SOURCE: Fredeman, W. E. “Earle Birney: Poet.” In Critical Views on Canadian Writers: Earle Birney, Bruce Nesbitt, pp. 107-14. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1974.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in the British Columbia Library Quarterly in 1960, Fredeman offers a critical overview of the first decades of Birney's literary career.]

The eve of publication of the Selected Poems of Earle Birney¹ offers a convenient opportunity for re-evaluating the poetic output of one of British Columbia's—indeed, one of Canada's—best known and most highly praised literary figures. Coming rather late to a literary career—after an apprenticeship of hack work, graduate study, odd jobs, and miscellaneous teaching, at the Universities of California, Utah, Toronto, and British Columbia—Birney, at the age of thirty-eight, was suddenly catapulted to national recognition with the publication of David and Other Poems in 1942. The combined forces of a variegated background, a decade of depression, and the gathering storm of World War II proved precisely the alembic to stir the poetic sensitivities of the young academic. With the attainment, for the first time, of something resembling stability and security—his doctorate, a lectureship at the University of Toronto, and, most important, the literary editorship of Canadian Forum—Birney began to publish his first serious poems in the late thirties.

The intervening twenty years have been fruitful for Earle Birney, bringing him increased recognition in the form of critical praise and literary awards, and the more tangible benefits of grants-in-aid and scholarships. They have also been productive: four volumes of verse, two novels, one anthology, another editorship (Canadian Poetry Magazine, 1946-48) and a welter of miscellaniana. Since 1946, Birney has been a Professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

Now, Birney is preparing to launch an edition of his poems, selected, revised and edited by himself. Although authors' selections are always risky, they do give the critic an advantage that he ordinarily lacks, because, more than individual volumes, they stand as manifestoes of artistic creed, enabling the critic to assume a synthesis not always apparent in single publications. This is particularly true in Birney's case, since his previous four volumes of poetry, with the exception of Trial of a City, have been cumulative, each adding new poems to a foundation of previously published and tested verse. However, the forthcoming edition, comprising some fifty-five poems and his verse play (roughly one-half of Birney's total poetry) will, in a way, be patterned from his previous publications, since, in addition to the forty-five poems drawn from earlier volumes, it will contain ten poems either previously unpublished or previously uncollected. The selections—and rejections—together with the often severe revisions of earlier “established” verse will prove most vital to Birney's critical reputation. However, the most salient fact about the appearance of the volume is that it heralds a new period of creativity, terminating eight years of silence in what seems to have been, for various reasons, a period of poetic sterility.

As a combination of the depression, the impending war, and his own wide background provided Birney with the necessary impetus for writing, so they, together with the left wing political idealism that made of him during the thirties an ardent Trotskyite, provided him with his basic themes. Birney's poems fall into five categories: descriptions of nature, satires, those dealing with war—either imminent or actual—love poems, and those built on narrative or dramatic situations involving one or more of the other four. Thematically, however, they overlap without clear lines of distinction; always they are autobiographical and extremely personal.²

The central theme in almost all of Birney's poetry is Love, and the most dominant symbol, as well as the controlling image, War. Reiterated throughout the major portion of his poetry, these dichotomous extremes of human impulse mirror the ironic and ambiguous role of man in a universe over which he is never quite master, even in his greatest moments of triumph, and of which, even in his most miserable failures, he is never quite pawn. Caught up in the Puritanical dilemma of sin and responsibility, mankind has at its disposal only Universal Love to combat the atavism inherent both in nature and in humanity itself. Birney's message, following consistently a recurring pattern of idealized optimism and hope, fear, and idealized disillusionment and pessimism, might be succinctly phrased in Auden's similar admonition: “We must love one another or die.” As Birney himself puts it in “Time-Bomb”:

O men be swift to be mankind
          or let the grizzly take.

The simplicity of Birney's dominant and persistent theme is intensified and made doubly poignant by the present forces which threaten mankind. War having become nearly obsolete, self-preservation must give way to the higher course of universal love, for man is faced not only with the destruction of his individual self but with the possible annihilation of his species as well.

