T.L. Morrisey

Monday, July 15, 2019

A Reappraisal of A.J.M. Smith


"And the classic shade/ Of cedar and pine..."

                                            
1.

Some people may think it presumptuous to call a book of only a hundred short,
mainly lyrical pieces of verse Collected Poems—but actually that is exactly what it is.
                                    —A.J.M Smith, Canadian Literature, (# 15, winter 1963)

                       
Fifty years ago A.J.M. Smith was one of our most prominent Canadian poets, since then Smith's prominence has declined into obscurity. Smith was a poet but he was also an anthologist, a critic, and someone who was important in the literary history of Canada, but he is primarily important as a poet. The reason for Smith's obscurity is his small body of poems, that he did not publish enough to be a significant poet. In E.K. Brown's review of Smith's first book of poems, News of the Phoenix (1944), Brown writes,

At last Mr. Smith has brought out a collection of his own. My first feeling, at the mere sight of the book, was one of disappointment. It is a little book; it holds but thirty-nine poems, spread over about as many pages; and among the thirty-nine are the twelve from New Provinces, and others well known to the readers of more recent anthologies of Canadian verse. One had hoped for evidence of greater fertility.

        One may be justifiably disappointed at the size of Smith's book but the book's real importance is its content, not the number of pages, and beginning with the title poem there are some truly exceptional poems in News of the Phoenix. Brown mentions twice that Smith is not a "fertile" poet, seemingly to reinforce his dislike for the book. But surely Brown knew that all poets are different; not all poets are prolific, some poets stop writing when young, some have ten or twenty years between books, and some write and publish more than they should. (Note: that both Brown and Smith published books on Canadian poetry in 1943 perhaps explains something of Brown's criticism of Smith's book; they were, in some sense, rivals with opposing views.) A few months after publishing this review, Brown made an effort to soften his first reaction to Smith's book by writing the following:

Finally, just a few months ago, appeared Mr. Smith's "News of the Phoenix," long awaited in Canada, and in perfection of technique undoubtedly the finest first volume since Archibald Lampman's "Among the Millet" came out in 1888. Mr, Smith has undergone the same influences that went to shape the difficult younger poets in this country. He is their analogue—and their peer. In his work is a distinctive note, the note of a temperament which is, as I have said elsewhere, "proud, hard, noble, and intense."            
 This idea that Smith's work can be dismissed based on his small body of published poems is repeated by Desmond Pacey in his Ten Canadian Poets (1958); Pacey writes that Smith "has produced a small body of poetry—only, in fact, two slim volumes, the second of which reprints a good deal of the contents of the first... " Pacey then writes,

 To call Smith a poet's poet seems to me to draw attention to his strengths and his   limitations.  He is a master craftsman, a poet from whom other poets can learn many of  the subtleties of technique; on the other hand he has neither the explosive force, the  musical charm, nor the clearly formulated set of ideas which either singly or in some  combination make a poet a great popular figure.

Many contemporary readers will agree with Pacey's assessment of Smith's poems; the poems emphasize craft over emotion and because of this they lack the capacity to hold our interest. To these readers Smith's poems must seem disembodied from time and place, as though self-contained and remote. This is the flaw in Smith's poetry: it is that technical skill without emotional depth is a formula for obsolete poems; however, conversely, emotion without technical skill is also a flaw in poetry. Having said this, there is more to Smith's work than craft; there is imagination, insight, intellectual depth, thematic cohesion, a restrained emotional content, and Smith's persistence to create a body of work that sustains its vision over many years. These are the qualities that we overlook when we complain that Smith's poems weigh too heavily on the side of craft. 

About twenty years after E.K. Brown's review was published, and five years after Pacey's book was published, Canadian Literature (# 15, winter 1963) dedicated an issue to A.J.M. Smith; in this issue, "Salute to A.J.M. Smith",  Earle Birney used the same word as Brown, "fertile", to criticize Smith; Birney writes, "As it turned out, Smith was to prove less fertile a poet than most, and, though he was to continue to set us all high standards when he did publish, his dominance was elsewhere." I could be totally wrong but until reading E.K. Brown's statement that Smith is not a "fertile" poet, and Birney's repetition of this, I had never heard of any poet, or any artist,  referred to as "fertile" except as having a fertile imagination. 







2.

Most of the members of the Montreal Group are distinguished poets (Leon Edel, a member of the group, was not a poet); all the poets but Leo Kennedy won the Governor General's award for poetry (F.R. Scott won the GG two times, once for non-fiction). Indeed, this is the preeminent group of poets—distinguished, creative, and innovative—in Canada. If Smith didn't publish a lot of poems Leo Kennedy published even fewer; John Glassco published only marginally more than Smith. Glassco and Smith published two books each followed by Kennedy with his one book. F.R. Scott published slightly more than A.M. Klein but only because Scott lived longer than Klein. In sum, none of these poets were prolific.

