Is F.R. Scott a Major Poet?

A few months ago I made the comment on Facebook that F.R. Scott is a "minor poet". Right away I knew I had committed some kind of Canadian Literature heresy; what? F.R. Scott is a minor poet? This led me to wonder about the criteria for how we categorize poets as "major" and "minor". T.S. Eliot in his essay, "What is Minor Poetry?", writes that the whole of the body of work by a major poet is greater than that same poet's individual poems. The opposite is true of the minor poet; the minor poet has a few really good poems but the majority of the minor poet's body of work is not equal to the excellence of a few individual poems. Eliot says that we need to read all of a major poet's work. All we need to read of a minor poet are the poems that are anthologized, the rest of the body of work is unimportant for the average reader. It is very difficult to categorize a poet as "major" because the criteria for categorizing poets is different for each poet; someone who is a major poet may not be "major" for the same reasons some other poet is considered "major". There is no single set of criteria for identifying a major poet; however, minor poets are easily identified. Returning to Frank Scott, I read The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott Toronto, McCelland and Stewart, 1981); he is a surprisingly original and compassionate poet and worth reading today. I can't bring myself to say that Scott is a major Canadian poet but (despite Eliot) I would suggest reading all of Scott's work, there isn't a lot of it but it's worth reading.

1981

After reading F.R. Scott's Events and Signals (1954)

It's a different experience to read someone's individual books than it is to read their collected poems. For instance, F.R. Scott's Events and Signals (1954), which I've just read, gives the reader an insight into Scott's thinking that changes one's perception of Scott, it softens and humanizes him; perhaps this side of Scott isn't as evident as in his Collected Poems. In fact, the Frank Scott in this book is quite fascinating and revealing. "Departure" seems to refer to his separation from P.K. Page in the late 1940s. I think we only see now, after Peter Dale Scott's poem in last fall's Pacific Rim Review of Books, that "A L'Ange Avant Gardien" and "Will to Win" refer to the artist and dancer Francoise Sullivan, but if I'm wrong then correct me. And we know that he had also a romantic relationship with the artist Pegi Nichol which perhaps gives us a different perspective on his poem "For Pegi Nichol". There were so many affairs with or without the possibly silent approval of his wife, Marian Dale Scott. "Invert" and "Caring" give an insight into these affairs: it is that Scott was always looking for love but also afraid to leave his marriage with someone he also seemed to love and (of course) lose his social position. Even today we don't look on affairs with approval or kindness; affairs come across as sordid and someone is always betrayed and hurt by them.

Cover of Scott's Events and Signals

On Leo Kennedy

On the right is the Kennedy family home on Rushbrooke Avenue in Verdun where they lived in the 1920s.
They had a private tennis court adjacent to their property. 

On Leo Kennedy

Ken Norris told me that in the 1970s he and a Montreal publisher invited Leo Kennedy to publish a book of poems, it would have been Kennedy's first book since The Shrouding (1933). Kennedy arrived at the meeting with a garbage bag full of poems (not an auspicious beginning!) and the meeting failed to produce a book; it would have been only his second book in forty years. One wonders about this meeting. Did Kennedy sabotage an opportunity to publish a second book so late in life? Was it a way to get out of publishing what may have been inferior work? Did he dislike my friend or the publisher and not want to work with them, then why go to the meeting? Or was there some psychological complex that had held him back from writing new poems or publishing them? Still, despite the dearth of new poems by Kennedy he always insisted that he was a poet, he was not shy about his place in Canadian literature, nor should he have been.

When I heard this story about Kennedy I thought that he was a fool to have passed up on a publishing opportunity; however, I've known other poets like him who had lots of talent but who never fulfilled themselves as poets, they stopped publishing for several decades or never published again after some early success. Am I the only one to think of this as a failing on Kennedy's part? Perhaps I am. During the years after The Shrouding Kennedy didn't publish much original poetry but he did publish book reviews and even some poems in Poetry (Chicago). Patricia Morley in As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy's Story (1994), her biography of Kennedy, mentions that these reviews were perceptive and incisive. As well, Kennedy was also interested in socialist ideas that were at odds with his work in an ad agency as a copywriter for consumer goods. Kennedy was one of the early "Mad Men" as depicted in the television show by that name. It seems that his creative energy went into copy writing.

