Although their private lives were sharply contrasting, EJ Pratt and Earle Birney shared a surprising number of similarities in their careers and poetic lives. Both had a long educational apprenticeship, taught school, and eventually taught at university. Both came to poetry later in life than most poets. Both took as his central theme man's relationship to nature. Both recognized the brutal indifference of the wilderness while still admiring its power, strength and potential for freedom. Both found humanity struggling with a dual nature: one primitive, self-destructive and violent, the other intelligent and compassionate. But more than this, these two, like Anne Wilkinson, stood outside the mainstream.
E.J Pratt (1882-1964) was born in Western Bay Newfoundland, the son of a Methodist preacher. He was educated in local schools and at St. John's Methodist College. He worked as a teacher and a preacher before entering Victoria College at the University of Toronto. After receiving his BA, BD, MA, and PhD, he remained to teach there. He was forty when he published his first book of poems, Newfoundland Verse. Pratt received many honours including the Lorne Pierce Gold Metal, the Order of St Michael and St. George, and three Governor General's Awards in 1937, 1940 and 1952. From 1936-42 he edited the Canadian Poetry Magazine.
Although he also wrote lyrics, Pratt's best known poems are epics, long narrative poems with often specifically Canadian themes, or themes of power and strength: the Titanic, dinosaurs, whales, the early Jesuits in Quebec, the Canadian Pacific Railway. This is a form that few of his contemporaries were exploring. Stouck (MCA) argues that Pratt's vision is rooted in the harsh life of a bleak, northern land. We hear it in his lovely lyrical poem "Erosion":
It took the sea a thousand years
A thousand years to trace
The granite features of this cliff
In crag and scarp and base.
It took the sea an hour one night
An hour of storm to place
The sculpture of these granite seams
Upon a woman's face. Pratt's vision centres on a metaphor of evolution: that human intelligence
overcomes and supplants brute nature, and moral order supplants the natural one. For Pratt, humanity evolved from nature with intelligence, will, and the ability to choose. In his epic poems, the struggles are without hatred, "the enemy is outside the human community; the conflict is part of the evolutionary process" (MCA 72), as illustrated in "Newfoundland":
Here the winds blow And here they die Not with that wild, exotic rage That vainly sweeps untrodden shores, But with familiar breath Holding a partnership with life, Resonant with hopes of spring, Pungent with the airs of harvest. They call with the silver fifes of the sea, They breathe with the lungs of men, They are one with the tides of the sea, They are one with the tides of the heart, They blow with the rising octaves of dawn, They die with the largo of dusk, Their hands are full to the overflow, In their right is the bread of life, In their left are the waters of death.
Pratt's narrative interest set him outside the mainstream of modernism. In Pratt's narrative poems, Buitenhuis argues, his principle subject was the world of men "which represented liberation, adventure, and the possibility of heroic action" (19). Not all Canadian critics, it should be said, praise Pratt. Some find him indifferent to the suffering of the common people, such as the Chinese labourers on the railroad. Buitenhuis disputes such distracters by placing Pratt in the tradition of Homer and Virgil, arguing that they did not take into their accounts the suffering of the common people in Troy or the Latium warriors. Pratt, for his defenders, was a narrative poet, expressing strong feeling with great technical virtuosity, creating national myths.
Sandra Djwa sees Pratt as a transitional figure whose poetic development
has its roots in both the English evolutionists of the 19th and the modernist tradition of the early 20th century. He was caught in the Victorian confrontation between Darwin's evolutionary theories and Christianity. However, as a consequence of his Newfoundland background "of man's continuing struggle against an implacable nature and his early training in theology, Pratt attempts to equip man with an ethical guide for the struggle against nature" (Djwa 5).
Selected Titles: Collected Poems (1958), 2nd Edition, with introduction by Northrop Frye
Earle Birney (1904-1995) was born in Calgary and raised in the mountain country near Banff and Creston. An only child, he developed a love of books and nature. Birney worked as a manual labourer for two years before entering UBC, first in Science, then English Literature. After his degree, he held a teaching fellowship at the University of California, and an instructorship at the University of Utah, but he didn't stay long in either place. For a brief while, he worked with Trotskyites in New York. Making his way to London where he held a Fellowship at the University of London, he met and married Ester Bull Heiger. Theirs was a turbulent marriage, due to Earle's wandering both
physically and figuratively. Birney eventually finished his MA and PhD at the
University of Toronto. He taught at U.of T., then, after WWII at the University of
B.C. where he eventually became Chairman of the Creative Writing program,
the first of its kind in Canada. Along with his poetry, Birney wrote two novels, a collection of short fiction, numerous articles, reviews and radio talks.
