A.M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, Dawn Fraser
In 1932 the C.B.C. was established. In 1936, the Governor General's Award was instituted. Canadian Literature survived the Great Depression, but the social climate, the work camps, the bread lines, the growing threats of war, and then the rise of Fascism and the outbreak of World War II affected the social consciousness of Canadian poets and many turned their critical gaze on things political: social injustices and disorder.
A.M. Klein (1909--1972)
Abraham Moses Klein was born in Ratno, Ukraine, into a Russian orthodox Jewish family who immigrated the following year to Montreal. He took his B.A. at McGill, his law degree at University of Montreal and was called to the bar in 1933. He spoke three languages, was versed in English Renaissance and modern poetry. Although he eventually abandoned religious orthodoxy, Klein studied for the rabbinate and was steeped in Jewish theology and culture stored in the Talmud and Cabbala, and retained a deep commitment to the Jewish community and its values. He practiced law, organized the Canadian Zionists, and edited the Canadian Jewish Chronicle.
However, deeply affected by the rise of Fascism, the 1930's were a difficult time
for Klein. He wrote very little in this period. During World War II, he found his voice speaking out against Nazism. In "Sonnet in Time of Affliction' (1940) Klein writes:
"Ah woe to us, that we, the sons of peace Must turn our sharpened scythes to scimitars, Must lift the hammer of the Maccabees, Blood soak the land, make mockery of starsƒ"
Klein's poetry of the 1940's "reflects a sense of alienation and futility, but at the same time a commitment to his art and to its social function" (D&L 84). From 1945-48 he was a visiting lecturer in poetry at McGill University. His post war poems are considered his best. They portray Quebec culture from a unique perspective that is at once separate from the two solitudes and distinctly its own. Klein portrays Montreal as static, secure, alive, and individual, like the traditional rocking chair on the broad veranda "which turns about its longing and seems to move/to make a pleasure out of repeated pain/its music moves as if always back to a first love." Munro Beattie states that these poems are "exquisitely wrought structures in which rhythm, tone and images embody and
interpret a broad vision of a way of life" (LH 247). But the poems not only portray a traditional way of life, they also reveal the signs of change--the signs of industrialism and urbanization.
1949 was an eventful year--Klein published his book of poems The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, which won the Governor General's Award, he campaigned, unsuccessfully, for office in Montreal as a CCF candidate, and he went on a fact-finding trip to Israel for the Canadian Jewish Congress.
In the early 1950's, Klein suffered a number of breakdowns, withdrawing from active life and writing entirely. He died in 1972. He was a major force in the development of poetry in the 1940's in Montreal. As Geddes argues, "Klein's stance is not merely declamatory, he is capable of lyricism, religious rhapsody, reminiscence, and confession as well as varying degrees of humour and satire. His aim as a poet as stated in 'Portrait of a Poet as Landscape' is "to say the word that will become sixth sense", "to bring/new forms to life" (P&P 709).
Selected Titles: The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (1948) G.G.; The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein (1974) Ed. Miriam Waddington
Dorothy Livesay (1909-1996)
Dorothy Livesay was born in Winnipeg. Her parents were both writers, her father a journalist, her mother a poet, both encouraged her writing. They moved to Toronto in her teens. She was educated at U. of Toronto, where as a second year student she was awarded the Jardine Memorial Prize, and at the Sorbonne where she did her thesis on the French symbolists influence on Modern English poetry. Here she must have honed her imagistic style, her love of clean, clear images, a speaking voice, organic form and her muted rhymes. Her early collections include Green Pitcher (1928) and Sign Post (1932).
In 1937, she married Duncan Macnair, a fellow activist. During the war, Livesay worked in Europe for three months on assignment with the Toronto star. Day and Night was published in 1944 and established her reputation as the poet of social protest. Munroe Beattie argues that the title poem "was a product of the most hateful decade of modern times and of Dorothy Livesay's rage and grief over what she saw in the world around her" (LH252). He points out that she had many opportunities to observe the social injustices brought about by unemployment, industrialism and other working class miseries--in the school of Social Work in Toronto, the Family Welfare Agency in Montreal, a relief office in New Jersey, and in conferences and organized protests of angry young men and women that she participated in. But she also broadened her social experience working for newspapers in Winnipeg, Toronto and Vancouver, as
Director of Adult Education in Vancouver, and as a high school teacher.