Perhaps the circumstances of Kennedy's personal life need to be considered. After 1935 Kennedy had to make a living to support his family; he had a second marriage and years later he took care of an invalid wife. Indeed, he had a successful career in copy writing and the family moved several times because of his work. He had three sons—one with his first wife and two with his second wife—and he helped raise two grandchildren which is what brought him back to Montreal in the 1970s. Kennedy was no puer aeternus, the Jungian term that describes a man who does not take on full adult responsibilities like gainful employment, maintaining long term and meaningful relationships, supporting his family, and being a fully functioning adult in society. He lived a responsible life of stability and middle class respectability and was well-liked and respected by his colleagues; however, perhaps (solely as conjecture) this middle class life conspired to end his career as a poet even though others have lived middle class lives such as his and they continued being poets. So what gives?

What gives is that after hearing of the "poems in the garbage bag" episode I saw Kennedy in a new light, as a kind of archetypal trickster, a coyote figure in mythology, someone who punctures the appearance of respectability in others. The anecdotes that Morley recounts of Kennedy shooting squirrels and storing them in his freezer, and other stories, suggests to me that Kennedy had a bit of the joker in him; perhaps even his copy writing career is a job suited to the jester, to someone aiming to sell stuff to people who don't want or don't need the stuff up for sale. This is just to suggest an explanation for some of Kennedy's behaviour and perhaps his work as a poet.

Kennedy is someone who had lots of talent as a poet, he is a formalist in his work, in some poems he is counting syllables, he has an incredible vocabulary in his work, and his images, metaphors and similes can be stunning. There is also something "old fashioned" in his work, I am not sure that he is a truly modern poet except that he was active as a poet in the Modern period; he's some kind of an aberration, a solitary voice that is self-invented. Kennedy has a depth of perception that is sometimes greater than the other Montreal Group of poets from McGill University. But I don't think he felt included among the Westmount poets who dominated English language poetry back in the 1930s. F.R. Scott made some cracks about Kennedy coming from working-class Verdun even though Kennedy had as much talent as FRS as a poet; Kennedy was not truly a working class person, his father owned a successful business located in Old Montreal and their home in Verdun was substantial. It is ironic that Scott is the defender of the working class, one of the founders of the CCF, a precursor of the NDP, and yet he is snobbish with Kennedy. Could Kennedy not have been offended by this, or contemptuous of Scott because of this? A response to Scott and his patrician lifestyle and social class might be to become even more eccentric. This, of course, speaks to the considerable class divisions that English-speaking Montreal experienced in the past; the wealthy lived in Westmount and had little or nothing to do with the English in Verdun, NDG, Griffintown, or elsewhere in the city of Montreal.

It's also curious that in 1926 AJM Smith published a poem entitled "The Shrouding", seven years before Kennedy published his book with this same title. Was there some conflict between them because of this? Small things divide poets! A friend published a poem with the same title as one of my poems and I always wondered what that was all about. BTW, his poem was inferior to mine... But I also published a poem entitled "Heirloom" after reading AM Klein's poem "Heirloom"; with its allusion to Klein my poem was to honour the older poet and it was published years (in the mid-1970s) after Klein's death. Was Kennedy making some kind of a comment, positive or negative, about Smith or the poems that Smith was writing by using Smith's poem title for his book?

I also question some aspects of Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy; she treats Kennedy in a benign way, but you also get the feeling that she thought of him as her personal pet project, she was writing his biography and she was proud to have him captive. She insinuates herself into his life story and becomes a part of Kennedy's biography. She comments that there is no biography of AJM Smith; Anne Compton's A.J.M. Smith, Canadian Metaphysical  (1994) is not a biography but a discussion of his work. Kennedy has a biography and the biography was a big deal for Leo Kennedy as it would be for any poet. It must have made him more impressive with his family and with other poets, it also returned him to public attention. I doubt we would pay him as much attention as we are (for instance this essay) if the biography hadn't been published, it raised interest in Leo Kennedy, poet. Kennedy was serious about the biography but he must have realised how little he had achieved in poetry; indeed, later he has difficulty collecting any archival material when requested to do so. There are no extensive Leo Kennedy Fonds; he came up with very little archival material.

