"Laurentian Shield" by F. R. Scott

Events and Signals, F.R. Scott,
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.

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