I was lean and sickly as a child, a tall skinny boy, and a great deal probably follows from this. It made me introverted and hypersensitive from the start, too much concerned with my health—though perhaps with good cause—and too self-conscious for my own good. (“When a hypochondriac is sick,” I later wrote, “he is twice as sick.”)

“Show me another kid who is any way like you,” said one of my cousins to me, sensing my difference from the rest. “Your family was always superior,” said another, many years later. “Always above everybody else.” We were all part of an extended family living in a connected group of houses in east-end Montreal, houses owned by my grandparents and uncles. (My superior family owned nothing, we rented a cold-water flat from Grandma at fifteen dollars a month.) The aunts and uncles very Polish, but mostly Liverpool-born and speaking fluent English from the first generation on. I was second-generation Canadian-born: Montreal, February 6, 1918.

There was Grandma, a large patriarchal mother-figure, and Grandpa, with handle-bar whiskers. A backyard which had a long-stemmed poplar tree going up three stories and then branching out, scattering catkins and caterpillars in spring and summer. There were seven sons and daughters, the uncles and aunts, all but one married and reproducing dozens of grandchildren, who were my sibling cousins. So I lived in a big crowd, though feeling somewhat isolated and different.

Grandmother said within my hearing, when I was five or six, that I might as well be taken out of school since I would not live long. Adults should be very careful of what they say within the hearing of children: it can be remembered fifty or sixty years later and can still be resented. I have long outlived my grandmother, and I was quite fascinated by her powerful personality, but I never forgot that careless remark. After all, it flawed my unthinking confidence in life from the very beginning. I was adult from my fifth year, so far as understanding the fact of human mortality is concerned.

The thought that I was somehow insufficiently quick, both physically and mentally, must have stayed with me, because I have never had much solid confidence in myself. Whatever I have done in later years was partly to prove to my father that I was not altogether a loss, not entirely a disappointment, though my father by then was a long time dead and would not have remembered what that was all about.

(Of course, Father would have been immensely surprised, and shocked, at any time, if he had known that an occasional word dropped, really a reprimand, had sunk so deep. So would Grandmother, who came from a Polish-Lithuanian culture where children frequently died young, and frail ones became predictable white coffins. It was hard common sense to say, “He won’t survive.” They meant no harm by it at all.)

In my twenties or thirties I invented a “personality test” that depends on childhood memories. Write down the three or four things you vividly remember from your tenth year or earlier (most people will remember no more than that), then interpret these incidents as symbolic memories.

I remember coming home from school in some fear, in my sixth year, having missed a word in an ongoing spelling-bee. (I had lost my first place and dropped somewhere to the bottom of the class.) One of my cousins, or one of my sisters, had run ahead to tell my mother the bad news. I could not face the coming reproaches, and hid under a bed to avoid facing my mother.

Some years later, graduating from Lansdowne School, I missed winning a four-year scholarship to attend high school by a matter of three marks or so. The failure stayed with me throughout my high school and college career, both of which were costly and which we could hardly afford, and it was only much later that it occurred to me, when I sized up the past, that after all I had led the entire school neck and neck with another boy, and came very close to winning! No, actually I had failed.

My mother died, at the mere age of thirty-one, when I was eight years old. My third vivid memory has to do with the time of her death. I am standing in the corridor of my grandmother’s house, before the closed door at the end of it, when an overwhelming realization comes over me that I will never again see my mother. Upon this thought I dissolve in tears. And then, on a sudden I realize, with a kind of thrill, that I am now completely and inescapably free. I block out this thought, but I cannot deny it had passed my mind. In fact I remember it now. To this day I believe I am different from others because of that dearly bought freedom at an early age. Much later, reading Sons and Lovers, I realized how strong my mother’s love must have been and how great a hold she had over me. I would have been another Paul Morel. The loss, as well as the sudden liberation, are contained in the symbolic memory. It tells me again and again that I am motherless and free, though I am forever deprived by her death.

In my twenties I looked back over those years and thought I had had the most unhappy childhood imaginable. The loss of my mother was not the only cause. I was always being taken to hospital, or “to see Dr. Ship,” to find out whether I was about to die from tuberculosis, whether I would at last undergo that dreaded operation for tonsillitis or for nasal polyps, or some other defect that would either finish me or set me right. At the ripe age of eighteen, when my father managed to get some money together to send me into first-year Arts at McGill, he insisted that I first undergo surgery for adenoids, although by the a time I actually had nothing bothering me, and I did have the operation done—like a necessary castration or initiation rite—after which my real life could begin. 

