New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors

This was - albeit of modest scope - a milestone selection of modernist Canadian verse. Under the anonymous editorship of F.R. Scott, who was variously assisted by A.J.M. Smith and Leo Kennedy this project took 4 years of negotiation and pleading on the part of Scott before it was finally published by the Macmillan Co of Canada. The anthology, published in 1936, features the work of 4 Montréal poets (A.M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott) and 2 from Toronto ( E.J. Pratt and R. Finch), and with its modest "Preface" establishes the modernists' claim on the attention of the Canadian reader. The original preface, written by an aggressively minded Smith, had been rejected by the publisher as being too impatient with traditional Canadian poetry. The "Rejected Preface" was resurrected in 1964, and was made an important feature of the new edition of New Provinces published in 1976.