Inward of Poetry: George Johnston & Wm Blissett in Letters
"Inward of Poetry" presents fifty years of thoughtful and, by turns, chatty letters between poet George Johnston and his good friend and frequent editor, the scholar William Blissett. Edited by former student Sean Kane, this lively collection includes several hitherto unpublished Johnston poems and reveals the development and creative necessities of one of Canada's revered poets and translators.
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These letters between William Blissett and George Johnston offer a precious glimpse into a Canadian literary world now largely vanished, an age celebrated in names such as A. S. P. Woodhouse, W. J. Alexander, and Harold Innis, and -- still flourishing in and dominating the Toronto I knew -- Northrop Frye, Earle Birney, Farley Mowat, Robertson Davies, Claude Bissell, Ernest Sirluck, Barker Fairley, and Marshall McLuhan. The two humane, generous, self-deprecating figures whose lifelong friendship and half-century of correspondence lie at the heart of this volume shared a love of poetic craft and painstaking workmanship that, as one of George's favorite Icelandic skalds put it, will be slow to grow old.'' '--Roberta Frank, Yale University
Oh, Johnston was an academic of some sort, a scholar, too; purveyor of Icelandic sagas ... sometimes, even deep in the fustier nooks and crannies of said academe, one might chance across an authentic beating heart for whom poetry, and not just some fantasia of the thing, truly does matter. A tip of the hat then to Porcupine Quill's publication of the George Johnston-William Blisset correspondence: "Inward of Poetry".'--Norm Sibum
"Inward of Poetry" is a journey, through correspondence, into the friendship of Canadian poet George Johnston and Canadian scholar William Blissett. Both men of letters, Johnston and Blissett met in graduate school in the late 1940s, beginning their fifty-year correspondence upon their departure to distant academic posts. Serving as a memoir of the men's lives and their scholarly vocations, "Inward of Poetry" provides readers with an intimate account into the minds and times of Johnston and Blissett.
Johnston is known to have written 180 letters to Blissett in his lifetime, and Blissett wrote more than 142 (correspondence from the 1990s has been mislaid). Sean Kane, the editor of the collection and a past student of George Johnston, expertly presents the men's friendship through his chapter-by-chapter narration, providing background information to set the stage for the letters. Kane's careful excerpting of the letters and notes of clarification delve deep into the significant aspects of each man's life.
In the early chapters of the book, Blissett and Johnston focus on the vocation to which each has felt called. Their ideas on teaching, scholarship, and their own reactions to what they had been reading and writing fascinate. In a discussion of a meeting they had both attended, Blissett disagrees with Johnston's outburst (accompanied, notes Blissett, by breathing down my neck'') that English is a dead language, like Irish, that shouldn't be taught in university. Johnston's charming response, indicative of their ease with one another, reads: I am an owl, everything I say sounds owlish to me - but I do believe that I might sound like a comfortable owl if I were writing to you.''
In middle chapters of the book, centered upon Johnston's poetry collections ("Cruising Auk," "Home Free," and "Happy Enough"), Johnston settles into his role as a comfortable owl'', full of long-range vision for what he hoped for in his poems and for Canadian literature as a whole. Trus
