George J. Dance wrote:
Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
The Song-sparrow in November, by Arthur Stringer
Alone, forlorn, blown down autummal hills,
Floats sweetly solemn, fond and low,
One mournful-noted song that fills
The twilight, lonely grown with snow.
[...]
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-song-sparrow-in-november-arthur.html
#pennyspoems
Commentary (for those who need it):
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature described Stringer's poetry as "undistinguished verse."[8] However, it has also been said that in his poetry "there is maintained a standard of beauty, depth of feeling, and technical power, which in Canada
have had all too little recognition."[13] At its time his blank verse drama "Sappho in Leucadia" was called "an imaginative, passionate, artistic work of surpassing quality."[13]
Stringer's chief claim to poetic fame today rests on his 1914 book, Open Water, the earliest book by a Canadian poet to use free verse – and in particular on his preface to that book, in which he "describes the modernist movement as a natural evolution.
"[1] Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, who reprinted the Open Water preface in their anthology The Making of Modern Poetry In Canada, remarked on it:
This book must be seen as a turning point in Canadian writing if only for the importance of the ideas advanced by Stringer in his preface. In a carefully presented, extremely well-informed account of traditional verse-making, Stringer pleaded the cause
of free verse and created what must now be recognized as an early document of the struggle to free Canadian poetry from the trammels of end-rhyme, and to liberalize its methods and its substance.[14]
"Stringer's arguments become even more striking from the point of view of literary history," Dudek and Gnarowski continued, "if we recall ... that the famous notes of F.S. Flint and the strictures of Ezra Pound on imagisme and free verse had appeared
less than a year before this, in the March 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago)."[14]
from Penny's Poetry Pages, the free poetry encyclopedia:
https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Arthur_Stringer?so=search#cite_note-garvin-13
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