The Young Turks: A Biographer's Comment

As the author points out, poets A.J.M. Smith (1902-1980), Frank R. Scott (1899-1985) and Leo Kennedy (1907-2000), the core members of the Montreal Group of modernist poets, were "Canada's tangry young men in the 1920's." Thus, she maintains, "Literary criticism written by the Montreal group between 1925 and 1930 should be read as the work of young radicals who were reacting to a poetic establishment perceived as decadent and who were plotting a coup d'état against the Philistines under the banners of T.S. Eliot and modernity." The author looks back at the literary criticism of this small group during the mid-1920s, especially that of Leo Kennedy, as they raged against the "Victorian" establishment of Canadian poetry.

Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Review

Vol. 11

67-69

Fall/Winter 1982

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