After my mother’s death, my father brought a maiden sister from Poland to take care of his three children. She was a frail, sensitive, literate person, who told hair-raising stories—some from Pushkin, I later discovered—and could recite many Polish poems from memory that were deeply moving. Her only punishment for me was to make me memorize poems, which was actually a kind of reward I thought, and through her I came to like Slowacki and Mickiewicz, Polish Romantics, before I ever knew Byron, Keats, or Shelley.

In school, in those days (in the late twenties), we sang songs from the English, Scottish, and Irish tradition: “Annie Laurie,” “John Peel,” “The Minstrel Boy,” “Comin’ throu’ the Rye.” The words were beautiful and the melodies delightful: a singing teacher visited the schools of the Protestant School Board and intoned the songs in his rich baritone voice, without accompaniment. That’s how we learned all the songs of the traditional repertoire, songs of which most students today are utterly ignorant.

I say the Protestant School Board, though I and my two sisters were Roman Catholics. We were actually “illegals” in the Protestant system at that time, just as recently there have been many “illegals” in the English-language school system in Montreal, students whom the law wants to propel into the French school system.

In my mind I carry lifetime scars of these early terrors and insecurities. Like Joseph Conrad, I am a lifelong admirer of English civilization, and later, in my poetry, I call England “the best corner of Europe,” despite my wasteland vision of modernity. Even in the long poem Europe, written in my early thirties, I say that “Courtesy is pleasing. . . And what more pleasant than well-bred English people?” And yet this affection for things English, and for the literature of England, is tempered with a kind of alienation, a feeling that what I most love and admire I really have no proper right to. I am an interloper even where I am most at home. I should add that, despite my troubles in childhood, I was also something of a pampered darling, as a reputedly ailing orphan, favoured by my aunts occasionally with a slice of rich lemon pie or home made raisin tarts, and the effect of this preferment has also left its mark. I may take pleasure in “being made much of,” even as I suffer from outward signs of neglect. 

  In the High School of Montreal, for the study of poetry, I had a battered purple-covered book entitled Poems of the Romantic Revival. Here I first discovered the great poems of Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning. Unlike the present time, when students are offered mediocre poems by doubtful poets “whom they can understand,” we were given the great poets without any question of watering them down for young minds. Read “The Eve of St. Agnes,” we were told, and be ready for the examination. Look up the words. Study the notes.

I also studied Latin and loved it, translating Horace for my beloved teacher and reading her my translations. (Not Greek, I picked that up later on my own.) But the meaning of great poetry, its timeless beauty, is the same in all ages and in all languages, with the proviso that you have to find your own touchstones, the passages that draw you out, evoke your own nature, and send you—“out of this world,” as they say nowadays. For me it was the ending of Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” as simple as the Sermon on the Mount, and as pure and perfect as undoctored natural speech can be. To this day, nearly sixty years later, I can remember the exact position on the page—top left side—where these lines occur. They are there for me still, and they have shaped my life and my emotions forever after.

So, too, are the triumphant closing lines of Horace’s Fifth Ode in Book Three about the Roman general Regulus, who being defeated and captured by the Carthagenians was returned to Rome on condition that he plead for peace. But he urged war instead, for the future safety of Rome, and then he returned as hostage of the Carthagenians to be tortured to death, knowing what his fate would be. He returned, says Horace, “as unconcernedly / As if they were his clients and he’d settled / Some lengthy lawsuit for them and was going / On to Venafrium’s fields / Or to Tarentum, Sparta’s colony”—

                     tendens Venafranos in agros 
                  aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum.   

I came to this a little later. In high school we studied the usual Horatian odes: “Integer Vitae,” “Exegi Monumentum,” “Eheu Fugaces,” “O Fons Bandusiae,” “Diffugere Nives.” (I think those were some of the poems.) Also some Virgil. But speaking of touchstones, let me give you Homer, from the Odyssey, Book II, just two lines that for me came to define poetry:

  To them grey-eyed Athene sent a favourable breeze,
the fresh West Wind, singing over the wine-dark sea. . .
 
             Tóisin d’íkmenon oúron híei glaukópis Athéne
             akraé Zéphuron, keládont epi oínopa pónton.   

The first requirement for a student of poetry is to learn the Greek alphabet and to begin decoding phrases like these. “Glaukópis Athéne” and “oínopa pónton” are standard phrases; but why does the whole thing sound so incredibly beautiful to me?

Not to appear arrogant, I will mention an anecdote. A good deal later, while giving a public lecture in Montreal, I hazarded an off-the-cuff translation of a Latin phrase from Ovid for the benefit of the audience—si pulvis nullus erit / nullum tamen excute (“even if there should be not a speck of dust, brush it off,” I think that’s about the equivalent)—but I mistranslated it somehow, I forgot how, and my old Latin teacher, who was in the audience, came up afterward and corrected me, gently, as usual. Well, we never cease to learn from our teachers.

