The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Commentary on Poetry in English, Third edition

by Louis Dudek (Editor), Michael Gnarowski (Editor)

The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada gathers together primary literary documents including manifestos, reviews, critical essays, and recollections to illustrate the most significant developments in the rise of modernist English Canadian poetry. Rather than present exclusively academic criticism, the editors have carefully selected original texts by the principal figures of modernism to offer readers a behind-the-scenes look at twentieth-century poetry in Canada. Collecting several decades of writings by luminaries beginning with pivotal essays by John Sutherland and A.J.M. Smith, and including George Bowering, Northrop Frye, Irving Layton, P.K. Page, F.R. Scott, Raymond Souster, and William Carlos Williams, this volume also provides explanatory notes to guide the reader and to evaluate the significance of each piece in its literary and historical context. This classic work of Canadian literary studies is now back in print with a substantial new introduction and appendices by Michael Gnarowski, who explains and interprets the essence of key initiatives in the unfolding of a modernist point of view. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada offers a comprehensive chronological path from the earliest examples of Canadian modernism to the beginning of the postmodern period.

384 pages, Hardcover

Published April 24, 2017

About the author

Louis Dudek was one of Canada’s most important and influential cultural workers. After gaining his PhD from Columbia University, Dudek in 1951 returned from New York to Montreal, the city of his birth, to take up a position as professor of English at McGill. Dudek’s return to Canada marked the beginning of his efforts to revolutionize the Montreal poetry scene through little magazines and small-press publishing, providing alternatives to commercial presses and opportunities for talented young poets. In 1956 he started The McGill Poetry Series, which gave a start to several young poets, including Leonard Cohen. The author of numerous books of poetry, Louis Dudek died in 2001.