is more academic study of Canadian literature. When Art Smith and Leo Kennedy were using the Eliot Waste Land imagery back in the ’20s, they were, without knowing it, recreating the kind of imagery that was in Bliss Carman, who was following the pre-Raphaelites and the late Victorians. What happens is that, in the whole international world of literature, certain changes take place, and occasionally those changes are felt in a country like Canada as plateaus in development. The Victorian age succeeded by the late Victorians produced a very distinct cultural change in England, which was reflected in Canada in the Roberts and Lampman group. Similarly with the upsurge of poetry in the United States, starting from about 1912 on, that hit Canada in the ’20s. It has been mainly a response to international currents: first in the early nineteenth century from Britain, then increasingly from the United States, and to a considerable extent from France.
The Auden/Spender/MacNeice/Day Lewis period of poetry began to hit Canada with the Preview and First Statement people and the generation of the 1940s. Neufville Shaw and Bruce Ruddick were certainly of that generation, and so was P.K. Page. F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith were already established writers by that time. It seems to me that the ’50s, which is the period in which I was most closely observing Canadian poetry, was a time when the production of really fine work was rather sparse. But it was an extraordinary period with a sense of a gathering of a range of powers, and every once in a while a fine book would flash out, like Jay Macpherson’s Boatman or Jamie Reaney’s Suit of Nettles or Irving Layton’s In the Midst of My Fever—those are just at random. One had the feeling that these books were important not only for what they were, but for what they typified. One had the feeling that a tremendous burst of creative energy was just around the corner, and, of course, that’s what came in the next decade.
What happened in the ’60s is a little difficult to define, but it was something like this. If you look at the state of poetry in Great Britain, I think you’ll have the feeling of a certain depression; that is, a feeling that creative powers are a bit on the wane, that they’re not being used, that the energy of the country, such as it is, is not going into poetry. That has a lot to do, of course, with the political and social decline of Great Britain. Similarly, if you look at the United States, you see a great deal of surface vitality, a great deal of put-on literature, and yet an output of literature that is not really commensurate with the size and vitality of the country. That, obviously, has something to do with the troubled conscience of the country. I don’t mean that Canada is smug, but merely that it is an observant country, that it’s more of an observer than a participant in current events, and that, consequently, great revolutionary changes, like the changes that we’re seeing in the ’60s, stimulate Canada to articulateness in a way that they do not stimulate Great Britain or the United States.
5 June 1971
ANDERSON: Little literary mags have had a spunky and often partisan history. They’ve been the mainstay of Canadian poets during the last fifty years. We’ll look at some of them tonight. * * *
FRYE: I was editor of the Canadian Forum for several years,1 and I felt that the function of the Forum was to be hospitable to new and coming writers, just by being there: to help young people to learn to write, by trying it over and over again. Certainly I got a lot of brickbats as a result. I used to have to throw away great wads of song that were sent up from Tennessee and so forth by somebody who thought this would be a soft spot. The editor, as I know from experience, has a rather unhappy time with poets, yet he has to realize that he’s a kind of midwife. He’s bringing a spirit or community of poetry to birth, and once it’s born, it’s on its own, it has its own life to live.
12 June 1971
ANDERSON: Tonight we take a look at younger poets, their points of view and some criticism of them. We hear also about concrete poetry. ***
FRYE: I’m rather interested in concrete poetry, in shape poems and that kind of experiment. They show you that there’s no hard-and-fast line between the poetic and the pictorial. There is a point at which poetry becomes a kind of verbal design, as it does in some of e.e. cummings’s poems. From there, there’s no reason to stop this side of a complete picture. I’m thinking of the poem by Lionel Kearns called The Birth of God, which consists of the figure one made out of zeros, set inside a zero made out of figure ones. That is a poem which, to put it mildly, would be difficult to read aloud, and yet it does communicate a perfectly legitimate imaginative experience, even though it’s a primarily pictorial one. There is, perhaps, an element of stunt or even a put-on about a good many experimental developments in our time, and yet we are in an age of collage: an age where we’re more or less committed to the unexpected juxtaposition.
19 June 1971
The sixth program featured a discussion of some of Frye’s theories by, among others, Canadian poets Margaret Atwood, Eli Mandel, Irving Layton, and Miriam Waddington. Frye responds to an accusation by editor and poet Peter Stevens:
STEVENS: I feel that the role of the critic is a very important one, provided he doesn’t get bogged down in too much academic criticism. I think Northrop Frye is at fault here, because he seems unaware of the immediate things that are happening on the literary scene. Frye, I think, is only looking at Canadian poetry from his mythopoeic point of view and doesn’t see what kinds of developments have been taking place.
FRYE: I struggle very hard as a critic not to like one kind of poetry more than another, because it seems to me that that’s critical laziness. It’s the critic’s job to greet every type of poetry as though it were his dearest friend. In my work as a teacher, I find that there is a kind of explicitly mythopoeic poetry which I spend a great deal of time on because of the particular kind of interests that I have. That sort of poetry is easier to teach, I know how to teach it—having brought myself up on Blake—and I recognize it in contemporary poetry. But, along with that, one has to remember that all poetry is equally mythopoeic. That is, Raymond Souster is just as mythopoeic as Jay Macpherson, and I could demonstrate that very quickly.
[After an interlude during which Irving Layton opines that many critics have not the faintest idea what poetry is all about, Anderson introduces the subject of the “garrison mentality” as elaborated in Frye’s conclusion to Literary History of Canada. Frye’s is the first of five comments on the subject.]
FRYE: Canada had a different history from the United States, and it created a different imaginative environment for the poet. The example that I keep coming back to over and over again is the absence of an Atlantic seaboard in the Canadian landscape, because the Atlantic seaboard is so crucial for the development of American culture. There’s the absence, too, of a general frontier. I know that the frontier theory in American history may have been a bit overworked,2 but, nevertheless, there was one, and it did extend from the north to the south of the country, and it did move back irregularly until it reached the Pacific. Canada, on the other hand, never had a single frontier. You had a number of isolated outposts, each of them surrounded by forest or wilderness, and isolated from one another, and they were, in the strictest sense of the word, garrisons. That is why they developed what I have called a garrison mentality—that is, the mentality of a small, tightly organized group that is in some danger (if not physical danger) of losing its sense of identity, and, consequently, very apt to resist any kind of analytical criticism or sceptical mentality. This attitude persists in Canada until very recent times.