DUDEK, Louis

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Montreal, Quebec, 6 February 1918. Education: Montreal High School; McGill University, Montreal, B.A. 1939; Columbia University, New York, M.A. in history 1946, Ph.D. in English and comparative literature 1955. Family: Married 1) Stephanie Zuperko in 1943 (divorced 1965); 2) Aileen Collins in 1970; one son. Career: Instructor in English, City College of New York, 1946–51. Lecturer, 1951–53, associate professor, 1953–69, Greenshields Professor of English, 1969–84, and since 1984 professor emeritus, McGill University. Associated with First Statement magazine, Montreal, 1943; editor, McGill Poetry Series, 1956–66, and Delta, Montreal, 1957–66; former publisher, Contact Press, Toronto, and Delta Canada Press, Montreal. Currently publisher, DC Books, Montreal. Former director-at-large, Canadian Council of Teachers of English; former member of Humanities Research Council of Canada. Awards: Quebec Literary award, 1968. D.L.: York University, Toronto, 1983; Hon. Dip.: Dawson College, Montreal, 1984. D.H.L.: St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, 1995. Officer, Order of Canada, 1984. Address: 5 Ingleside Avenue, Montreal, Quebec H3Z 1N4, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Unit of Five, with others, edited by Ronald Hambleton. Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1944.

East of the City. Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1946.

The Searching Image. Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1952.

Cerberus, with Irving Layton and Raymond Souster. Toronto, Contact Press, 1952.

Twenty-Four Poems. Toronto, Contact Press, 1952.

Europe. Toronto, Laocoon Press, 1954.

The Transparent Sea. Toronto, Contact Press, 1956.

En México. Toronto, Contact Press, 1958.

Laughing Stalks. Toronto, Contact Press, 1958.

Atlantis. Montreal, Delta Canada, 1967.

Collected Poetry. Montreal, Delta Canada, 1971.

Epigrams. Montreal, DC Books, 1975.

Selected Poems. Ottawa, Golden Dog Press, 1975.

Cross-Section: Poems 1940–1980. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1980.

Poems from Atlantis. Ottawa, Golden Dog Press, 1980.

Continuation 1. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1981.

Zembla's Rocks. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1986.

Infinite Worlds, edited by Robin Blaser. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1988.

Continuation II. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1990.

Small Perfect Things. Montreal, DC Books, 1991.

A Last Stand: Poems. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1995.

The Caged Tiger. Montreal, Empyreal Press, 1997.

The Poetry of Louis Dudek: Definitive Edition. Kemptville, Ontario, Golden Dog Press, 1998.

Recording: The Green Beyond, CBC, 1973.

Other

Literature and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media, and Their Relation to Literature. Toronto, Ryerson Press-Contact Press, 1960.

The First Person in Literature. Toronto, CBC Publications, 1967.

Selected Essays and Criticism. Ottawa, Tecumseh Press, 1978.

Technology and Culture. Ottawa, Golden Dog Press, 1979.

Ideas for Poetry. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1983.

In Defence of Art: Critical Essays and Reviews, edited by Aileen Collins. Kingston, Ontario, Quarry Press, 1988.

Paradise: Essays on Myth, Art, & Reality. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1992.

Notebooks, 1960–1994. Ottawa, Ontario, Golden Dog Press, 1994.

The Birth of Reason. Montreal, DC Books, 1994.

1941 Diary. Montreal, Empyreal, 1996.

Reality Games. Montreal, Empyreal, 1998.

Editor, with Irving Layton, Canadian Poems 1850–1952. Toronto, Contact Press, 1952; revised edition, 1953.

Editor, Selected Poems, by Raymond Souster. Toronto, Contact Press, 1956.

Editor, Montréal, Paris d'Amérique/Paris of America, photographs by Michel Régnier. Montreal, Editions du Jour, 1961.

Editor, Poetry of Our Time: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Including Modern Canadian Poetry. Toronto, Macmillan, 1965.

Editor, with Michael Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1967.

Editor, All Kinds of Everything: Worlds of Poetry. Toronto, Clarke Irwin, 1973.

Editor, Dk—Some Letters of Ezra Pound. Montreal, DC Books, 1974.

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Bibliography: Louis Dudek: A Check-list by Karol W.J. Wenek, Ottawa, Golden Dog Press, 1975.

Critical Studies: "A Critic of Life: Louis Dudek As Man of Letters" by Wynne Francis, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver), autumn 1964; "Louis Dudek Issue" of Yes 14 (Montreal), September 1965; The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature edited by Robert Weaver and William Toye, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1973; Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster by Frank Davey, Vancouver, Douglas and McIntyre, 1980, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1981; "Louis Dudek: Texts and Essays" edited by B.P. Nichol and Frank Davey, in Open Letter (Toronto), summer 1981; by Terry Goldie, in Canadian Writers and Their Works, edited by Robert Lecker and others, Toronto, ECW Press, 1985; "Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek" by Robin Blaser, in Sagetrieb (Orono, Maine), 7(1), spring 1988; The Place of American Poets in the Development of Irving Layton, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (dissertation) by Sabrina Lee Reed, n.p. 1989; "Dudek on Frye or, Not a Poet's Poetics" by Nicola Vulpe, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver, British Columbia), 136, spring 1993.

