"He bears history,/the lakes/he dives under …" These lines will take us into the first poem in Scott's [Selected Poems,] "Lakeshore," one of the finest and most characteristic pieces in the collection…. [Its theme is] Man's history, which extends back into pre-history and before man. Its unifying symbol is water as the source of life. The poem establishes through a specific concrete personal experience a contact in awareness with biological history, stretching back to the primordial beginnings of life and all around to the earthbound mechanical now of "a crowded street."

By the edge of a lake, the poet—or, better, the sensuous mind that is the protagonist of so many of Scott's metaphysical lyrics—contemplates water, earth, and sky….

          Floating upon their broken sky
          All netted by the prism wave
          And rippled where the currents are….

This is exact, clear, and elegant. There is a seventeenth-century grace about these opening lines…. It is a style that admits, indeed invites, Wit…. (pp. 26, 27)

"Lakeshore" is an excellent starting point for a consideration of Scott's non-satirical poetry. The themes and the motives of many of his most completely articulated poems are seen in it at their clearest and most direct. The fascination with water, as an element and as a symbol; the identification of the poet's Self with Man and of the sensuous perceptive physical being with Mind; and the inescapable tendency to identify or interchange the language and imagery of science (especially biology, geology and psychology) with the language and imagery of religion: all these are here. (p. 29)

"Lakeshore" may also serve as an exemplar both of the "candid" style derived from Imagism and of the witty metaphysical style that, without being in the least derivative, recalls [Andrew] Marvell and [Edmund] Waller—or, if you prefer [W. H.] Auden. Some of the earliest poems … already have a simplicity of language and an exactness of imagery which are the firstfruits of conscious discipline, control, and humility. Little pieces like "North Stream" and "Snowdrift" or the much later haiku "Plane Landing in Tokyo" exhibit these qualities in miniature splendour.

A pure and naked perception alone could not, of course, satisfy Scott for more than a moment, and most of his poems that start out as an image soon become images, and perceptions soon become concepts and blossom in metaphor, analogy, and conceit. Mind comes flooding in.

Many of the early very simple verses grouped near the beginning of Selected Poems are nevertheless quite delightful, though their importance perhaps is mainly historical (they date from the mid-twenties) and technical (they show Scott's later style beginning to form). "New Names" develops in a personal and indeed almost rapturous way the old thesis … that Canada is a country without a mythology. Scott suggests we must make our own anew. "Old Song" finds and expresses an austere cadence in the almost-silence of the northern wilderness….

Here we are back to the purest imagism and a style that is the ultimate in simplicity and suggestiveness…. Here as in "Lakeshore", we have the sense of vast distances in space and time and a view of geological pre-history that goes back even farther than the ages of man-as-fish.

Another poem that rises naturally out of such telescopic probings into the geologic and biologic past and therefore has affinities with "Lakeshore" and "Old Song" is the strange meditation called "Mount Royal". This is [an E. J.] Pratt poem with a difference…. Here time is speeded up: the Mountain rises out of the sea; the sea subsides, leaving its deposit of silt and shells; Man walks and builds his muddled cities "where crept the shiny mollusc," and the poet or poet-mind observes it all…. The joke about the fishes building on sand and thinking themselves safe alerts us to the fact that irony and satire are this poet's chosen weapons. The satire here is directed against man's vanity, pride, and blind self-confidence as in Hardy's lines on the loss of the Titanic, where dim moon-eyed fishes stare at the mighty wreck and query "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" The situation is reversed in "Mount Royal". It is the fish who have been stranded and passed by. Now they are cited as an object lesson that suburban and commercial man, who builds his villas on the reclaimed island of the mountain, fails to heed—blindly and foolishly, it is implied, since the forces of atomic destruction are to hand. The poem ends in angry scorn. (pp. 29-31)

There is a curious consequence of this geologic view that we can observe in some of Scott's most characteristic poems. He is a man capable of—indeed unable to refrain from—taking long views, both backwards into the past and forward into the future, an idealist in the popular sense of the word…. [As] a poet he welcomes the new, the just, and the generous—and always in the broadest and most generous terms. Poems that embrace vast cosmic distances, both of space and time, lend themselves to thinking in abstractions. There is world enough and time for all the great abstractions to come into being, to evolve and grow, to change, to grow old, and perhaps to die. The good ones we must cultivate, preserve, and nourish; the bad ones we must kill. (p. 31)