Notwithstanding his teaching responsibilities, Birney seldom stayed home for long. He was a wanderer and a 'poetic ambassador', travelling widely and reading at colleges and universities around the world. After serving in the Army during World War 11, in 1953 Birney travelled to France, then to Mexico, Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and India in 55-56, to Latin America -- Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, the West Indies -- and to Europe in 62-63, and to Australia and New Zealand in 68. These travels are reflected in what many critics consider his best collections: Ice Cod Bell and Stone and Near False Creek Mouth.
His early poems echo Pratt's desire for order out of chaos. However, Birney's
idea of order does not rest in Christian faith, but rather on the value of
common man and the humanist virtues of love and compassion. Birney was
more of a modernist than Pratt. In a post-romantic mood, Birney's relationship
to nature both respects nature's processes and recognizes the need to struggle against it and against our own tendency to despoil it. Birney insists that humanity has the power to choose, and gives to each of us the power to create our own destiny.
"David", one of Birney's earliest poems, is also one of his greatest. Indeed, for a while, it was thought that Birney could not repeat its success. " David", a long narrative poem, is the story of two friends, two mountain climbers. Friends, though David sees himself as Bob's tutor in the art of mountain climbing, they work in a mosquito-fested valley during the week, and climb mountains on their weekends. David spies the unknown, unclimbed Finger on Sawback and decides they must conquer it. After saving Bob from a fall that loosens his footing, David falls and breaks his back. He pleads with Bob to push him over the ledge:
He opened his gray
Straight eyes and brokenly murmured "over---over."
And I, feeling beneath him a cruel fang
Of the ledge thrust in his back, but not understanding,
Mumbled stupidly, "Best not to move" and spoke
Of his pain. But he said, "I can't move---if only I felt
Some pain." Bob is faced with the horror of controlling David's fate. He overcomes his own beliefs to grant David's final wish:
I said that he fell straight to the ice where they found him And none but the sun and incurious clouds have lingered Around the marks of that day on the ledge of the Finger That day, the last of my youth, on the last of our mountains.
David and Other Poems, published in 1942, won the Governor General's
award that year.
In "The Ebb Begins From Dream" we again see Birney's favourite theme at work. The 'relentless moon' controls the Toronto workers' as they ebb back to their jobs, and evening 'flood' homeward. Here, as elsewhere, Birney probes the relationship of nature and art, nature and society. In "Vancouver Lights," the lights, the beleaguered spark of humanity is surrounded by a "flooding of the primal ink", the darkness. The lights of the city symbolize humanity's attempt to create intelligent order in the cosmic, fathomless darkness, in the nothingness "pulsing down from beyond and between/the fragile planets".
Perhaps Birney's most mysterious poem is "Bear on the Delhi Road". It speaks to his favourite themes--nature, society, and the relationship of man to the wilderness, but myth plays a significant role. On the road to Delhi, two Kashmir men teach a Himalayan bear to dance. They dance "to wear wear/from his shaggy body the tranced/wish forever to stay/only an ambling bear/four footed in berries." It is as difficult, the narrator insists, for the men as for the bear because:
It is not easy to free myth from reality or rear this fellow up to lurch lurch with them in the tranced dancing of men
In the 1960's, Birney moved beyond the early poems to explore his love of language, inspired by the experimental poets like bill bissett and BP nichol, to liberate spelling and grammar, to resist closure, to play with sound and pattern.
I suppose it sounds strange to describe Birney, a poet who was an influential professor at U. of T. and U.B.C., an editor of Canadian Forum, Canadian Poetry Magazine and Prism International, and a spokesperson for emerging Canadian realism, as outside the mainstream. (Elspeth Cameron describes him as at the "crucible of Canadian Literature".) Yet, from the time he could hike the mountains around Banff, Birney forged his own trails. He possessed, as Pound described the poets, 'the antennae of the race'. Or at least, the antennae of Canadian letters. From his controversial life style, to his foray into Trotskyism, to his ever-evolving poetry, Birney did not stay comfortably on any middle ground. He was an explorer and an experimenter who created unforgettable Canadian images. For example, in "Bushed" he creates the quintessential trapper who builds his shack on the shores of the lake, but is driven crazy by the mountain which is "clearly alive", which sends messages, booms proclamations, sets guards of goats, and allows the wind to forge an arrowhead out of its peak. In his loneliness, his delusions, the trapper bars himself in and "waits for the great flint to come singing into his heart".
After a vigorous life, a minor heart attack, a debilitating fall out of a tree, Birney had a heart attack in 1987 that left him brain damaged. Elspeth Cameron points out that one of the tragic ironies of Birney's life is that the poet who always feared aging and death, who "hated to be trapped or caged or enclosed, the man who was in favour of capital punishment because he could never have tolerated incarceration, the man who chose the subject of mercy-killing for his major poem, was to be confined to the chronic care ward of a hospital honouring the monarchy he despised in a city he disliked: Toronto's Queen Elizabeth Hospital" (569) for the last eight years of his life. Earle Birney died in 1995 at the age of 91.
