Selections from The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971)

From “Canada and Its Poetry” (1943), an essay in review ofThe Book of Canadian Poetry(1943), edited by A.J.M. Smith: … [A]ccording to Mr. Smith’s book, the outstanding achievement of Canadian poetry is in the evocation of stark terror. Not a coward’s terror, of course; but a controlled vision of the causes of cowardice. The immediate source of this is obviously the frightening loneliness of a huge and thinly settled country. When all the intelligence, morality, reverence, and simian cunning of man confronts a sphinx-like riddle of the indefinite like the Canadian winter, the man seems as helpless as