Critics who complain that Smith was not "fertile" as a poet don't understand the process of writing poetry which, simply put, is that the Muse visits the poet, it doesn't work in reverse. As well, much of Smith's published body of poems was written when he was young, the Muse often prefers young poets over older poets; as an example of this, Coleridge was most prolific as a poet for a two year period when he was twenty-five years old, from 1797 to 1799 (I am not conflating Coleridge with A.J.M. Smith). Smith's priority was the perfectly crafted poem, his ideal was a small collection of about one hundred poems; this results in a small book because perfectly crafted poems take more time to write than poems that need little editing. To explain this better, consider that Alex Colville, although not a poet but a man of great technical skill, imagination, and vision; Colville produced only three or four paintings a year, but no one ever said he wasn't "fertile". Smith encouraged an idea of the importance of technical ability in poetry but when applied to his own work this was interpreted as Smith not being "fertile" and then further interpreted and misconstrued as his work not being significant.  

 

All the members of the Montreal Group (again, leaving out Leon Edel) published poetry but also worked in other literary genres, for instance criticism, translation, and memoirs, or as anthologists (Smith and F.R. Scott; Smith and M.L. Rosenthal). Some group members were accomplished as poets but also in fields other than writing: F.R. Scott was a distinguished constitutional lawyer and law professor; A.M. Klein was a lawyer and publicist for the Bronfman family; Leo Kennedy made his living from advertising; A.J.M. Smith was a man of letters. Let's compare Smith's body of published books of poems with those of other members of the Montreal Group, excluding posthumously published books, and see where Smith stands among them; here is a list of the poetry books they published:


F.R. Scott's books of poetry:

Poetry books:
  • Overture. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945.
  • Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.
  • The Eye of the Needle: Satire, Sorties, Sundries. Montreal: Contact Press, 1957.
  • Signature. Vancouver: Klanak Press, 1964.
  • Trouvailles: Poems from Prose. Montreal: Delta Canada, 1967.
  • The Dance is One. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973.

Selected Poems:
  • Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966.


A.M. Klein's books of poetry:

Poetry:
  • Hath Not a Jew.... New York, Behrman Jewish Book House, 1940.
  • Poems. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944.
  • The Hitleriad. Norfolk, CT.: New Directions, 1944.
  • Seven Poems. Montreal: The Author, 1947.
  • The Rocking Chair and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948.


John Glassco's books of poetry:

 

Poetry Books:
  • The Deficit Made Flesh: Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1958.
  • A Point of Sky. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Chapbook:
  • Montreal. Montreal: DC Books, 1973.

Selected Poems:
  • Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971.


A.J.M. Smith's books of poetry:

 

Poetry Books:
  • News of the Phoenix and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1943. New York: Coward-McCann, 1943.
  • A Sort of Ecstasy. Michigan State College Press, 1954. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.

Selected Poems:
  • Collected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962.
  • Poems New and Collected. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967
  • The Classic Shade: Selected Poems. Toronto: McClelland Stewart, 1978                                                                                                                                                                                      
 Leo Kennedy's poetry book:

Poetry Books:
  • The Shrouding.  1933



A.J.M. Smith's family home in the 1920s, 79 Chesterfield Avenue, Westmount, Quebec
                   


3. 

Here are some quotations from Canadian Literature's "Salute to A.J.M. Smith" issue (# 15, winter 1963). In 1963 Smith was still a prominent poet and referred to with admiration and esteem by his contemporaries; he was acknowledged as having made a substantial contribution to Canadian poetry.

  • "This issue of Canadian Literature is in part a celebration occasioned by the publication of the Collected Poems of A. J. M. Smith, one of Canada's important writers and, since the 1930's, a poet of international repute. It is an act of homage..."  —George Woodcock

  • "All help in the end to put this collection, despite its spareness, among the most distinguished, I believe, of the century."  —Roy Fuller

  • "As I read the Collected Poems which Oxford has just given us, I realize, as I never did before, just how all of a piece, as well as how varied, Smith's work really is. "Metaphysical poetry and pure poetry are what I stand for," he has insisted. One may be justly dubious about his "metaphysical" qualities, but he is as pure a poet as he is a critic."  —Milton Wilson



                           


4. A.J.M. Smith and M.L. Rosenthal

M.L. Rosenthal was both a poet and a critic; in his introduction to A.J.M. Smith's The Classic Shade, Selected Poems (1978) Rosenthal writes with authority and insight into Smith's poetry. Perhaps because Rosenthal is not Canadian he can appreciate Smith's work in a way that Canadians can't; Rosenthal isn't encumbered with the preconceptions native Canadians bring with them. It was Rosenthal who invented the important descriptive phrase "confessional poetry" in his review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies, a whole school of poetry is categorized as such, so Rosenthal is both perceptive and influential. Rosenthal is also a poet and poets are often, if not usually, the best critics of poetry and the most understanding of what motivates poets to write. It is a failed critic who places ideology above the work being discussed. Smith met Rosenthal at Michigan State College (now Michigan State Universityin the 1930s when they were both teaching there; Rosenthal moved on to teach at New York University but they remained friends and together edited the anthology Exploring Poetry (1955). Here are several quotations by Rosenthal from his 1977 essay on A.J.M. Smith, the essay is both the introduction to The Classic Shade and a separate essay that was published elsewhere:

