The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition

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.

In Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (1989), Brian Trehearne set
a new standard in combining the scholarly study of and artistically
sensitive approach to our poets. In that book, after preliminary
examination of comparatively minor writers, especially W.W.E. Ross and
Raymond Knister, he focused on F.R. Scott, John Glassco, and A.J.M.
Smith. In this new book, he has carried the process further by examining
the younger generation of Canadian modernists. Brief treatments of John
Sutherland and Patrick Anderson are followed by detailed studies of P.K.
Page, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Louis Dudek.

Trehearne chooses to focus on the decade of the 1940s (though his
actual cutoff point is 1953–54), and he begins by challenging the
conventional view that the main poets of this period were separated by
the opposed attitudes of the two dominant little magazines, Preview and
First Statement. This assumption has received some questioning recently,
but Trehearne, characteristically, delves deeply into the original
documents and effectively demonstrates that the old view is untenable.
He insists that the “real distinction ... lay with the individual, and
not with the little magazine.” He also challenges the earlier
influence of a blinkered cultural nationalism by relating the poets in
question to their international contexts, which are the contexts of
modernism. The result is a fresh and constantly stimulating reassessment
of some of our best writers of the mid–20th century.

This is an admirably solid work of scholarship—which means that it
must be read slowly and as a whole. Trehearne builds his case
carefully—even, at times, laboriously. For those prepared to follow
him, he provides an exemplary foundation for serious study, and
appropriate critical appreciation, of the poets concerned. His earlier
book, for all its cogency, did not—so far as I can see—have an
appreciable effect on critical studies in the 1990s. It is to be hoped
that the cumulative force of the two volumes combined will be
influential. We need more commentators like Trehearne—sound scholars
who are also sensitive readers—if we are to emerge from the current
critical morass.