Nine Canadian Poets
[F. R. Scott's Selected Poems,] often regional or topical, are appealing for the personality they define: intelligent, compassionate, skeptical but hopeful. Many speak, with only slight indirection, about justice, charity or change…. (p. 323)
Others chide or lampoon…. The targets of his wit are writers, censors, teachers, tourists, businessmen, the socially prominent, and (particularly) politicians…. (pp. 323-24)
Mr. Scott's angry and satirical poems, variously ingenuous, seem so "right-thinking" as a group as to be above aesthetic criticism. His sense of place and time, of social error and justice, of his own portion of responsibility for what is good and what is not, and of the enormity of impending change make attractive the large amount of advice which these poems contain. (p. 324)
Marvin Bell, "Nine Canadian Poets," in Poetry (© 1968 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), Vol. CXI, No. 5, February, 1968, pp. 323-28.∗
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