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The Montreal Group was a circle of Canadian modernist writers formed in the mid-1920s at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, which included Leon Edel, John Glassco, A.M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith. Most of the group's members attended McGill as undergraduates. Due to this connection, the group is also referred to as the McGill Group or McGill Movement.〔Dean Irvine, "(Montreal Group )," ''Oxford Companion to Canadian History''. Answers.com, Web, March 25, 2011.〕 The group especially championed the theory and practice of modernist poetry over the Victorian-style versification, best exemplified by the Confederation Poets, that predominated in Canadian poetry at the time. The Montreal Group is "defined by its ‘little magazines’, which catered to innovative prose and poetry influenced by contemporary movements in British and American modernism," and "also by its belated inheritance of a fin-de-siècle poetics from the aesthetic and decadent movements in Europe." 〔 ''The Encyclopædia Britannica'' credits the group and its members with having "precipitated a renaissance of Canadian poetry during the 1920s and ’30s by advocating a break with the traditional picturesque landscape poetry that had dominated Canadian poetry since the late 19th century. They encouraged an emulation of the realistic themes, metaphysical complexity, and techniques of the U.S. and British poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden that resulted in an Expressionist, Modernist, and often Imagist poetry reflective of the values of an urban and cosmopolitan civilization." 〔"(Montreal group )," ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', Britannica.com. Web, March 25, 2011.〕 ==History== In the 1920s, the prevailing tradition in Canadian poetry was still the "one that had been established by the poets of the Confederation: Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott. This poetry, although striving for a certain Canadian quality, was very much the offspring of English Victorian verse. The majority of versifiers in Canada were to cling to this mode of expression until the beginning of the 1940s." While some Canadians were writing modernist poetry – W.W.E. Ross, (R.G. Everson ), Raymond Knister, and Dorothy Livesay were all publishing Imagist poetry in free verse – "Their activity was individual and unrelated; their poems appeared in American and English literary publications. In Canada, there was no focal point, no center of activity... yet."〔Ken Norris, "(The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism )," ''Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews,'' No. 11 (Fall/Winter, 1982), Canadian Poetry, UWO.ca, Web, March 25, 2011.〕 That changed with the coming of the Montreal Group. The little magazines they founded gave Canadian modernism a focal point. As Louis Dudek and (Michael Gnarowski ) were to write four decades later, in ''The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada'' (1967): :The little magazine in Canada has been the most important single factor behind the rise and continued progress of modernism in Canadian poetry. The history of the little magazine covers a period of some forty years and closely parallels the development of modern poetry itself from the mid-1920s to the present time. All the important events in poetry and most of the initiating manifestoes and examples of change are to be found in the little magazines." 〔 The Montreal Group was responsible for several different publications which for the first time gave Canadian modernists the chance to publish in their own country. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Montreal Group」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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