F.R. Scott, "The Dance is One"

I've just reread F.R. Scott's, The Dance is One (1973). Scott is not a great poet but he's also not a minor poet; as I wrote about Scott's colleague and friend, A.J.M. Smith, he is one of our better poets. Scott's importance lies not only in his body of creative work but also in what he did (he helped bring modernism in poetry to Canada in the 1920s), who he knew (Leon Edel, A.J.M. Smith, John Glassco, Leo Kennedy, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Louis Dudek, and many others, for instance Pierre Eliot Trudeau), what he believed (for instance, an inclusive vision of Canada) and his career as a distinguished law professor at McGill University. 

Louis Dudek told me that Scott controlled every aspect of Sandra Djwa's biography, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott, that always intrigued me but I also feel ambivalent about it because Scott basically censored the book. If you read Professor Djwa's biography of P.K. Page you'll get the other half of the story about Scott's extramarital affairs that he didn't want in his official biography. I was also very impressed with Scott's book of translations St-Denys Garneau & Anne Hebert: Translations/Traductions (1962); additional translations by Scott are in The Dance is One.  

The title of The Dance is One is from his poem "Dancing" and is also the inscription on his and his wife's headstone in Mount Royal Cemetery. By the way, Allan Hustak's biography of Scott's father Canon Frederick G Scott, Faith Under Fire, shows the kind of extraordinary family F.R. came from; Canon Scott was an exceptional person as was his son Frank Scott.

Here is my main reservation regarding Frank Scott as a poet: writing poetry is not a sideline, maybe people can do two things well in life but not in poetry, poetry demands full-time commitment and Scott never gave it full-time commitment, he was also a human rights activist, a lawyer, a law professor, one of the founders of the CCF, and while some of the poetry he wrote is exceptional he also wrote satirical poetry, and other poems, that have a limited interest for readers. I know that Scott was charismatic and people liked him, some loved him, they all thought highly of him. But poets don't have to be nice people, was Robert Frost a nice person? No, but he was a great poet. Here is my main complaint about Frank Scott, he was attached to his social class while promoting social causes, he was making a name for himself as a lawyer and law professor, and while he was doing this he wasn't writing poetry, he was dividing his time and while poetry was important to him it didn't come absolutely first despite what he claimed. None of the Montreal Group of poets wrote large bodies of work except for A.M. Klein.  

Cover of Frank Scott's The Dance is One

Headstone for F.R. Scott and his wife Marian Dale Scott at Mount Royal Cemetery

Cover of Scott's translation of poems by Anne Hebert and St-Denys Garneau

Carolyn Zonailo at the Scotts' family grave site,
Mount Royal Cemetery, Montreal, mid-1990s

NOTE: This was up-dated and expanded on 28 July 2019; 02 August 2022.