On the subject of élitism, since we are touching on it, I say—let’s not insult democracy. Democracy was not achieved to make us all mediocre, but to make us free and superior, each in his own way. Élitism is a good thing, and highly democratic, if rightly used, on behalf of the majority. My father was a hardworking man, at one time a fireman, later driving a truck for a brewery in Montreal, for a time running a hotel and tavern in Hamilton, in his final years managing a court of roadside cottages in Orillia, Ontario. He was a literate and refined person by nature, but perforce struggling as an immigrant in a new country.

Money pressures at home nearly made me drop out of high school before finishing, but advice from a YMCA counsellor sent me back to school and I completed the course—Grade Thirteen, at that time equivalent to first-year college. I then went to work in a warehouse, on St. Helen Street, in the old part of Montreal, an area of brick, dust, and grime, devoted to tightfisted business operations. I rubbed shoulders with working people, who were the sort of people I liked best—deliverymen, truckers, salesmen, and typists crowded in busy offices. Some years later I wrote the poem “Old City Sector,” whose opening lines well describe my impression of this part of old Montreal:   

              This gut-end of a hungry city
             costive with rock and curling ornament,
             once glorious, the pride of bankers,
             reaches each projecting cornice
             over the stomach of empty air, the street
             now deserted.

My view of work and workingmen is contained in the poem “Building a Skyscraper” written some ten years later, in which I say that someday “They will be celebrated / more than millionaires, since without rich men/ nations can run as well, or better, but not without these men.” It is not a passing opinion but a permanent belief, of the right order of values.

At the time, however, work in a warehouse was a dead end, and yet I did not see any hope of ever getting out of it. Then suddenly my father was able to send me to college, I think by persuading his wife, since he had re-married, to help finance my education; and I registered as a sophomore at McGill University. This was in 1936, three years before World War II, but Hitler was already threatening in Europe and there was civil war in Spain. For me a new life began in the university, a life without parental supervision, a life of freedom and exploration. I wrote for the campus newspaper, the McGill Daily. Saw my editorial articles reprinted in other college papers across Canada. Played chess in the Student Union to my heart’s content. Fell in love. Discussed philosophy and social problems with new-found friends, Reg Harris my philosophical cohort, Guy Royer my best friend, a French Canadian from high school, Norman Hillyer a United Church theology student, then a keen socialist who later became a Reverend. (We had great lunches at the Presbyterian College on University Street, bringing our own sandwiches to lunch and sharing tea in common, arguing at the top of our bent.) My friend Margaret, who thought me “a genius,” brought a book of poems by C. Day Lewis to my attention, a book out of the library, but I was slow in picking up the scent. I had been scribbling poems from high-school days. I wrote my first around the age of twelve or thirteen, but these were miserable childish verses. Our parish priest, Father Bernard, encouraged my sister Lillian in poetry, and brought her secondhand books as gifts, The Complete Poems of Sir Walter Scott, The Poems of Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, and other nineteenth-century Romantics. I neglected and disparaged these musty tomes.

In the Carnegie Reading Room, subsidized by the Carnegie Foundation, which was a modest room in the Arts building (exactly where the English department offices are now located), I discovered a small anthology of contemporary Italian poetry and in it a poem of about eighty lines, in three sections, which I copies out and soon knew almost by heart. It was by a turn-of-the-century poet named Ceccardo Roccatagliata Ceccardi.

                Quando ci revedremo
              il tempo avrà nevicato
              sul nostro capo, o amore . . .
 
               (When we meet again
               time will have snowed
               upon our heads, my love . . .)

Ceccardo Ceccardi is missing from most later Italian anthologies. But I carried him around in my head; and some forty years later wrote a poem, “First Love,” which echoed his exact phrases:

   
                 You wore a blue coat and white scarf, remember?
                 And we walked in the dim night-time, talking.
 
                 What does love matter, or all that since has happened?
                 What happened is an eternal possession. . . .

                                                          (from Zembla’s Rocks) 

A poet may seem to have vanished into oblivion; and yet somewhere, perhaps in a far foreign country, someone may have read his poem, and have lived with it through the years. This is what is called futurity, even if it be in only one reader’s memory—immortality, to be reborn in another poet’s lines.

            Leaving McGill University with a B.A. degree in ’39 I had already read Neitzsche, and Ibsen. (“The password is Anarchy” says a poem in the McGill Daily in 1951, and I am delighted today, in looking up Ceccardo Ceccardi, that he called himself “an aristocratic anarchist”—thought I was neither an anarchist, nor a Marxist, nor even a socialist in any true sense. I argued against the “Reverend” Norman Hillyer, my dear friend, and he called me a “Tolstoyan liberal,” whatever that may have meant at the time.) I also carried Walt Whitman into the fields at Charlemagne (some fifteen miles outside of Montreal) and read him aloud to myself, and probably conversed with him in my hallucinations.

