25 - English-Canadian Poetry from 1967 to the Present

Summary

THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF Confederation in 1967 serves as a convenient historical event from which to date the beginnings of contemporary English-Canadian poetry. However, the decades-long careers of many notable poets, as well as the sheer quantity and variety of Canadian poetry of the last forty years, suggest that marking a clear division between contemporary poetry and the poetry of the mid-twentieth century is still in many ways an impossible task. Two decades before the centenary, in 1947, the establishment of modern poetry in Canada was signaled by the publication of John Sutherland's Other Canadians: An Anthology of the New Poetry in Canada 1940–46 and, symbolically, by the death of Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947). Irving Layton (1912–2006) — one of the poets in the Montreal circle associated with Sutherland's First Statement (1942–1945), a galvanizing journal — published his first book, Here and Now: Poems, in 1945. Periods of the Moon, the volume he published in 1967, was, astonishingly, his nineteenth. In the centennial year Layton was undeniably one of the leading Canadian poets — A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959) alone assured him that position. And in the decades after 1967, Layton's output was still prodigious: By the time of his death in 2006, he had published a further thirty new volumes or selections. To consider him solely as a poet of the modernist moment is therefore to overlook his continuing presence long after his debut as a poet.