Selected Titles: David and Other Poems (1942) GG; Ice Cod Bell and Stone (1962); Near False Mouth Creek (1964); The Collected Poems of Earle Birney Vols. 1 and 2 (1975)
Anne Wilkinson (1910-1961) was born in Toronto and spent her early years in London, Ontario and Toronto, but was educated abroad. Her father was a lawyer who died of multiple sclerosis in 1919. Her mother remarried in 1926. During her early years, Wilkenson visited Bermuda, England, Egypt, Italy and France, but she spent most of her summers at Roche Point on Lake Simcoe, the home of her grandfather Osler. She studied somewhat informally in London, California, Connecticut and Paris. In 1932 she married Dr. Frederick Robert Wilkinson, a paediatric surgeon. In 1930, after a year in London, and a year in New York where Robert was studying, they moved to Toronto where her husband was surgeon on staff at the Hospital for Sick Children. They raised three children. Wilkenson became literary editor for the magazine Here and Now in 1949. In 1954 the Wilkinsons were divorced. Suffering from lung cancer, Wilkinson
died in 1961 at the Toronto General Hospital.
Unlike most of the poets we have examined so far, Wilkinson wrote in widely different genres. She published fables, a history of the famous Osler family, prose sketches, and two collections of poetry: Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955). She stands in the margins of Canadian letters, perhaps because her body of work is not extensive, because it is spread lightly over a range of genres, because she was just entering her mature literary stage when she died, or because, for her generation, it took enormous effort for a woman poet to be recognized. She is no longer collected in the major anthologies, but this oversight cannot detract from her original contribution to Canadian poetry. As AJM Smith argues, "She has helped us to be a little more aware and hence a little more civilized. Her poems are a legacy whose value can never be diminished" ( xxi).
Wilkinson lived one of the last grand Edwardian life-styles in the mansion of her grandfather Osler. With privilege Wilkinson also felt claustrophobia, restricted by the social roles that were clearly defined for her. As a poet, Wilkinson worked in isolation--another restriction of her elite and self-sufficient family. Indeed, it wasn't until the publication of her first book that she came to know other poets such as Pratt, AJM Smith, PK Page, Louis Dudek, and Margaret Avison.
Wilkinson is perhaps best understood in the genre of life writing. "Summer Acres" honours her past, in a poem that is partly an ode to the family home where "my skin is washed by a lather of waves/That bathed the blond bodies of uncles and aunts/And curled on the long flaxen hair of my mother", and partly an elegy where "tall grow the trees/Where the trees and the family are temples/Whose columns will tumble, leaf over root to their ruin".
Like Pratt, Wilkinson explored the relationship of humanity and nature, a relationship for them informed by strong faith. In "A Poet's Eye View" she examines that relationship minutely:
You are earth, loam, actual fields And we the green reed growing from your body; You are solid, we are porous, ringed with chatter Stalks that echo water Running in your under-worldly springs. You, the earth, are bound to earth's own axis, We, who grow our down roots deep in you Are multi-headed, spray out seed like dandipuff To tickle the fabulous thin highborn skin of air Before we fall, point every potent feather Back into its spawning bed, your tethered body; You are warped with rock, the woof of you Is ore; in soul's rough weather Rock splits open at the giant tremor of the soil; We, the green ones, laugh and add an inch For each storm's death, our knowing nonsense blowing On and off the lode of your mortality.
Although the central theme here is similar to Pratt's, Wilkinson contributes not
only female images "You are warped with rock, the woof of you/is ore", but also early post-modern images in the "multi-headed" nature of humanity set
against the singularity of rock.
Many of her poems depend upon sensuous imagery--"the "five and fathomed
senses,/Precision instruments/to chart the wayward course/through rock and
moss and riddles" as in:
You'll shiver but you'll hear The sharp white nails of the moon Scratch the slate of midnight water
She intermingles light (as both truth and life), green (the signification of
nature) and love to achieve, as AJM Smith notes, the sensuous community of
the green world, a testimony to the beauty and richness of life:
Then two in one the lovers lie And peel the skin of summer With their teeth And suck its marrow from a kiss So charged with grace The tongue, all knowing Holds the sap of June Aloof from seasons, flowing.
In the introduction to The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson, AJM Smith describes the special qualities and peculiar virtues of Wilkinson's poems, "their being saturated, as it were, with light, a radiance of the mind, cast often on small, familiar things, or things overlooked before, and reflected back into the mind and heart" (xiii).
Selected Titles: Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955)
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.