"Conflict" is a rather Emersonian poem on the tragic paradox of war. It develops the thesis that men on both sides in any conflict fight for the good they know and die with equal courage for the opposite sides of truth…. Here speaks the defender of unpopular causes, the idealist who loves the abstract and the universal. It is the wide application of unparticularized truth that such a poetry seeks to secure. Universals and abstractions are employed with the confidence born of an utter faith in their reality and validity. Such words as good, wrong, bravery, love, truth, prison, ghetto, flag, gun, rack, rope, persecution, sacrifice, whether abstractions or collective symbols, are made to glow with the vitality of an individual existence—or are used as if they did so glow.

How this is done, the eight quatrains entitled "Dialogue" may demonstrate. In structure and language this poem is as taut and concentrated as "Conflict", but its movement is in the reverse direction—from sensation and particularity (from the concrete, that is) to the universal, a universal which is equated with the spiritual…. The progression is straightforward…. Our bodies are the gateway to a supra-sensual world. Eye, ear, and hand contribute to the synthesis of a new form "to house a new conception."

What is needed always is a new language, new images, and a new technique. Scott has been trying all his life—and sometimes with heartening success—to find these. Some of his notable successes are moving love poems that have been placed in this collection immediately after "Dialogue". Their newness and hence their effectiveness lies in nothing more strange than an absolute fidelity to the occasion and the emotion that has brought them into being…. [In "Meeting"] the conciseness of the syntax contributes potentialities to the meaning. It is not fear that holds us apart but understanding that holds us together.

Other poems that approach or achieve the new style are "Will to Win"—a deceptively light and witty jeu d'esprit in which the lightness enables the poet to keep control of the situation and the wit serves to define it; "Vision"—beautifully rhymed quatrains in which the "newness" or rightness comes from the clarity with which the sharp edge of every idea is defined; and "A I'Ange Avantgardien"—the explicit statement of a romantic view of poetic creation according to which the emphasis must always be on the making never on the made.

One of the most striking paradoxes of Scott's poetic life is that the ceaseless flow of energy which throws up poems of all kinds and in all modes should nevertheless be able to shape them with extreme care, whether the work in hand is a piece of impressionistic and typographical experiment or a closely knit web of thought, like the fine late poem "Vision"—a true metaphysical lyric…. (p. 33)

["Vision"] is song that is as well written as prose—a poem that reiterates the validity of the "candid" style of "Lakeshore" and the earlier imagist pieces.

This style is seen at its most purely intellectual in what I have called the "defining" poems—lyrics that perhaps have developed out of Scott's training as a lawyer. Lawyers, like poets, are involved with words, with definitions, and with subtle quibbles. Some of these pieces, as for example "Memory", are apt and ingenious metaphor…. Others, like "Was" seem merely verbal, until we notice that here the universal and the abstract are made concrete and immediate, the ideal transformed before our eyes into the real…. (p. 34)

Another "defining" poem of the same sort is the one beginning "Caring is loving, motionless," but the lines entitled "Stone" show an interesting difference. In these what is being defined is not an abstraction or a state but an object, a solid item, "a still of gravity". The method is entirely different from that of imagism. The purpose of an imagist poem is to perceive and to present perception, but here we go further in an effort to grasp the idea of the thing and of its place in history. The motion too is just the reverse of that in "Was", where an abstraction was made concrete; here a concretion is seen in the light of thought—the remarkable thing being, however, that the thought is made to seem to radiate from the stone itself…. In these distichs we come back to the sense of time in which Scott is so deeply immersed that it recurs in poem after poem. Here the mind moves from the glacial epochs of pre-history to the bursting stone that falls on Hiroshima….

The old dictum that the style is the man has never been more clearly illustrated than in the poetry of F. R. Scott. All his poems, from the gayest and lightest expression of delight in life through his pointed and savage satires to the profound lyrics I have been mainly considering, are informed and qualified by a sense of responsibility and an inescapable sincerity, which is serious but never solemn and rich without ostentation. (p. 35)