The Montreal forties : modernist poetry in transition / Brian Trehearne.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Montreal Forties establishes a new reading of Canadian modernist poetry in this crucial decade, during which the radical impersonality of high-modernist poetics gave way to an ironic expression of the modern individual in years of unexampled geopolitical and private crisis.

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CHOICE Review

Trehearne (McGill Univ.) challenges the "conventional categories" of Canadian literary history with a painstaking examination of four key poets based in Montreal in the forties: P.K. Page, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Louis Dudek. Author of Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (1989), Trehearne convincingly argues that the persistent tendency to divide these poets into a Preview and a First Statement group (after the names of two "little magazines") is simplistic. He contends that all of these poets share a style of the period "in which brevity, density, and difficulty of metaphor are central to a poem's soundness of structure, or lack of it." The author supports his arguments with an exemplary use of archival and published sources; his chapters on Klein and Layton are especially good. Though Trehearne is so committed to the modernist aesthetic that he leaves other issues unexplored, this book should provoke many responses. Unfortunately, Trehearne's mannered writing is sometimes more difficult than the poetry he discusses, so his audience will be limited to graduate students, faculty, and the occasional ambitious undergraduate, for whom the book is recommended. T. Ware; Queen's University at Kingston