Kennedy, Scott, Smith, and fellow
Montreal poet
A. M. Klein were all members of the
Montreal Group of poets centred on that city's
McGill University in the 1920s and early 1930s. Smith and Scott had co-edited the
McGill Fortnightly Review; Kennedy and Klein were respectively editors of the
Review's successor journals, the
Canadian Mercury and the
McGilliad. The four poets began assembling an anthology of poetry in 1931, and in 1934 invited
Toronto poets
Robert Finch and
E. J. Pratt to join them. Scott and Smith disagreed over also inviting Toronto poet
Dorothy Livesay. "Smith twice explicitly suggested to Scott that Livesay’s poetry be included in the volume. On both occasions Scott refused, saying that Livesay’s work would be appropriate for a second, 'more political' edition of
New Provinces at a later date." (Scott was a founder of the social democratic
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, while Livesay was a member of the
Communist Party of Canada.) Much later, though, Livesay told an interviewer that Scott had wanted to include her work, and that it was Pratt who had vetoed it. There were other disagreements between Scott and Smith. "Smith wanted the volume to offer an up-to-the minute statement on the contributors' work, while Scott wanted it to offer a more historical statement on the development of the contributors' poetry, in hopes of calling forth other, unknown modernist poets-in-the-making." In line with the anthology he envisioned, Smith penned a Preface in 1934 that was a manifesto of modernism and a rejection of all that had gone before. In Canadian poetry, he mocked, "The most popular experience is to be pained, hurt, stabbed or seared by beauty—preferably by the yellow flame of a crocus in the spring or the red flame of a maple leaf in the autumn." "The fundamental criticism that must be brought against Canadian poetry as a whole," he added, "is that it ignores the intelligence. And as a result it is dead." Scott had trouble reconciling that tone with the anthology he planned. "You will have to be careful not to make claims for a greater radicalism than this volume will show,” he warned Smith. For his part, Smith objected to the inclusion of the Toronto poets, describing Finch's imagery as "trite and undistinguished" and some of his lines as "distressingly Emily Dickensian," and calling Pratt "the weakest member of the group—judging of course by his inclusions only." All told, it "took 4 years of negotiation and pleading on the part of Scott before it was finally published by the Macmillan Co. of Canada." Later opinions were less praising. The 1997
Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature called the book "commercially unsuccessful but critically important," while in 2003
Canadian Poetry published an essay "designed to question a literary history which has canonized an unsuccessful volume of poetry published by a small group of Canadian modernists who excluded female poets." Despite poor sales and charges of sexism, though,
New Province's place in the modern Canadian canon looks assured. Besides its historical status as the first anthology of modern Canadian poetry, it is also notable for its contributors. Every contributor except for Kennedy (who never published another book) went on to win the
Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for poetry. As only 350 copies of the first edition were ever bound, it is extremely rare. A copy was being offered for sale in 2011 for $750. ==References==