Margaret Atwood has remarked that her poetic tradition is Canadian…. [Her nearest of kin] are James Reaney and, possibly, Jay Macpherson. (p. 129)
Influenced by Frye, both Reaney and Macpherson believe in the power of the imagination to create autonomous poetic worlds. Atwood, while celebrating the imagination, often in disturbing images that recall, for example, Reaney's The Red Heart … or Macpherson's Welcoming Disaster …, is aware of its dangers. In her poetry physical reality constantly assails imagination, challenging its proud autonomy so that the poet must adopt an ironic eye and an ambivalent attitude towards both realms. Atwood further resembles Reaney in the emphasis she places upon perception, although she is again less willing than he to trust the eye of the beholder, the individual's inner vision. Her use of myth owes much to Reaney's theories in Alphabet,… because Reaney provided a model for the intersection of immediate experience and myth. Macpherson's The Boatman, published in 1957, was one of Canada's first series of poems artistically shaped as a book instead of a collection. With Double Persephone, The Circle Game, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and to a lesser degree in other volumes. Atwood creates comparable unity—poems inter-related through theme and image to create a structural and imaginative whole.
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