            At this time (1942) I met with a group of literati and joined in a literary movement of sorts. Canada just then was still doing its spring cleaning of Victorian dust and cobwebs in the renovation that is called modernism, although our modernism had started a dozen years after the European and American schools of London and Paris, and this was the second wave of “modern poetry in Canada.” The Canadian poets A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Knister, Dorothy Livesay, and R.G. Everson had started the cleanup in a gentle, quiet way around 1925, writing free verse, appearing in Poetry (Chicago) and in other small magazines, writing some vigorous articles, and forecasting the changes to come. Their poetry, however, was less vigorous than their prose. The second wave of poets which I now joined were just beginning, combining their forces with the older boys, to make a more raucous, exciting noise.

The simple idea that modernism was primarily a housecleaning, a sweep-out of sentimental propriety and moral hypocrisy, is now hard to recapture; we have so many complex theories about modernism and postmodernism. But the root problem and the liberation, which the modern revolt brought with it, were then so obvious that the idea could be taken up by flappers and gigolos. “Homme, sois moderne!” was inscribed over a café entrance in Montmartre; and Richard Aldington in his poem “The Eaten Heart” said what everyone in that generation knew:

              We were right, yes, we were right
              To smash the false idealities of the last age,
              The humbug, the soft cruelty, the mawkishness,
              The heavy tyrannical sentimentality,
              The inability to face facts, especially new facts. . . .

In Canada there were already free-verse proponents in 1914. But the main lines of developing modernism can be seen as branchings from the chief modern British and American poets, in a clear order of succession. F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith, from 1925 on, are most easily associated with Yeats and Eliot, actually the most traditional and conservative of the moderns. The group with which I became connected, consisting of Irving Layton, John Sutherland (editor of First Statement magazine, then of Northern Review), Miriam Waddington, Raymond Souster, have a kinship to poets like Whitman, Masters, Sandburg, Kenneth Fearing, or Robinson Jeffers. A much later generation, represented by Ken Norris in the 1980s, shows a passionate devotion, in practice and principle, to William Carlos Williams. (Earlier on, Raymond Souster was also a Williams admirer.) The sequence is fairly simple, with other affinities intervening—to Edith Sitwell in James Reaney; or to Dylan Thomas, in Al Purdy and Alden Nowlan; or to popular ballad and lyric in Leonard Cohen—but it shows a progression, if a bit halting, from tepid modernism to extreme avant-gardism, such as we find in the late poetry of bp Nichol and others, analogous to the experimentalism of Gertrude Stein or André Breton.

For myself, I did not want to take a regressive stance, in which loud vulgarity and forced rhetoric replace the old sentimentality, although there are poems from the 1940s or early 1950s that might illustrate the road not taken. My particular affinity did not appear until the mid-1940s, and then the magnetic pull was to Ezra Pound, the most complex and difficult of modern poets. What drew me to Pound was his aestheticism and his revolutionary modernism in principle.

There is no creativity possible to man that is not the result of an impress from some preceding work or creation. The infinite potentiality of nature cannot appear in its purity, as something made out of nothing. It can only work upon what is there, since everything in this creation emerges from something that is already there, as a variation or progression in things. An artist, therefore, cannot produce an original work of art in the sense that it resembles nothing known before, that it derives from a different world, from a distant planet, or even from a remote culture which he has not experienced. 

My contacts with other poetry, with other literature, with music, with paintings, with powerful ideas, are the only source from which I can develop original poetry, forms of art, or ideas of my own. The vest-pocket copy of Hamlet which I carried about everywhere in my college years is one such source; so is the poetry of Whitman, which I recited in my country walks.

            Music had a powerful appeal for me. While still at college I borrowed from the library complete scores of the famous operas and played on the piano the parts which most moved me. The prologue to I Pagliacci was one such piece, especially the melody part beginning “Un nido di memorie . . .” (I swooned in ecstasy over such music; come to think of it, my knowledge of Italian, which made me capable of reading Italian poetry, came from these operas.) Madame Butterfly, with its wondrous first act, and the great moments in La Bohème were made entirely my own, on the piano, in this way. I thought of Puccini’s music as “smoke rolling along the ground,” with wonderfully imaginative music, and I resented later, and laughed off, Pound’s line about “Puccini the all-too-human.”