Birney's poetry is obviously didactic, but rarely in the pejorative sense, for it seldom preaches. A personal involvement in mankind's dilemma, and in the inevitable seeking for solution, prevents the poet's offering patented panaceas for mankind's (and therefore his own) ills; rather, he extends a prophetic hope that tomorrow—if, remembering yesterday, we, living today, are willing to prepare for the future—may be better:³

Somehow, still, we may blow straight,
come flowing into the couloir's caves,
funnelling into the gullies, battering
the bright rock with the hail of our will.
O we may yet roar free, unwhirl,
sweeping great waves into the deepening bores,
bringing the ocean to boom and fountain and siren,
tumbling the fearful clouds into a great sky wallowing,
cracking the mountain apart—
the great wind of humanity blowing free, blowing
through, streaming over the future.(4)

It is the breadth of the solution offered by the poet—a broad humanism positing individual involvement and responsibility combined with an insistence on the absolute autonomy of the human will, expressed with masculine forcefulness in both imagery and diction—that protects Birney from the snare of sentimental didacticism:

The compassed mind must quiver north
          though every chart defective;
there is no fog but in the will,
          the iceberg is elective.(5)

Desmond Pacey is undoubtedly right when he says that Birney's greatest strength as a poet lies in his “capacity movingly and convincingly to express a persistent faith in man's power to make or unmake his own destiny”.⁶

In Birney's case the question of evaluation is difficult. Although never a poetaster, he has been unable to sustain a quality throughout any of his four volumes.⁷ However, each contains poems of exceptional ability.⁸ “David” is regarded by most critics as Birney's finest poem, by many as a masterpiece in its own right. In “David” the close caps perfectly a series of near climaxes, and in the final line—“That day, the last of my youth, on the last of our mountains”—there is truly magic, as E. K. Brown saw: “an unpredictable extension of meaning, … at one stroke raising the experience of the poem to another level where pain and constraint and self-reproach are no longer matter-of-fact but full of tranquillizing imaginative suggestion.”⁹ So often in Birney's poetry the greatness of an individual line or lines completely overshadows the poem as a whole. In “David” this is not true; the climactic close reinforces and enriches all that precedes it. In lesser poems, however, it has a weakening effect, especially when it occurs at the beginning, as in “Man is a Snow”:

I tell you the wilderness we fell
is nothing to the one we breed.

When its position climaxes a generally poor poem, as in “Within These Caverned Days”, it becomes merely a facile device that hardly compensates for the lack of quality throughout the poem.¹⁰ Generally speaking, Birney's forte is the succinct, elliptical, highly compressed, tightly woven poem in which unity can be sustained without affectation or artificiality. To this category belong such poems as “Introvert” (in many ways one of his finest poems), “Time-Bomb”, “Gulf of Georgia”, “Slug in Woods”, “From the Hazel Bough”, and “Ulysses”, a kind of sixteen-line Meredithian sonnet, concluding with the synthesizing couplet:

but the bow is yours and you must bend it
          or you'll never finish what Homer began.

In the same way, “Hands”, somewhat longer than the other poems cited, demonstrates Birney's remarkable facility for tightening and unifying the poem by the use of the epigrammatic couplet:

We are not of these woods, we are not of these woods,
our roots are in autumn, and store for no spring.

Birney's weakest poems are those which are purely topical expressions of passing or changing social conditions, such as “For Steve”, “Joe Harris”, and “Man on a Tractor”.¹¹ Many of the war poems, inspired by temporary conditions, seem cold and remote when compared with “Hands” and the paired poems “Dusk on the Bay” and “Vancouver Lights”, in which Birney is seeking not to record realistically the conditions of the moment but to get behind the human condition in a world in which man is threatened by forces against which he has no protection save the robes of his own mutual humanity. Birney's satirical poems, most of which are topical, fail for the same reasons. Occasionally successful, as in “Canada: Case History” and “Anglosaxon Street”, they are too frequently marred by self-consciousness, flippancy, and artificiality. Poems such as “Ballad of Mr. Chubb”, “The Monarch of the Id”, “Christmas Comes”—even “Restricted Area”, Birney's trenchant satire on anti-Semitism—fail because of their obvious embarrassment to the poet, who, throughout, is making a nervous attempt at objectivity. It is the failure of the satire that makes Trial of a City and Other Verse Birney's weakest volume, despite the near-brilliancy of the verse play which gives the book its title.

