In 1976 at Michigan State University, American and Canadian scholars and poets gathered to honor A. J. M. Smith, seventy-four-year-old doyen of Canadian letters. It is fitting that such a symposium sh...
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Critical Essay by A. M. Klein
An appreciation of Smith's craftsmanship—his hammered gold on gold enamelling—is not to be taken … as underestimating the content and essence ...
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Critical Essay by Earle Birney
Such of Smith's poems as "The Archer", "A Hyacinth for Edith", and "The Plot against Proteus" were, of course, no more i...
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Critical Essay by Roy Fuller
[Like] Wordsworth, Smith has obscured his progress as a poet by arranging [Collected Poems] subjectwise, not chronologically. The book is divided into five sections, the o...
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Critical Essay by Milton Wilson
Certainly you don't have to talk to Smith for long to realize that he relishes the thought of being odd classical man out in a society of romantics, and, from th...
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Critical Essay by A.j.m. Smith
When I write a poem I try to know what I am doing—at least with respect to craft. Luck is needed too, of course, and luck is unpredictable. All I know about it is...
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Critical Essay by George Woodcock
There are few poets whose work keeps well over a generation; Smith is one of them, and in my view [his collected poems] places him clearly among the more memorable ly...
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Critical Essay by Northrop Frye
Mr. Smith has the reputation of being a metaphysical poet in the tradition of Donne…. Certainly Mr. Smith is scholarly: [in A Sort of Ecstasy] we meet such phras...
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Critical Essay by Munro Beattie
Clearly Smith has refined and polished his own poems with unremitting care. His subtle imagination and skilful craftsmanship most strikingly display themselves in the p...
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Critical Essay by I. S. Maclaren
Certainly the one hundred pieces [in Poems New and Collected] show Smith to be a chameleon—he can viciously dismiss the vacuity of 'popular poetry'...
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A(rthur) J(ames) M(arshall) Smith
