SPEAKING OF THE PERIOD from 1920 to 1960, Margaret Atwood stated in her introduction to the New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1982) that “this, for me, is the age that only the usual Canadian cautiousness and dislike of hyperbole prevents me from calling golden.” The years between 1920 and 1960 were indeed a period of prodigious activity and contention in English-Canadian poetry, and the contentiousness was as productive a force as was the energetic publishing of poems, collections, manifestos, and little magazines. These were also, of course, years that were overshadowed by two world wars; and those global events were felt most powerfully in the poetic activity of the period: in a wave of postwar modernist poetic practice in the 1920s, in a slowing of poetic production in the 1930s, when the Depression and then another looming war delayed the appearance of a number of poetic voices, and in a reinforcement of a sense of political urgency in the works that did appear during this time.

Modernism Revisited

Until recently, this period in the history of Canadian poetry had followed a strongly defined, well-established narrative. This familiar story has now been both challenged and refined. Typically, the narrative of poetic activity in Canada between the years of 1920 and 1960 had been a tale of triumphant modernism: of a sweep of postwar cosmopolitanism that left earlier poetics in the dustbin of literary history, followed by a quiet, otherwise-preoccupied period of the 1930s, and culminating in a dramatic conflict between competing poetic forces of aestheticism and political consciousness during the 1940s and 1950s.