Studies: F. R. Scott
[F. R. Scott] has published verse—eight volumes—distilling in his poetry a profound and moving vision of the world and his place in it. As we read through the early periodical verse, the subsequent books of poetry and the Selected Poems, it becomes increasingly clear that Scott's subject is man in the generic sense and human relationships. Although many of the poems begin with the individual experience, the movement is always from the personal to the universal. (p. 2)
Scott is a strongly visual poet whose shaping "I" is closely associated with the "eye" that perceives…. [He] sees poetry as a communication, as a signalling from one isolation to another…. Fingers scratching on the dividing pane, like a pen on paper, suddenly open up an "eye." And because scratching at a window is a metaphor for the creative process, the "eye" becomes the vision of the poem that plays on the "I" of the persona: the image is that of a poem opening up a world, of a microcosm generating a macrocosm.
His characteristic metaphors develop from the exploration of man's relationships to nature and society: they involve time and infinity, world and universe, love and spirit, terms that emerge as twentieth-century humanist substitutes for the Christian vocabulary. A typical Scott poem moves from specific image (the great Asian moth of "A Grain of Rice" for example) or from the natural landscape … to a consideration of the significance of the image in the larger pattern of human life. And the human journey, in turn, is seen as a moment in time, a part of the larger cosmic flux in which matter, striving to realize itself, is thrown up briefly in waves—ripples on Henri Bergson's flowing stream of time. Scott perceives that man as a physical being comes and goes; yet he maintains that there is continuity in the human spirit and in the shared human experience.
His poetry reflects the wide diversity of such experience, ranging in style from the reportorial and satiric "Summer Camp" to the fine lyric "Departure." Yet underlying both lyric and satire is a common vision of the poetic ideal. He has remarked that satire is "inverted positive statement" and certainly the obverse of Scott the lyrical idealist is Scott the satirist. From the satirical inversions of poems such as "W.L.M.K." and "The Canadian Authors Meet" … we can infer the political and the poetic ideals for which Scott stands. Such poems, which at first glance might appear to offer a discontinuity of subject and style, have, in fact, a fundamental unity derived from a central vision and from the strength of an engaging poetic personality. The poems are also united by an enormously flexible speaking voice which can move from the satiric … to the tenderly reflective…. As a poet and a man of law, Scott is most concerned with the kind of social order or 'writing' that man chooses to shape his world. His fear, expressed in "Laurentian Shield" … is that the language of a developing Canada might be reduced to the syntax of rapacious technology, "the long sentence of its exploitation." (pp. 2-3)
For Scott the enormous age of the land seems to have been transmuted into a substitution for an historical past. But at the same time, because of its associations with the new nationalism and because it was open, unexplored, unpeopled, the land presented itself as an open page or clean canvas for the artist's impression. He soon realized that it was on the basis of this natural landscape that Canada's new literature must be built…. (p. 5)
Canada is "inarticulate" because "arctic" or barren, yet in the depth of her lakes she has developing "songs" of her own. In Scott's metaphor the land is a woman to be awakened through love into language and growth. The process of giving voice to the land is dependent on man's co-operation with it, a co-operation expressed by his "technic," a pun which fuses technological development with artistic technique. What the poet desires for Canada is the highest in the civilizing process, the language of poetry which Scott characterizes (borrowing a line from Stephen Spender) as "A language of flesh and of roses."
At present there are rudimentary "pre-words,/Cabin syllables,/Nouns of settlement" but, ominously, the language is moving through "steel syntax" towards the "long sentence of its exploitation." Here, the punning "sentence" carries a secondary meaning of legal sentence imprisonment. There is a danger that a technology of exploitation or rape is replacing the ideal of love and nurture…. What Scott advocates is a socialist brotherhood which will fill "all the emptiness with neighborhood." This "language of life" is the voice of millions of Canadians working together in the mines and forests; it is their united endeavour which, in the ringing words of the poem's conclusion can "turn this rock into children."
The themes which emerge from "Laurentian Shield"—of land as myth and property, of land as evolutionary process and history, of land in relation to human love and politics—are integral parts of Scott's poetic vision. We also find in this poem his most effective use of metaphor, that of vivifying the inorganic, and his characteristic use of language, the twinning, often punning extension ("Inarticulate, arctic") in which meaning is drawn out from one syllable or word to another.
Scott characteristically uses the pun, a bringing together instantaneously in the mind of the unexpected similarities and relationships. Examples of this technique range from the simple pun of the ballad depicting his defence of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, "A Lass in Wonderland" (which amalgamates Alice with a rueful "Alas!") to variations such as the portmanteau "L'ange avantgardien." The pun as a poetic device is characterized by wit and humour…. Scott is able to develop emotional resonance from the pun in much the same way as did the Metaphysicals, by transforming an initially audacious comparison into a structural conceit. He can do this because he shares with the Metaphysicals an agility of mind which delights in witty comparison and a structured vision of the human as a microcosm within the macrocosm of the universe. Because Scott sees man and human experience silhouetted against the larger movements of the universe this relation is reflected in the form as well as the language of his poetry…. Scott's art is essentially an art of process: of life as living and of poetry as experience. In "A l'ange avantgardien," he wryly embraces his own muse, the "rebellious angel," who is half guardian angel and half the insurgent spirit of the avant garde…. The emphasis is on the process of making, not on the artifact. Similarly, in "Passerby," the poet listening to the sound of footsteps passing reflects on the relation of life and art in "The linking together of time and our temporal nature."… [This] is very much a time poem, in which the passing footsteps carry overtones not only of people and events passing but of the ebbing of life itself. The traditional answer to this dilemma, life passes but art endures, is ironically dismissed…. Like [Henri] Bergson, Scott perceives that the flow of experience cannot be contained by the stasis of art. Because life cannot be held, the human choice is that of fleeing the terror or of facing and transcending it…. The poem builds to the steady but muted lyricism of [the] last stanza with its enormously powerful conclusion; affective because although encompassing the fact of death it nonetheless chooses to affirm. In the final image of the flood is incorporated the duality of the life-giving but also life-dissolving sea. It is this finely balanced vision that distinguishes Scott … as a Canadian poet whose poems offer most in the traditional Arnoldian sense of helping us to live our lives.
Scott, like E. J. Pratt, is also one of our first recognizably Canadian poets in that his poetry expresses Canadian identity, an identity first associated with the new social vision of the 'thirties. In the poems of the 'forties, this early political stance is humanized by the recognition that political action must be informed by vision, and by intelligent choice. The necessity for vision is articulated in the poem "On the Death of Ghandi" and a concern with the "knowledge of how to use knowledge" is apparent in the tart but bemused tone of "To Certain Friends."…
Such knowledge, as described in "Examiner," is the opposite of "the ashen garden" where the young are shaped by the "acid subsoil" of the old. However, the poem in which this choice is given ends ironically…. There is no question of the examiner's sympathies: the tension of the poem springs from a recognition of the difference between his own beliefs and the system he is obliged to uphold…. "Examiner" prefigures much of the later poetry where Scott turns increasingly to nature in an almost Wordsworthian or Arnoldian sense to find assurance of the higher human values which man lacks. (pp. 9-11)
Scott's vision has always been of a Canada of limitless potential. In many ways this is the ideal "true north" of our national anthem, a Canada in which the social, economic and political conditions of life are evolved to meet the needs of Canadians. This vision is the product of a strong social conscience, a disciplined mind and a warm humanity. (pp. 15-16)
Sandra Djwa, "Studies: F. R. Scott," in Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, No. 4, Spring-Summer, 1979, pp. 1-16.
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