There was Dean Clarke of the Faculty of Music, in those days, conductor of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, who gave open lectures to interested students in a small, overcrowded room every Friday before the Sunday afternoon symphony concert at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Guy Street just above St. Catherine. I could not afford the concerts, but I got a job as unpaid usher and so was able to hear each concert after Dean Clarke’s lecture. This was a musical analysis of the themes and development of the main item on the program. I remember especially the lecture on and performance of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, of which the opening notes still echo in my ears as I pause for a moment in this writing. “Brahms,” said Dean Clarke, “was a passionate Romantic at heart, but he held back his emotions—until they broke through in certain passages of his music.” There are some things said that one remembers fifty or more years later, whether good or bad, because they are the shaping influences of our lives.

At home we played all kinds of current popular music on the piano, as well as traditional songs. I loved Irving Berlin, and later came to love Cole Porter more than any other current composer. A bit later, in my New York years, I discovered the music of Bach, “The Well-tempered Clavier,” in the music room at Columbia, where records could be played and music taken out. I played on an upright piano in our rented one-room apartment on 123rd Street, corner of Amsterdam, fingering the music as well as I could, though I’d never had music lessons. Later, I became an enthusiast and collector of the popular songs of the nineties, the songs of Harry Von Tilzer, Paul Dresser, George M. Cohan, and James Thornton. And there was British Music Hall, a great source of social history and fun. And above all, ancient songs from France, beginning with the troubadours, whom I made out on the piano, and going on to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, also the melodious songs of French Canada. And finally, English folk songs, in the collections of Ralph Vaughn Williams, songs like “The Banks of Sweet Primroses,” “As Sylvie Was Walking,” “The Blacksmith,” and many others. I have, in other words, a strain of the popular and of the traditional life of the people in my poetry, a very powerful strain of great beauty and universal feeling, but it may be that the people themselves are today cut off from this experience, so that this is not recognized in my poetry.

A visiting lecturer at McGill, many years later, speaking on Theodore Dreiser, remarked about Dreiser’s brother Paul, who wrote songs under the name of Paul Dresser, that he was the composer of trivial and unimportant songs at the turn-of-the-century. Sitting in the audience as a faculty member, I could not interrupt the speaker, though I was deeply incensed, for I admired the songs of Paul Dresser with a special kind of joy and nostalgia. Are they collected anywhere? Probably not. And yet, among the stories of Theodore Dreiser, you will find a long short-story—actually a memoir—entitled “My Brother Paul.” It gives an excellent account of the music business and of the stirring life of the entertainment world of New York at that time. Paul Dresser’s songs were a good part of it, immensely popular, and they are still moving and beautiful, with their gentle and sentimental touch of pathos and melodrama.

At home in our Polish family, or later with my in-laws and relatives after my marriage, there was a custom at Christmastime and on other holidays, to do some old-fashioned group singing at table. The great songs of the Ukraine, of Lithuania, of Russia, and of Poland would be sounded in chorus, and repeated to one’s heart’s content, while glasses clinked and drinks were poured out. Some singers of talent, my mother-in-law in particular, sang in harmony with the leading melody, a technique of part-singing which they had learned in the folk villages of Lithuania. This music, too, is part of my inheritance, though there is no way perhaps to recognize its plangent melodies and vigorous rhythms in my poetry. Somewhere it must be there, since nothing is lost that moves us deeply and is part of our continuing memory.

            Beauty is international. And the enduring works of art, whether we find them in ancient Egypt, China or Japan, India or Africa, are all recognizable to us because they have a common element, which must be a quality of humanity, called grace or beauty. All these songs of many nations, and the many kinds of music, are part of one essence which is intrinsic to human nature, and which goes by the name of beauty. That is the best word we have for it, though all it means is that we respond deeply with all our being to its surface resonance.

I had shown some poems to Dr. Harold Files, a very fine teacher at McGill, and he had advised me to look up John Sutherland, who was then editing the first numbers of a mimeo magazine, First Statement. At the same time, Irving Layton, whom I knew from his poems in the McGill Daily and whom I had met the previous winter, came by chance to know John Sutherland’s sister, Betty Sutherland, a young painter who was working briefly as a cashier in the restaurant where he ate his meals. The result was a union of forces in the magazine First Statement between a very strong and authoritative critic, John Sutherland, and a very bold and energetic politically-conscious poet—Irving Layton at that time—and a very unassertive lyrical poet, that is to say myself.

I was six years younger than Layton, and in one’s early twenties six years counts for a good deal. He was the dominant figure, but I was not inclined to be dominated, so that our conversations for many years took the form of extremely heated arguments. Betty Sutherland used to say: “You two are such different poets, why don’t you just let each other be? Why do you have to fight it out over every single point?” (How right she was, yet how impossible to escape this strife of temperament built into our nature.)