“Trial of a City” should not be lightly dismissed by anyone interested in understanding Birney's work. In many ways it was the culmination of all that he had written between 1937 and 1952, for obviously on trial is not only Vancouver but civilization itself and all the accomplishments of mankind. In this sense, it is one of the most universal pieces that Birney has written. In the play the present has been doomed by the future, and an inquiry has been called at which only witnesses from the past may offer testimony. The counsel for the present, an insensitive everyman named Legion, is singularly unaware of any of the important issues with which mankind has for centuries been involved; rather he is a devoted Pangloss of the present, hymning, and understanding only, the materialistic side of man's endeavours:

We're the hub of Tomorrow, the Future's baby,
We're here to stay, and I dont mean maybe.

and peremptorily dismissing any criticism of his materialistic values. Against his opponent from the future, Gabriel Powers, Legion's arguments “defending civilization” are totally ineffectual, and one recognizes in his condemnation of the Snow-kwee Salish—that “These fellows never learned defence because they'd nothing to defend”—both his own and society's damnatur.

In the end, Powers is outstripped, not by Legion but by a Mrs. Anyone, an unghostly citizen of the world who refuses to stand witness for Legion's picture of civilization. Bearing vociferous testimony to the humanity which she truly symbolizes, she dispels Legion and asserts the positive values of mankind. To Powers' indictment, “But what is peace if all the earth's a gassy Jacktown?” she replies, “It still has its becoming.” “How could I know,” she asks, “without the threat of death, I lived?” The end of the play restores the time-sequence that Birney has so often insisted upon in his poetry: the present, growing out of the past, determines the future. In that sequence, which Legion's complacent acceptance of the present denied, lies the hope of mankind. “The only future's what I make each hour,” Mrs. Anyone tells Powers:

Without my longer Will, my stubborn boon,
You'd have no mate to check with but the cornered moon.
It's my defiant fear keeps green my whirling world.

So completely does this play summarize thematically the whole of Birney's poetry, he has chosen it to conclude his forthcoming volume.

It is never an easy task to arrest the creative process temporarily and evaluate a living, producing poet; to predict the consideration which the future may offer a contemporary is fatuous. This is particularly true in Birney's case, since he is first of all a verse experimentalist who almost always stimulates opposite reactions in different critics. Birney's chief poetic flaw lies in a strong academic tendency which leads, on the one hand, to the experimental transfer of archaic meter and diction to such poems as “Anglosaxon Street” and “Mappemounde” and the introduction of Long Will of Langland to “Trial of a City”, and on the other, to a complexity of diction and an elliptical succinctness that makes his poetry, superficially at least, obscure. The principal quality of Birney's poetry is undoubtedly its sharp pictorial imagery, abetted by a sensitive and acute feeling for both the sound and the meaning of words.

E. K. Brown once commented on the “authentic originality” of Birney's poetry:

… he owes nothing at all to earlier Canadian writing and scarcely anything—when he is fully himself—to recent verse anywhere else. He has a harsh and intense sensibility which makes his pictures and rhythms fresh and living, and his technical accomplishment is brilliant, at times bewildering.¹²

Another critic, W. P. Percival,¹³ has spoken of Birney as “poetically athletic” and noted the sharpness of the impact made by his verse. Desmond Pacey has felt in Birney's poetry a “reserve power”,¹⁴ and has seen in it “a useful synthesis of all the major tendencies up to his time.”¹⁵ Contradictory as these judgments are—covering a span of years from 1943 to 1958—they testify to the essential fluidity of critical opinion that must always exist in evaluating the work of any contemporary.

Notes

1. To be published later this year by McClelland & Stewart in Toronto, and by Abelard-Schuman in London and New York. [This collection was not published.—Ed.]