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When Robin Blaser introduced the quasi-definitive selection of Louis Dudek's poems, Infinite Worlds, he claimed that "Dudek is Canada's most important—that is to say consequential—modern voice." This is not the place for the ranking of poets, but the really significant part of Blaser's statement can be taken as true. Throughout a long career Dudek has been perhaps Canada's most consistent defender and practitioner of the classic modern mode.

There are two ways in which Dudek's modernism has been manifest, first in his devotion to imagism, which dominated the earlier part of his poetic career, and then in his insistence that in poetry perception (the discovery of the right image) must be disciplined and shaped by thought. More than most Canadian poets, Dudek has been a deliberately intellectual artificer, consciously concerned with the propagation of an essentially elitist literary attitude.

Here one comes to the main and most abiding influence on Dudek as a poet, that of Ezra Pound. Dudek began writing verse at the end of the 1930s, though his first volume, East of the City, did not appear until 1946. In 1943 he joined John Sutherland and Irving Layton in editing the poetry magazine First Statement, which Sutherland had founded in 1942, and he helped launch a movement that would liberate Canadian poetry from the British past, giving it at least a North American if not a very specifically Canadian character.

At this time Dudek already regarded himself as an imagist, and for a long time he argued that imagism was "the central antidote to the ills of Canadian poetry: the insistence on the clarity of imagery, contemporary imagery." One of his earliest books was actually called The Searching Image, and it presents some almost naively direct examples of imagist practice, for example, "A Small Rain," which I quote whole:

   Evening. With the thin rain falling,
   a sky like moonstone.
   And here, a slender tree, at street-edge
       one branch pointing left
           skyward,
       Another, thin, slanting to the right.

   And in the pale-light-filled street
           the first lamps, far
   pearly, light blue
       light green, red
   of all colours
       of all dimensions.

The resemblance to the early Pound is evident, and there is no doubt that Dudek has combined the role of disciple and original creator in an unusual way. As the Canadian critic Milton Wilson once remarked, Pound had been "both the hero and the villain of his story." In the late 1940s, when Dudek studied and taught in New York for a while, he began a correspondence with Pound that he eventually published. Not only did he follow Pound into imagism, but Dudek also labored diligently to acquire the kind of omnivorous erudition Pound displayed in his Cantos. Eventually the later Dudek came to resemble the later Pound, for it was the influence of The Cantos that led Dudek in the direction that most clearly marked his originality among Canadian poets, the creation of the long meditative poem as distinct from the long narrative poem, which already had a considerable Canadian history.

At their best Dudek's long poems of the 1950s and 1960s—Europe, En México, and Atlantis—move out from the shadow of The Cantos to become fine examples of philosophic verse filtered through a highly individual sensibility. Such poems, though they are formally modeled on journeys, have been criticized for their lack of narrative development, but this is the application of a prose criterion to a kind of writing that is, in fact, following an essentially poetic pattern, substituting for the quasi-chronological development of an argument the juxtaposition of situations, incidents, epiphanies, and revelations that are united tonally by the reflective manner. In them one finds examples of the poetry of philosophic statement such as few other Canadians have bettered. This Heraclitean reflection from Atlantis is an example:

   I seem to peer through time, as through a tottering mansion,
   to glimpse the shapes beyond, the spectral bone-men
              who lived, and died, and believed.
 
 
   And see the new religion fearfully replacing the old,
                        burning temples,
   knowing, past cure, how sure their reasons were
             against the old idols,
   who are now burned themselves, with the sure fire of reason.
 
 
   Nothing stands, we say, we moderns.
   All's flux, an art of mathematics—of fiery matter,
   while the old gods gutter and die in the flames.

With the writing of these long works Dudek's production of short lyric poems declined, and for more than twenty years, between 1958 (Laughing Stalks) and 1980 (Cross-Section: Poems 1940–1980), he published no collections of shorter poems. But it would be a mistake to assume that in giving an example to younger Canadian poets of the writing of long poems, which many of them have since followed, he entirely abandoned the lyric mode. One can find passages in the major poems, like the following from En México, that show his continued devotion to simple imagism and that in this way declare the unity of his work:

   All the green blanketing the hills,
   the braided streams,
   and the brown sands bleaching;
   horses with heads akimbo,
   small lambs that leap,
   children with huge eyes,
   and lovers shy in their look;
      praise these to the bewildering heavens,
   knowing no other tongue but praise.

—George Woodcock