"Day and Night" expresses the factory life, the violence and oppressiveness of
industrial labour:
Dawn, red and angry, whistles loud and sends A geysered shaft of steam searching the air. Scream after scream announces that the churn Of life must move, the giant arm command. Men in a stream, a moving human belt Move into sockets, everyone a bolt.
The poem moves down to the boiler room, where those in power hatch hatreds
between the workers:
We were working together, night and day, and knew Each other's stroke; and without words, exchanged An understanding about kids at home, The landlord's jaw, wage-cuts and over-time We were like buddies, see? Until they said That nigger is too smart the way he smiles Therefore they cut him down, who flowered at night And raised me up, day hanging over night--
But up in the roller room, revolution is brewing:
We have eyes To look across The bosses' profit At our loss.
Livesay calls for social change, social action:
Day and night Night and day Till life is turned The other way.
The poem is enhanced by Livesay's form, which includes jazz and black
spiritual rhythms, juxtapositions, and multiple voices. Day and Night won the
Governor General's Award in 1944.
In 1947 she published Poems for People, still political, still compelling, but with a gentler socialism. New issues were raised: those of mother and wife. This new collection also won a Governor General's Award. In her introduction, Lee Briscoe Thompson notes that the collection "shows an even more accomplished level of richly restrained diction, energy, humanism, and the ability to project herself into the experience of others" (95). This year, Livesay was also awarded the Lorne Pierce Metal for her creative and critical contributions to Canadian Letters.
Thompson argues that in the 1950's Livesay's poetry mellowed, and it was not
until she spent three years in the early 60's teaching in Zambia that her driving
rhythms and strong images returned. Thompson describes Livesay's new range of themes as including male/female relationships, women's issues and perspectives, old age in a youth centred culture, and the Canadian experience. As Livesay matured, Thompson explains, her gaze turned to other pressing issues: "the phases of love, the personal march toward death, and the precarious state of the world--environmental, social and spiritual" (96).
Livesay died in 1996. She is one of our best-loved poets.
Selected Titles: Day and Night (1944) GG, Collected Poems, The Two Seasons (1972)
F.R. Scott (1899-1995)
In a 1957 review of Scott's The Eye of the Needle, Northrop Frye states that although the "fall-tide of the capitalist counter reformation has ebbed", Scott's poems still "remind us of all the things that we are jealously trying to forget: unemployment, exploitation, social and cultural snobbery, the unscrupulousness of the press, the middle class hypocrisy that asserts that only striking workers are being selfish, the helplessness of the intellectual, and the fact that most guardians of the destinies are exactly as stupid and ill-informed as they appear to be" (BG84). Fifty years later, Scott's poems still remind us of all the things we'd rather forget.
F.R. Scott was born in Quebec City, the son of Archdeacon F.G.S. Scott, a well-known poet. He was educated at Bishop's College, taught in a Quebec high school and at Bishop's for a time. He spent three years at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and then studied law at McGill. In 1927 he was called to the bar. The following year he joined the faculty of McGill and eventually became Dean of Law.
His political commitment was forged by his position as a constitutional law professor at McGill, as National Chairman of the C.C.F. party, a member of the National Council of the Penal Association and as a U.N. resident representative in Burma. Scott's poems are best described as public, often satirical, colloquial in diction, conversational in rhythm--social commentary in the tradition of Whitman, Pound and William Carlos Williams. Munroe Beattie contends, "the informed mind has been perfectly coordinated with the civilized heart. His finest poems proceed from the whole personality, which makes itself heard with clarity and force in their cadences" (LH 244). In "Overture" Scott summons the beauty of art,
In the dark room, under a cone of light You precisely play the Mozart sonata. The bright Clear notes fly like sparks through the air And trace a flickering pattern of music there.
But in these times, with the rise of Fascism, the "tissue of art is torn", and he asks, "how shall I hear old music. This is the hour/ Of new beginnings, concepts warring for power,/ Decay of systems"--
And this perfection which is less yourself Than Mozart, seems a trinket on a shelf A pretty octave before a window Beyond whose curtain grows a world crescendo.
