Between Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Poems of A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott in The Canadian Mercury (1928-29).

The article focuses on the journal "The Canadian Mercury." Published in seven issues between December 1928 and June 1929, the contents of "The Canadian Mercury," disclose the emergence of a modernist aesthetic that was trying to counter a prevailing but lifeless strain of the Romantic tradition in Canada, and which would influence Canadian poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The journal documents a transition between poetic traditions. Canadian modernist poetry is not born in this magazine, but its head is emerging. The magazine's contents disclose a moment in which a new aesthetic struggles to find its modernist breath while yet entangled in a Romantic umbilical cord against which it protests. Created as a monthly journal of "Literature and Opinion," the journal purpose, according to its opening editorial, was to replace "the state of amiable mediocrity and insipidity" in which Canadian literature "languished" with a poetic spirit the McGill poets understood as having already emerged in Britain and the United States, and which they believed was "at last beginning to brood upon our literary chaos" in Canada.