Canadian poetry

Wordsworth told us poetry was 'spontaneous emotion recollected in tranquility.' Us post-postmoderns now consider this trite in the extreme. About the only thing people seem to agree on these days about poetry is that they don't agree on anything.

When I first encountered Wordsworth's construction as a dim undergraduate, though, it seemed reasonable enough. I hadn't read any Wordsworth. The only poetry I'm sure I'd read before ENG101 was Dennis Lee's Alligator Pie (such was the state of Ontario's school system in the 1980s — which is much improved these days, I’m sure).

Wallace Stevens famously quipped, 'A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.' While such a sentiment may do little to win over those who desire a clear raison d'être for their poetry, Stevens' words do contain an elegant implication: a poem is a 'thing in nature' and, as such, is experienced as the world is experienced, with all its attenuating surfeit, mystery, strangeness and contradiction.