[grant] presidential ADDRESS 7 



Though not without response to many new impulses, though one 

 of the first to essay vers libre, and to write it with restrained and 

 rhythmic charm, Duncan Scott like Majorie Pickthall carries on what 

 was best in the Victorian tradition, and has that sense of form and 

 restraint, that instinctive feehng that poetry must have a pattern so 

 often lacked by our bolder and more brawling Georgian poets. 



Both Marjorie Pickthall and Duncan Scott owe something to 

 Canadian life. Scott especially owes much. One side of his poetry 

 is indeed essentially Canadian. The landscape, the air, the clouds and 

 their colours which he loves to describe, are essentially the landscape 

 and the cloudscape of Canada. Much of his verse could only have 

 been written by one who loved the forest and the prairie and the 

 Indians. Miss Pickthall is more bookish, less essentially Canadian, 

 but she too in her latest work has laid the scene in the early French 

 days, and has delicately and yet boldly tinted in the flowers and 

 berries of the Canadian summer. But on their larger side, the side 

 of ideas, both are universal. The vague hope of eternity with which 

 Scott closes his lines "In Memory of Edmund Morris," or Marjorie 

 Pickthall's strange mediaeval fancy of the woodcarver who slays his 

 wife's lover to bring into her face the dumb despair of the Virgin 

 over her dear dead son who is also her dear dead Lord, owes nothing 

 to Canada, but is drawn from hearts that have pondered over love 

 and hatred and envy and despair and the human heart and man's 

 strange destiny. 



But I have been able to linger so long over these two just because 

 no others seem to me to have produced any bulk of work of equal 

 merit. How different from the England which all through the war 

 published its yearly volumes of Georgian verse ; so that now the poets 

 have almost ousted the novelists, and England is like a nest of singing 

 birds, of some of whom I hope Professor Edgar will tell us to-morrow. 



One reason for the comparative lack among us of what is to me 

 the highest form of creative art is found in the word "school" which I 

 have used so often. "Poetry", says Wordsworth, is "emotion recol- 

 lected in tranquillity." To put it in another way, Poetry is at once 

 intensive and solitary. Most great literary movements have sprung 

 from some coterie, or cénacle, or group. Not to speak of Athens or of 

 Rome, it was so in the many literary movements of XIX Century 

 France, whether Parnassians or Symbolists or neo-Catholics; it is so 

 in England to-day. "As iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth 

 the face of his friend." In the contact of mind with mind the emotion 

 is engendered, and then in the after tranquility the poem is shaped. 

 In Canada we have neither the groups nor the tranquillity. Duncan 