  • "Smith, an important force in modern Canadian poetry though still but little known in the United States, is an active esthetic intelligence whose life's work (like that of most other genuine poets of matured intelligence) refutes the very notion of an "anxiety of influence" that reduces the power of poetry to renew its energies because of its great past."  P. 10

  • "If we viewed Smith's complete oeuvre as a unit, we would find in it analogous balancing of joy in the life-force and more depressive visions."  P. 12

  • "In the Romantic-Classical debate, Smith tends to vote Classical on principle while his poems actually throw the balance of feeling and imagination a little the other way." P. 13

  • "His (Smith's) ordinary humanity is evident in his obvious preoccupation with love and death and joy, and in his sense of language."  P. 15

  • "The nobility of his (Smith's) finest work has many aspects. I believe it can partly be accounted for by his high degree of empathic sensitization to the rhetoric of the most truly accomplished lyrical poetry generally. But his unabashedly human hatred of death is somehow another, and of necessity a more passionate, source. One rarely finds the position held with such thrilling clarity in poetry. The language is the pure, sustained, and subtle speech of a poet who sees his own nature as a relationship between his art and his fate."  P. 19
                                           

                                  
5.

He will go far, for he is genuine, and gifted.
—F.R. Scott, diary entry on A.J.M. Smith, 21 February 1927


Casual readers of poetry should not be overlooked, any audience for poetry is important. Casual readers don't care about the technical or historical background of poetry—they don't care if A.J.M. Smith was influenced by the Metaphysical Poets, they have probably never heard of the Metaphysical Poets—they like great poems when they read poetry. This was my experience when I was young, I was reading Palgrave's The Golden Treasury and read Shelley's "Ozymandias of Egypt" and immediately I knew I was in the presence of something great, something that existed by itself, as though it had always existed and always would exist. Great poems have a life of their own, they transcend the rest of a poet's body of work and, again, one doesn't need knowledge of the literary and historical era to enjoy reading them. These truly great poems are experienced as "pure poetry", existing beyond time and place; they are the kind of poem A.J.M. Smith wanted to write and, in fact, did write. One or two of Smith's poems—"pure poems"— more than make up for his small body of work; I refer to poems like "The Lonely Land" and "Like an Old Proud King in a Parable", but there are others.

Roy Daniells, in his review of Smith's The Classic Shade, Selected Poems (1978), published in Canadian Literature (# 79, winter 1978), positions Smith "as moving between two worlds, one dying, as the tradition of Carman, Lampman and Roberts subsides, one powerful to be born. ... How well has Smith provided a continuum, bridged the gap, or at least navigated between these diversities?"  Just over forty years later we have our answer, Smith has not fared well. The reason Daniells gives for Smith's failure to retain his prominence as a poet is demographic, he suggests that multiculturalism has displaced the concept of a homogenous culture of which Smith was a representative. Multiculturalism, as Daniells recognizes, is the society that was still "powerful to be born." For Daniells, Smith might be too old fashioned and even irrelevant to a contemporary multicultural audience; however, he also writes, "It is certain that a poet can become memorable on the strength of a handful of poems that show a fine excess of sensibility and achieve a genuine utterance."

Louis Dudek writes that it was Smith' s misfortune to publish his work in an era of low art, a time when poetry was popularized and made easy to understand and when high art was rejected by the public as uninteresting, inaccessible, and elitist. In a review, published in Delta (# 20, February 1963), of Smith's Collected Poems (1963), Dudek writes, "It may be that we find, in the end, that this was the most durable poetry published in Canada in the forty or so years since Smith began. He is our miglior fabbro, and in the last resort it is the fabbro that looks best to immortality." As most readers will remember, T.S. Eliot referred to Ezra Pound as "il miglior fabbro", the "better craftsman", in thanks to Pound who had edited Eliot's "The Waste Land". This is high praise from Dudek considering his adulation of Ezra Pound.

Most poets never know prominence, they only know obscurity; A.J.M. Smith is fortunate, he was once a prominent poet and deservedly so. Smith can be better appreciated and understood today than when he was alive, today we can consider his oeuvre in the context of the completion of both his life and his body of poems. The first thing in a reappraisal of Smith's literary career is to stop diminishing his accomplishment in poetry by saying he did not publish enough poems to be a significant poet; Smith's body of poems is sufficient in size and, more importantly, it is also significant as poetry. Some of Smith's poems transcend the time in which they were written, they are the "pure poems" that he wanted to write and they resonate in the reader's imagination. Smith's status is probably somewhere between being a "minor poet" (to which he resigned himself) and a "major poet"; in fact, he is neither minor nor major, but he is one of our better poets. Smith's poetry is a remarkable and incredible achievement but, as with any poet, he is not everyone's cup of tea and reading Smith takes some work, it is not light reading.



                                                            —Stephen Morrissey
                                                                April-July 2019

NOTE: Do a search of this blog for other comments on A.J.M. Smith .




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