1
POEM OF THE MONTH A CENTENNIAL PROJECT
It may be an exaggeration to say that everybody in Canada
writes poetry but it is certainly true to say that at least
ninety-five per cent of Canadians have at one time or
another in their lives courted the poetic muse. Statistics
always lend themselves to different interpretations but
researches show that with the possible exception of the Finns, no more bardic a people than the Canadians have appeared in
history. Yet it is also a strange paradox that in no country of the world is poetry less read or less published. The ingrained reluctance of each poet to regard as worth reading anything written by somebody else naturally accounts in a large measure for the lack of published work; obviously the more poets the less demand for poetry. It would appear that the very richness of the Canadian endowment tends to defeat the first requirement of any national art that it at least be articulate. But there is more to it than that. What Canada suffers from is a too great geographical diversity.
In the last analysis all poetry has its roots in the soil. Though it may be the rocks and rivers of the harsh northland or the lush orchards and tobacco fields of Ontario, the wide wheatfields of the prairie west, the sugar groves of Quebec,
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