F. R. Scott is best known, as a poet, for his social and literary satire…. The virtues of Scott's light verse are immediately obvious: clarity, wit, economy, lightness of touch, and brilliant wordplay. It has also been widely recognized that many of these qualities have been carried over into his more serious poetry…. [But] Scott's outlook, in some of his most serious poems, is a profoundly ambiguous one. His clarity is often used to define an ambivalence, and his wordplay (especially the punning) to embody contrasting meanings in their most concise forms.

This ambiguity is concerned with what such critics as D. G. Jones see as a central Canadian theme: a doubt about the nature and validity of the human civilizing or technologizing process as it impinges upon human relationships and upon the natural environment…. That Scott's attitudes towards such a theme might indeed be ambiguous could perhaps...