Out of This World: The Natural History of Milton Acorn

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.

This is a popular or populist biography of Milton Acorn, “the
People’s Poet,” that also contains selections from poems either
hitherto unpublished or not currently in print. I say “popular or
populist” because Chris Gudgeon has taken pains to avoid writing an
“academic” book on the university-press pattern. He has, however,
undertaken extensive research, partly by interviewing relatives,
friends, and acquaintances and partly by ferreting out obscure printings
in generally inaccessible issues of defunct little magazines. His book
is therefore scholarly but without the suggestion of stuffiness that
often accompanies that word.

This strategy is readily understandable. Acorn was a self-made man with
grassroot convictions about socialism and the people, a cantankerous
enemy of whatever he considered privileged, bourgeois, or effete. It
would be a grave mistake to shroud his life in literary respectability.
At the same time, the general absence of footnotes and of any extensive
bibliography means that dedicated students cannot easily follow up
references. (Where, for example, are Acorn’s surviving manuscripts?)

Out of This World is, then, a somewhat uneasy but on the whole quite
successful compromise between the populist and the soberly serious. It
does, however, encounter problems. I doubt, for example, that many of
the readers who are attracted to the book for sociopolitical reasons are
likely to be interested in Gudgeon’s background information on
Acorn’s poetic context, while literary scholars will want more. I
would have liked more, for instance, on Acorn’s religious attitudes,
which are mentioned but not fully discussed. Further attention might
also have been paid to the complexities of his having been a nationalist
who saw treacherous betrayal in poets turning to non-Canadian traditions
for their poetics, but who himself submitted to the political ideology
of (God save us!) Joseph Stalin. And I don’t think Gudgeon should so
casually shrug off Acorn’s later protests against abortion and “gay
rights” as evidence of mental decline.

Nevertheless, this is an absorbing—though

often sad and sometimes even pathetic—story of a decidedly fractious
human being who, at his best, was a very fine poet, even if not quite
the outstanding genius that Gudgeon’s engaging enthusiasm sometimes
suggests.