IN 1926 THE POET A. J. M. SMITH (1902–1980) found Canada immersed in “an age of change, and … a change that is taking place with a rapidity unknown in any other epoch.… Ideas are changing and therefore manners and morals are changing. It is not surprising, then, to find that the arts, which are an intensification of life and thought, are likewise in a state of flux” (“Contemporary Poetry”). At this point in its history, Smith argued, the forces of modernization had already transformed the country so thoroughly as to infuse it with a new zeitgeist, engendering both a specifically modern mindset (unheard-of ideas, manners, and morals) and an equally iconoclastic artistic scene. While Smith's assessment — with the verve and rhetoric of a modernist innovator — eclipses the many premodern continuities in Canadian society, culture, and artistic practice at the time, it is certainly right in diagnosing “a nation in ferment” (Pacey 1976, 119). In fact, it was the collective experience of change — induced by closely intertwined political, economic, social, and cultural developments — which gave fresh momentum to the idea of a Canadian nation in the first place. Building on the milestone of Confederation, the first half of the twentieth century saw a refueled debate on the merits and drawbacks of national autonomy, with agendas of political and cultural nationalism forming a sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflictual alliance. Given Canada's particularly entangled position as a simultaneously bicultural, colonial, and North American country, these discussions mainly evolved within the triangle of nationalist, internationalist, and continentalist orientations and ambitions.