Now, I'm just thinking about Leo Kennedy and trying to figure him out and maybe he's not a trickster at all. One of the things critic do, one of the things some readers do, is try to figure out some explanation of the writer or the writer's work that he or she is currently reading. Another thing is to build on what we read, to develop some of the ideas we read and make them a part of out own insights into life. We find something curious, or something that appeals to us, or something that deepens our feelings and understanding about life, or we find something that speaks to us as human beings and we need to explore that writer or his or her work for ourselves, to apply it to our own understanding of life. That's what I've tried to do here.

Note: Kennedy may have published a second book in 1972 or 1992, Sunset in the States published by Diane Press; this seems to be a summary of some kind of legislation in Michigan, it is not mentioned in Morley's book on Kennedy. Perhaps it is not Kennedy's work but wrongly attributed to him.

18 January 2018

The Shrouding by Leo Kennedy

I just finished reading Leo Kennedy's The Shrouding, originally published in 1933, this edition was re-published by Michael Gnarowski's Golden Dog Press in 1975. I am so impressed by Kennedy's work, I think he's brilliant and he's the real thing, a real poet. He always presented himself as a poet and I thought this rather specious when reading Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy, but I can see the validity of it now. This one book is Kennedy's (almost entire) body of work, as Leon Edel writes in his Introduction, "...all writers in reality have only one book within them." This may be true, or not true, but we would still have liked a few more books by the same person. Kennedy is a formalist in his writing, there is rhythm and music in his poems, many of the poems are unfashionable as they rhyme, and the first poem in the book is a sonnet. Kennedy writes in his Introduction, "These poems were written when the world was more formal and poets thought a lot about scansion and almost as much about rhyme." I bought my copy of The Shrouding from Dundurn Press, delivered it cost $13.80, cheap! https://www.dundurn.com/books/Shrouding

McGill Fortnightly Review

Mark McCawley, the editor of Urban Grafitti, was in favour of online/digital magazines, I was in favour (and still am) of both, but I prefer a hard copy, on paper. This was one of the few things about which Mark and I disagreed. Online periodicals can disappear when the editor discontinues the site/periodical, and what is digital can be revised or altered in the Orwellian future. Hard copies of periodicals, kept in archives, can be researched years from now and I have done this type of research. So, for instance, two of the Montreal Group of poets (Scott and Smith) founded The McGill Fortnightly Review and it was published from 1925 to 1927; a few years later they published The McGilliad. Even today these periodicals are fascinating reading. The full run of both periodicals is available at Special Collections at McGill University or online at https://blogs.library.mcgill.ca/…/mcgill-fortnightly-review/

Leo Kennedy, Montreal Poet

I've just read Patricia Morley's As Though Life Mattered, Leo Kennedy's Story (1994); Kennedy was one of the four poets that comprised the Montreal Group in the 1920s. The others were F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, and A.M. Klein. Kennedy had one book in him, The Shrouding (1933); I've read some of the poems in this book and they are truly exceptional, had he written more and produced a larger body of work he might have been the best of the four poets. Instead, he wrote advertising copy (like Ron Everson), many book reviews, and some poems for children; however, the second or third book was never written. We can only judge a poet on what he or she produces, the marriages, poverty, fishing trips, drinking, this is all of interest but it isn't poetry.

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.                          

"Laurentian Shield" by F.R. Scott

F.R. Scott was born in Quebec City on August 1st in 1899 but lived most of his life in Montreal. A member of the Montreal Group of poets, Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, Leon Edel, and John Glassco helped bring Modernism to Canada. Desmond Pacey's Ten Canadian Poets (1958) is still a good place for some insight into Scott's importance as a poet.

Here is one of Scott's most famous poems:

LAURENTIAN SHIELD

F. R. Scott
From:   Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.

A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

Retrieved, 14 August 2017: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/scott_fr/poem2.htm

                                                                                                "The Dance is One"

John McAuley reading at the Yellow Door, Montreal