Munroe argues that Scott has "remained faithful to the undergraduate's certainty that a never-ending conspiracy among the rich and powerful is the explanation for the injustice he sees in society" (244) and that only through social cooperation will the good life flourish for all. Munroe goes on to say that this is the source of Scott's indignation against stupid or opportunist politicians, greedy entrepreneurs and landlords, misuse of public resources and inequity in the legal system. It is a compelling vision that is still current. It does not take much to substitute say Mulroney or Stockwell Day for Bennett or King!
In Social Sonnets II Scott asks us to "take a look at the Sat Eve Post/ get a load
of its thick slick ads". Written in 1954, this satirical poem still speaks to us today:
Have an eyeful of its long slim girls Selling themselves with lipstick and whiskey and cars To any man whose distinction is drinking in bars Using a dictaphone, or buying false pearls.
Despite Scott's indignation for the 'huckster' 'Knight errant of our time', he completes the poem light heartedly, "So be not discouraged, never give up hope/ And please--no escaping to Moscow or Rome."
F.R. Scott was a member of the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism; he translated both St. Denys Garneau and Anne H³bert, two outstanding French Canadian poets. He has written not only poetry but also works concerning law, economics and international relations. He had a hand in editing many of the major journals of his time, such as The Canadian Forum, The McGill Fortnightly Review, Northern Review, and the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. He was a unique voice in Canadian letters, a voice for the people.
Selected Titles: The Eye of the Needle: Satires, Sorties, Sundries (1957)
Leo Kennedy (1907-2000)
Born in Liverpool, England, Kennedy came to Canada in 1912. He was educated at the University of Montreal and was part of the group of McGill poets in the 1920's. He contributed to The McGill Fortnightly Review and The Canadian Mercury, literary journals that by the mid-twenties reflected "an increased concern for the condition of the lower orders of society, farmers and labourers and their way of life" (LH 487). This was literature with a social conscience. Kennedy's poem "Life's Like a Garbage Can," published in Canadian Mercury in June 1928, is an attempt to look at things as they are, rather than with the romantic sensibility of the Victorian Era.
The Shrouding, his only volume of poems, published in 1933, includes sonnets
and lyrics and the lovely poem "Prophesy for Icarus":
No bird that streams its feathers back And plunges softly out Through cubic densities of space Then banks, and climbs aslant, But will drop fluttering with woe, And flex its wings, dismayed To feel time-brittled tendons halt, And know itself betrayed.
Frye informs us that Kennedy's generation "encountered more urban and intellectual influences, and found in T.S Eliot especially a technique for adapting the old mythological themes to a human as well as a natural environment, and to ironic and as well as to romantic uses" (BG 36). Kennedy's poem, "Words for a Resurrection," uses Christ'sresurrection to embody the power and 'ecstatic sundering' of spring. Northrop Frye has an interesting theory that "every good lyrical poet has a certain structure of imagery as typical of him (or her) as his handwriting, held together by certain recurring metaphors, and sooner or later he will produce one or more poems that seem to be at the centre of that structure" (BG 179). "Words for a Resurrection", Frye insists, is the imaginative key to Kennedy's work; it displays the distinctive theme that reveals his reaction to his natural and social environment (BG 179):
Each pale Christ stirring underground
Splits the brown casket of its root
Wherefrom the rousing soil upthrusts
A narrow, pointed shoot,
And bones long quiet under frost
Rejoice as bells precipitate
The loud, ecstatic sundering,
The hour inviolate.
This Man of April walks again--
Such marvel does the time allow--
With laughter in his bless²d bones,
And lilies on his brow.Kennedy is in the school of Canadian poets that tends to portray nature with an evil or at least a sinister power--the view Atwood takes in Survival; visions, Frye explains "not only of a riddle of inexplicable death, but of a riddle of inexplicable evil" (BG 149) as seen in the married corpses of his sonnet "Epithalamium".
It amazes me that one volume of poems could have such a lasting influence,
that, for example, Frye calls on Kennedy so often to illustrate his theories. But
Kennedy's poems are haunting and well crafted and will, no doubt, endure.