The result is that relations between us eventually ceased, in the mid-fifties, which was about a dozen years after we first met. But much water had poured under the bridge (the Jacques Cartier Bridge, where we first parleyed and resolved together to change the shape of Canadian poetry), before that final separation took place.

            There is often a short pause between the first phase and the second phase of a significant artistic change, as if “that first fine careless rapture” required the mind or spirit to catch its breath before a second, and stronger, heave could begin. This was true of the modernism of Eliot and Pound, after the Waste Land, and it was certainly true of the modern development in Canada. Not only was there a pause after Scott and Smith’s first start in the 1920s and early thirties, but there was a pause after the mid-forties which was followed by a new burst of energy after 1951. Collective enthusiasms—that is, creative acts—may come in spurts, for all we know, and this may apply to revolutionary movements as well as literary ones. 

During the forties activity I was still in my early twenties, first getting out of college, then working haphazardly in the advertising agencies, scraping a living first as a free-lancer, then as a permanent employee. I married in 1944 and with my wife Stephanie moved to New York, for further study and a taste of bohemian life. My health unfitted me for enlistment in the war, so that I was able to leave Canada and register at Columbia University in New York. Up to that time I had not quite found my direction or voice as a poet, but now things began to take a turn.

I had of course published. Ryerson Press in Toronto had brought out the book Unit of Five, in which I was one of the young poets included. After this, while I was living in New York, the same Canadian firm brought out my first separate book, East of the City. However, no book of mine appeared from First Statement Press, where other poets were being published who were my boon companions. I was perhaps already running my own race—a condition which became more marked as time went on.

  I eventually entered the Ph.D. course at Columbia and graduated with a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature; but I was ill-prepared for this work, and at the beginning had no such serious intentions. I had no Honours training in literature, which would have given me concentrated undergraduate study in the subject. In fact I had wandered all over the lot in the general course at McGill, with courses in political science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as English and French literature, since my notion of education, so far as I had any, was that of self-fulfillment in the broadest sense. I had no practical purposes, beyond poetry and seeing into life as far as possible. Why was I born? In order to know, Socrates had taught me.

As a result, when it came to graduate study for the Ph.D., I had a hard time of it, even though I was an older student than most (almost thirty). I learned by intensive reading what I should have packed away back home in my fresh youth, and this probably showed even later in my orals, where I was still a learner—and mainly a poet, not a concentrated scholar like the rest.

However, I did catch up to a certain extent. I started at Columbia with courses in article writing, poetry, and even journalism, since I was still an advertising writer and a journalist by trade. But I also took a course in medieval history; and this was so immensely exciting an experience for me that I decided to go solidly into history, and in 1946 I received a master’s degree in that field. The subject which I pitched on in history, and which I continued in the department of English and Comparative Literature, was the history of the profession of letters, a question which interests me to this day and which provides the leading theme for the present autobiographical essay.

Being concerned with poetry, and with the importance of poetry in the past, it has struck me from the beginning of my career that in our time poetry, and in fact any writing with a view to permanence, which is what the arts must have as a first condition of their greater value, does not find a place in the existing culture. While billions of words are being poured out in printed form, in newspapers, magazines, and popular books, little or nothing of this has any lasting value. By definition, then, we are already in, or are entering into, a dark age. Looking over time, periods that have left no permanent record, or little of worth, are negligible; while great civilizations and celebrated moments in history are those which leave durable works of value. I wanted to know the history of this question—the reason why modern culture seems to prefer the journalistic and the ephemeral to the genuine and the durable, in the arts.

The most fascinating part of the curriculum at Columbia was a high-powered seminar with Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun; but extracurricular activities were even more engrossing. I met the burgeoning novelist Herbert Gold, as well as the psychologist Zygmunt Piotrowski, as personal friends. With Herb Gold I played some handball in nearby courts and aped the style of James Joyce on the typewriter. But I was a slow poet beside these flashing lights and never made much impression on them.

I wrote to Ezra Pound, who was then incarcerated in an asylum in Washington, D.C., having broadcast to American troops during the war in Italy—all about Usura, The Unwobbling Pivot of Confucius, and the writings of John Adams—so that he was accused of treason, but finally considered non compos mentis, unfit for trial. Pound wrote back, and a kind of correspondence followed which led to my higher education in the reality of modern poetry.

Through Pound I came to meet several writers and artists in New York and vicinity (he sent me addresses and telephone numbers which I sometimes followed up—please note that I was up to my ears in graduate work, and from 1947 on I was also teaching English at the City College of New York). I came to know Paul Blackburn the poet, as a friend; and Michael Lekakis the sculptor, whom I valued highly; and Cid Corman, the editor of Origin, as well as several other camp followers of Ezra Pound, some not so savoury as others. Frankly, I never could understand why I should go chasing after some disciple or other of Ezra’s to add a cubit to my stature, so I did not follow up all his recommendations. There was Marianne Moore whom he wanted me to visit with a parcel, but much as I admired MM I used the post instead. And of course William Carlos Williams, whose address I knew offhand—and occasionally exchanged a note with—but I never bothered to visit him. Also E.E. Cummings, whom I did not meet until he came to Montreal for a reading and I introduced him to the audience. I had a distrust of such personal contacts, since the real life is the life of the mind, and there we meet daily with our kind and carry on our conversations.

