Crawley, Alan (1887–1975)

Alan Crawley (born in Cobourg, Ontario on 23 August 1887; died on Vancouver Island in 1975) was an editor and critic who played a significant role in the development of modernist Canadian poetry in the 1940s and 1950s. A lawyer by training, he was rendered blind in his forties, and his enforced retirement left him the time to pursue his interest in modern poetry. In 1941 he was approached by four west coast poets, Dorothy Livesay, Floris McLaren, Doris Ferne and Anne Marriott, to edit a magazine that they felt was sorely needed as a vehicle for contemporary Canadian poetry. The resulting periodical, Contemporary Verse, ran from September 1941 to 1953, publishing over 120 poets during its 39-issue run. Contemporary Verse, which Crawley edited first from Vancouver and later from Victoria, proved an important forum for both emerging and established Canadian poets. Crawley took pains to encourage younger poets, especially women, and sent constructive critiques and perceptive comments both to those whose contributions he accepted and to those he rejected. In addition to his editorial duties, Crawley also did occasional public outreach activities such as radio broadcasts, poetry readings and speaking tours, which he used to introduce Canadians to contemporary poetry from both their own nation and from abroad.

Watts, Myrtle Eugenia ‘Jim’ (1909–1968)

Myrtle Eugenia Watts, known variously as Jim, Jean, or Gina, was a Canadian foreign correspondent for the Spanish Civil War, theatre artist in the Theatre of Action, and patron of Canadian leftist literary and theatre culture in the 1930s. In her short career, Watts had a significant impact on Canadian leftist modernist culture. Jean Watts was born in Streetsville, Ontario to a wealthy family. By 1920, Watts’s family had moved to Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, where Watts’s social and artistic circle would eventually include such prominent Canadian cultural figures as writers Dorothy Livesay and Stanley B. Ryerson, and theatre artists Toby Gordon Ryan and Oscar Ryan. Watts and Livesay would spend their adolescences as self-identified bluestockings, attending lectures by prominent feminist Emma Goldman, and reading the literary works of European and British modernists. Beginning in her early adulthood, Watts contributed significant resources to the Worker’s Theatre (later the Theatre of Action) and to the establishment of the leftist literary journal New Frontier (1936–1938), for which her husband Lon Lawson was editor. In early 1937, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Watts took up a position with the Canadian Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Clarion (1936–1939), as a foreign correspondent stationed at the Blood Transfusion Unit outside Madrid.

Marriott, Anne (1913–1997)

Joyce Anne Marriott was a Canadian modernist poet. Born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, Marriott published seven collections of poetry and hundreds of poems in periodicals, as well as producing scripts for the National Film Board of Canada and CBC Radio. She is best known for The Wind Our Enemy (1939), a long poem written after spending several weeks with family in Saskatchewan at the height of the Great Depression. The poem combines an imagist aesthetic with social realist content, instantiating a genre that her contemporary Dorothy Livesay would later call the ‘Canadian documentary poem’. The Wind Our Enemy garnered attention by E.K. Brown in ‘The Development of Poetry in Canada 1880–1940’, published in Poetry Magazine.

Knister, (John) Raymond (1899–1932)

Raymond Knister was one of Canada’s earliest modernist writers. Although Knister is best known as an imagist poet, he wrote and published work in a wide range of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, book reviews, literary criticism, and one play. Born and raised in the farmlands of southern Ontario, Knister was called the ‘farmer who was poet too’ by fellow Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay. Knister’s writing career, which began in the 1920s, coincided with an age of Canadian nationalism, and despite the fact that Knister found it easier to publish in the USA. than in Canada, he was a great supporter of developing Canadian literature. Like other writers of this time, such as Morley Callaghan and A. J. M. Smith, Knister insisted upon the development of a unique national literature that would remain connected with international literary movements, like modernism, but would be neither an imitation of other literatures or produced for the ephemeral tastes of the market. Knister’s writing career was cut short when he drowned on 29 August 1932, while on holiday with his wife at Lake St Clair in Ontario.

Livesay, (Kathleen May) Dorothy (1909–1996)

Dorothy Livesay was a Canadian poet, journalist, activist, social worker, instructor, field worker, and author of short fiction, literary criticism, radio plays, and autobiography. Her collection of poetry Day and Night (1944) was lauded as a significant socialist, modernist text. Livesay was born on 12 October 1909 in Winnipeg, Manitoba to journalist parents. She received a BA Honours in modern languages (1931) from the University of Toronto. Influenced by IMAGISM, she published her first collection of poetry Green Pitcher (1928), a well-received book of lyric poetry, while still an undergraduate student. Livesay studied at the Sorbonne, earning a Diplôme d’Études Supérieures (1932). Her thesis was entitled "Symbolism and the Metaphysical Tradition in Modern English Poetry." In Paris, she was exposed to Marxism and the effects of the Depression in Europe, and developed her left-wing politics in response. Upon returning to Canada in 1932, she published a second book of poetry, Signpost, enrolled in the School of Social Work at the University of Toronto, and joined the Young Communist League.