Selected Titles: The Shrouding (1933)
Dawn Fraser is older than the rest of the poets in this section. And poorer. He was not educated at university, did not edit literary magazines, nor did the elite of Canadian culture support his work. His politics came out of the First World War and the years of poverty following the War, in Cape Breton. Fraser is our hard-hitting working class minstrel, a popular local poet from Glace Bay who wrote narrative poems about the gruelling 1920's in industrial Cape Breton. Ronald Caplan in a publisher's note to Echoes from Labor's Wars states, "Fraser's stuff is two-fisted, face-to-face, and strongƒit is a compelling testament to courage, peace, and community" (vii). Fraser is best understood as a bard in the tradition of Robert Service (whose poems he knew off by heart), and as part of a strong oral culture in Cape Breton that preserved working class traditions and values. In their introduction to Echoes, David Frank and Don MacGillivray describe Fraser as a populist poet who read his poems on the street, at local union meetings, and at the Savoy and Russell Theatres in Glace Bay. The poems were published in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, or posted at the main intersection in Glace Bay. They were also collected in a few books: Songs of Siberia (1919), Songs of Siberia and Rhymes for the Open Road (1924), Echoes from Labor's Wars (1926), The Crime of Johnny Kyle and Other Stuff (192-), The Case of Jim McLachlan (192-), and Narrative Verse and
Other Comments (1944). (None of these dates are terribly secure, apparently.)
Fraser was born in Oxford, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. He was baptized
Oswald Vincent, but his family called him Donald, and he preferred Dawn. Go
figure. He spent his early years in the Antigonish area, and moved to Glace Bay
in 1901. He got as far as high school, but didn't graduate; in "A Biography of
Oswald Donald 'Dawn' Fraser", he states that what knowledge he had came
from reading and travelling. His favourite writers were Jack London, William
Drummond, Robert Service, and Oscar Wilde. Later, he moved to New England
for a period before the First World War, a "footloose working class youth on the
roam through the Boston States," but he also received a certificate in pharmacy
from the state of Massachusetts. He returned to Glace Bay after the war, where
he spent his last forty years. The jobs he sampled included a male nurse,
soldier, pharmacist, labourer in lumber and construction camps, a gravedigger,
circus barker, copywriter, salesman, picture framer, and a small shop owner.
His poems provide a populist critique of industrial capitalism. Songs from
Siberia came out of a four-month stint in Siberia, while he was in the army--an
"ill-advised Allied effort to quell the Bolshevik Revolution" (Echoes xi). These
poems reveal the experiences of suffering of a determined people in the midst
of war. "Rhymes of the Road" explore his years as a foot loose drifter, writing
about the lives, the loves, the hard drinking of sailors, hoboes, labourers, and card players. Echoes of Labor's Wars, his most widely read collection, is about
the class conflicts of industrial Cape Breton in its most turbulent decade: the
1920's. Here we experience, first hand, the bitter conflict of capital (in the form of British Empire Steel Corporation) and a militant trade union. Fraser is one of the few literary voices of the new and independent working class culture, a voice no longer willing to defer to capital. He was intent on telling the truth about the lives of the miners, as illustrated in the story of Eddie Cummins, who, in 1924 was "too poor to buy, too proud to beg":
And before he died he suffered As many have before. When the mines closed down that winter He had nothing left to eat And he starved, he starved, I tell you On your dirty, damned street.
1924, the bleakest year for the miners in Cape Breton, brought low wages, little
work and near starvation for most of the families. Fraser condemns the newspapers for telling how "the prince/ Had caught a cold, and how the princesses' youngest kid/Was nearly four years old" but not reporting that Crimmons and others like him died starving to death in the street. Poems such as "The Case of Jim MaLachlan", the union's secretary/treasurer who was arrested and convicted of seditious libel for telling the truth about conditions is a paean to the men in the frontlines of a union dedicated to improving the 'living wage' of the coal miners.
Politics remained important to Fraser. In the 1930's he joined the CCF and ran
as a local candidate, and during the 1940's he was campaign manager for
Clarie Gillis, the area's first CCF Member of Parliament. He continued to write,
but the poems dwindled in volume and intensity, as Frank & MacGillivray
suggest, this too reflected the mood and spirit of the community. In the 1950's
his health failed, and he died in the Camp Hill Hospital in Halifax in 1968. It
discouraged Fraser that the press showed little interest in his poetry. Ironically,
as Frank & MacGillivray point out, even his obituary made no mention of his
writing. But like Robert Service, Fraser needs to be included in the anthologies.
Populist poetry is important to our memory, our history; it is the voice of the
common man or woman, telling it like it is.
Selected Titles: Echoes from Labor's Wars (Expanded Edition) (1992).
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.