What Pound opened up for me was a great curiosity about contemporary poetry—and its engagement with the cause of civilization. I got out of New York in 1951; I returned to Montreal to teach at McGill University. The return began a new productive stage in my career. I was now in my thirty-third year of life and ready to work on poetry and teaching in earnest.

I came to McGill with a mission. It may be that the worst teachers, as well as the best, are teachers with a mission, but I came with the confidence that I had something very important to teach. There were in fact two things. The first was modern poetry and literature, which had evolved fully abroad but which had barely started in Canada with small groups of poets having a limited audience. The message of modernism was to be spread abroad, through students, lectures, and magazines. It was also to be directed at poetry in Canada, at new promising writers; and outlets had to be created for these new promising writers; and outlets had to be created for these new voices. Then the second program was the massive movement of European literature and thought since the eighteenth century, with its profound practical implications, which students’ minds had still to experience, like buckets of cold water thrown at them from a high lectern.

It was a few years before I was able to teach everything I wanted to teach. But sudden changes in the department made this possible, and as one student (Ruth Wisse, now a prominent teacher herself) said a few years later, “You happen to be teaching all the most interesting courses in the department.” I received enthusiastic support from students very often, as many teachers do in their best years, so that it is not entirely vain to record this one remark. Classes grew from twenty or thirty to nearly five hundred in those years before the student revolution, and I was extremely busy trying to keep up with my vast area of teaching.

The subject of my European literature survey was divided into a two-year course (four terms) which many students took in successive years: the period from eighteenth-century rationalism and enlightenment to romanticism and realism; and the period from naturalism to modernism. My six radio lectures, published under the title The First Person in Literature, give a fair outline of some of the leading ideas. Also, Emery Neff’s Revolution in European Poetry provides a good view of the background for the first part; while a recent book like Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind deals with many of the central books and ideas that formed part of the entire two-year course. In fact, the substance of literature and thought to which American students are now said to be closed was precisely the subject matter which it was my mission at that time to open them.

This huge course—a study, really, of the subversive currents in modern thought—was virtually brought to an end by the student revolution in the early sixties. “What I have been teaching you, and warning you against,” I said to my students, “has now arrived, right here in the classroom”—as radical students began to raid the lecture halls and harangue teachers. The course in question was familiarly known as “Journey to the End of the Night,” after Céline’s novel, which terminated the two-year course—and the night, it seemed, had closed in upon us.

Beyond the classroom, this activism of my teaching program led to magazine activity and literary publishing of various kinds. With Raymond Souster and Irving Layton we set up Contact Press, derived from Souster’s magazine Contact, with perhaps a bow to Williams and McAlmon’s earlier magazine with the same name. Through this press we published Cerberus, our own three-poet book, and after that some thirty of the most promising poets in Canada, a list which came to include most of the established poetry in the country: names like Al Purdy, Alden Nowlan, John Newlove, F.R. Scott, Phyllis Webb, Eli Mandel, D.G. Jones, W. W. E. Ross, Gwendolyn MacEwen, R. G. Everson, George Bowering, Milton Acorn, Margaret Atwood, and others. At the university, I started the McGill Poetry Series, which published only ten books, but also launched some prominent names, Leonard Cohen, Daryl Hine, George Ellenbogen, Dave Solway, Pierre Coupey, and Seymour Mayne among the rest, all of whom are still active and writing. And then there was the magazine CIV/n, which lasted through seven numbers from 1953 to 1955.

CIV/n was edited by Aileen Collins, with the help of her coeditors Wanda and Stanley Rozynski; but advising these editors, in manuscript-reading sessions, were Layton and myself, and sometimes other people willing to help and assist. The title of the magazine came from a letter of Ezra Pound’s which I had seen quoted: “CIV/n not a one-man job”—that is, Civilization, in order to have it, you must work together and in concert.

After CIV/n ceased publication I started the magazine Delta in 1957 and continued single-handed until 1966. (“Civilization” had become a one-man job.) Actually, I bought an old Chandler and Price printing press and installed it in my basement in Verdun, Montreal’s working class-suburb. The press was not too noisy, I loved the smell of printer’s ink, so that on this press I printed the early numbers of the magazine as well as my own satirical poetry Laughing Stalks. Eventually this work became too demanding and I went to a downtown printer for the job.

