Little magazines like Alan Crawley's Contemporary Verseare the life blood of literary culture. They provide an ongoing forumin which both well established and new poets can experiment and presenttheir latest work, and it is often with the little magazines,therefore, that litearary change and oringiality have theirbeginnings.
Today there is no shortage of such outlets in Canada. But in 1941,when Alan Crawley began to publish Contemporary Verse in NorthVancouver, there were only two in the whole country. Both of these --Canadian Poetry Magazine and Canadian Forum -- werein the East, and neither was in any way committed to"modernism." Contemporary Verse, thus became a majorelement in the foundations of modern Canadian poetry.
In this book Joan McCullagh shows how, between 1941 and 1952, themagazine charted the establishment of modernism in Canadian poetry bypublishing, even before 1947, the largest, most impressive, and mostrepresentative collection of early forties' poetry in the country.Her extensive quotation from the hitherto unbpublished correspondencebetween Crawley and nearly every major poet of the forties also showshow important and valued a literary influence Crawley himself was as acritic and advisor behind the scenes.
Daryl Hine and Jay Macpherson are only two of the poets who werefirst encouraged and guided by Alan Crawley's private crticism ofwork they sent him and then first published in ContemporaryVerse. Other poets with whom he corresponded at length, and whosepoetry he published, including P.K. Page, James Reaney, Louis Dudek,Raymond Souster, Dorothy Livesay, Anne Wilkinson, and Earle Birney.
Very few libraries, even in Canada, hold a complete set of the 39issues of Contemporary Verse. The index to the magazine thatJoan McCullagh has compiled and included here will therefore serve notonly as a guide to Contemporary Verse itself, but also as anindispensable publishing record of many Canadian poets during the1940's.
