Alan Crawley and Contemporary Verse

Book excerpt: Little magazines like Alan Crawley's Contemporary Verse are the life blood of literary culture. They provide an ongoing forum in which both well established and new poets can experiment and present their latest work, and it is often with the little magazines, therefore, that litearary change and oringiality have their beginnings. In this book Joan McCullagh shows how, between 1941 and 1952, the magazine charted the establishment of modernism in Canadian poetry by publishing, even before 1947, the largest, most impressive, and most representative collection of early forties' poetry in the country. Her extensive quotation from the hitherto unbpublished correspondence between Crawley and nearly every major poet of the forties also shows how important and valued a literary influence Crawley himself was as a critic and advisor behind the scenes.