For publishing books, I started a small press in 1965, Delta Canada, with my friends Michael Gnarowski and Glen Siebrasse. Gnarowski was one of my earliest students at the university, then a young man from Shanghai, where his father had run a prosperous business. Through Delta Canada we published some thirty-two titles in the years between 1965 and 1971, a list of poets that includes R.G. Everson, F.R. Scott, Eldon Grier, Gerald Robitaille (who brought us in direct touch with Henry Miller), as well as John Robert Colombo, and Peter van Toorn. The press also brought out my Collected Poetry in 1971.

Following Delta Canada, I continued publishing through a small press called DC Books, partly because this name was descended from “Delta Canada” but more so because I had the assistance now of Aileen Collins and the stationery indicated “Dudek/Collins (editors)”; Aileen Collins and I were married in 1970. The press published a short list of interesting poets, new and old, in the next few years, among them Henry Beissel, Avi Boxer, and Laurence Hutchman.

The method of publication that began with First Statement Press and Contact Press in Montreal has continued and has spread throughout Canada to such vigorous presses as The House of Anansi, Coach House Press (Toronto), Oberon Press, Quarry Press (Kingston), and many others scattered over the country. In my own view, small presses and magazines represent the effort of a literary minority, such as it is, to make a small separate place for itself and to survive in a commercial society.

My own poetry had continued throughout these years, despite the overwhelming amount of work I had taken on, in teaching, student poetry reading, editing, publishing, printing, as well as magazine and newspaper writing. I was writing regularly for the weekend newspapers, vide my collection of newspaper articles In Defence of Art, edited by Aileen Collins. I was also guest-lecturing at numerous conferences and universities; and broadcasting frequently over the CBC (it broadcast and published my heavy lectures The First Person in Literature). Other books resulting from this Chautauqua activity are Selected Essays and Criticism and the six lectures in Technology and Culture.

The notion that a professorial job is an easy one, or is cut off from the real world, is a misconception among people who have never known a busy professor or have never been near a university. There may be some profs having an easy time of it, but in my local experience I have not seen any. Most of them are harried beyond words. Fortunately, I did not need a vacant mind and perfect leisure in order to write. I wrote when I could and when I had to, which was most of the time, in spare moments between one task and another, during a quiet lunch, or in the evening at home. There is a powerful great self underlying our paltry conscious self, which thinks unceasingly, untiringly, and gives us cataracts and clusters of words from time to time whether we want them or not. We have to edit this stuff, and dispose of most of it as unusable, but it is the source of our best thinking, and our life’s plans, and our hope for the future. It is the source from which I have gotten most of my poetry—or rather, all of my poetry, since I have never written a poem consciously from a prepared plan.

There are two stages in the writing of a poem, as I know it: dumping it out, and then working on it. The first stage involves a certain amount of tension and holding one’s breath, but one gets over it quickly, whether in a surge or in several short spurts; the second stage demands a good deal of time. My habit over the years was to write the first draft of a poem and to put it by, then to work on it a few days or a few weeks later. There was not always the free afternoon, or day, to work on a single poem; and in the early days I had often wasted much time laboring over a poem that turned out to be a misguided failure. Leaving a draft to cool for a while saved time, since I would know better after a pause whether the poem was worth laboring on or not.

The result of this two-stage method of writing, however, was that hundreds of poems in rough manuscript and in sketchy drafts collected in my desk drawers and files, or simply among the papers that crowded my desk. When I retired in 1984 I decided to spend some time cleaning up these unfinished poems, destroying some, putting some aside as unusable, and finishing others, no matter how short, as poems fit for publication. This exhausting work occupied me for several years, but I ended with some five hundred poems that could possibly be considered worth preserving. Gradually these poems were divided into three books, and eventually condensed further into two. First, Ken Norris, an energetic editor and poet in his own right, assisted Véhicule Press in selecting from the total a manageable book of 141 pages, which was published under the title Zembla’s Rocks.  

Writing is obviously a mimesis, or imitation, of someone thinking. When we read an essay, we are willing to assume—it is actually our pleasure to assume—that the essay is the thought process of the man writing. He asks a question, pauses, considers various sides of the issue, and perhaps reaches a conclusion. We think this is how he thought the matter through. But actually the essay is a construct; the author designed it carefully to give it that air of naturalness, or reflection—as in Emerson, or Stevenson—that we take to be his way of thinking.

This is also true of the poem, the novel, the prepared lecture, or even the play. It is a construct that conveys to us an intellectual form, that is, the mode of thought, fictive and conventionalized, of a particular individual. Even a depersonalized, self-annihilating, irrational work must do so.

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