2. Desmond Pacey, in the most recent critical evaluation of Birney (Ten Canadian Poets, Toronto, Ryerson, 1958, pp. 293-326), misses the point. Fond of labels, he tags Birney “chronicler”. “As applied to a poet,” Pacey explains, “the label of chronicler implies that he is primarily a public rather than a private poet, that he seeks to be objective rather than subjective, that he is concerned with the fate of society rather than with the state of his own soul” (p. 294). This rather casual lumping together of the material, the point of view, and the motivation or intention of the poem forms a specious generalization which fails to bear out the definition it seeks to make. One wonders, initially, what a “public poet” might be: Tennyson in his laureate poems might qualify at one extreme; Eddie Guest at the other. Certainly a “social” poet (which seems to be what Mr. Pacey means) need not be “public”. As to objectivity, one need only examine “David”, “Man is a Snow”, “Introvert”, “This Page My Pigeon”, and “Canada: Case History”, five quite distinct types in the Birney canon, to recognize immediately the extremely private nature of the poems and the highly subjective experiences, both actual and psychological, which they describe. Finally, the sense of involvement in society and the case made in the poems for individual responsibility in the ultimate fate of society and mankind is more personal, if not more introverted, than most “my heart is a singing-bird” poetry. “Chronicler”, as Mr. Pacey defines it, seems incorrect as applied to Birney; in its more usual sense (and Mr. Pacey belabours the superficial fact that Birney's poems are often topical and focused on the Canadian scene) it is an oversimplification.

   In labelling Birney “chronicler”, it may be that the critic was greatly influenced by Birney's two novels, Turvey (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1949) and Down the Long Table (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1955), the former a humorous parody of the war experiences of the Canadian counterpart to Private Hargrove, the latter a rather abortive chronicle of Canada in the period of the great depression. The novels depend, both in narrative and in thematic structure, on the contextual details of the Canadian scene during the depression and the war, and thereby tend to be much more documentary than his poetry, in which the environment is often no more than an imagistic springboard for the emotions and ideas conveyed by the poem. In his novels, Birney seems everything that he is not in his poetry: chronicler, extremely nationalistic, self-conscious. The meeting ground between the two creative roles seems to exist solely in the intensely autobiographical nature of both.

3. The element of Time must never be lost sight of in Birney's poetry. Apart from its thematic importance in individual poems, it was used as the structural division in Now Is Time. For its application in “Trial of a City”, see below.

4. “… or a Wind”, sequel to “Man is a Snow”.

5. “World Conference”. Retitled “Conference of Heads” in the forthcoming edition.

6. Op. cit., p. 309.

7. Many of the poems discussed below have been either thoroughly revised or omitted in the forthcoming edition.

8. I do not intend to discuss Birney as a “Canadian” poet. As a qualification expressing anything other than nationality, it seems to me to have no critical validity, although it has become increasingly an apologetic epithet among critics too often saddled with what they consider inferior verse. Many critics tend to confuse “regionalisms” with nationalistic tendencies, belabouring the obvious fact that a poet will incorporate into his verse the environment—natural, political, psychological—with which he is most familiar. But a good poem is a good poem, quite independent of national origin. The impulse and experience of “Tintern Abbey” would have been equally exciting, irrespective of Wordsworth's nationality. It may be that Birney has won more fame in Canadian letters than he might have realized in a more competitive intellectual climate, but certainly he would be regarded as a serious poet in any country.

9. On Canadian Poetry, Toronto, Ryerson, 1943, p. 77-78.

10. Many of these weaknesses are recognized by Birney himself. The above couplet has been deleted in the revision of “Man is a Snow” and the entire poem has been substantially rewritten. The loss of the couplet, one of his best, is unfortunate, but the poem is greatly improved. “Within These Caverned Days” has been excluded from the volume.

11. Confirming the severe critical light in which Birney has recently re-examined his poetry, all of the topical poems mentioned in this paragraph have been omitted from the forthcoming edition. Those few examples of topical poetry which have been allowed to remain have been brought up to date by revision.

12. Op. cit., p. 78.

13. “Earle Birney”, in Leading Canadian Poets, ed. W. P. Percival, Toronto, Ryerson, 1948, pp. 23-29.

14. Creative Writing in Canada, Toronto, Ryerson, 1952, p. 141.

15. Ten Canadian Poets, p. 326.

From the British Columbia Library Quarterly, 23 (1960), pages 8-15. By permission of the British Columbia Library Quarterly.