Paradise: Essays on Myth, Art and Reality

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Louis Dudek is not only an important Canadian poet but also a thoughtful
and forceful writer on poetry and, more generally, on the (threatened)
culture of our age. This collection of essays gives the impression of
being a gathering of odds and ends—but is no less cogent for that.
Essays on (among other topics) Nabokov, the contemporary poet Ken
Norris, the long poem as a literary form, and the poetry and prose of
the Nova Scotian Catholic writer R.J. MacSween are framed by a vintage
Dudek meditation on “The Idea of Art” and a lecture on myth versus
rationality best summed up by this statement: “Religions are the dust
clouds of exploded fanaticisms.”

This remark is, of course, an epigram, and it occurs within an
interesting essay entitled “The Art of the Epigram.” Dudek is,
indeed, at his best in the epigrammatical form, where his obstinate
sanity finds its most succinct expression. Here are a few courageous and
provocative specimens culled from all parts of the book: “Pedantry
killed the study of Greek and Roman classics . . . and it is now killing
English studies under the guise of something called Critical Theory”;
“[I]t is precisely a failure at the level of thought that has led to
the impasse in modern art”; “[A] myth takes possession of your mind;
a thought, a concept, is something you hold in your mind.”

As these sentences suggest, Dudek, now an elderly man, has reached the
stage when he feels the need to speak out. What he says will not be
popular; he will be much easier to ignore than to answer. Some will try
to shrug him off as a reactionary, but in fact he is one of the most
radical thinkers writing in Canada today, and deserves to be widely read
for that reason.

The title? A paradox explained by another fine epigram: “That you do
not ‘find’ paradise is not the issue, but that you seek and desire
it is everything.”