In "Political Meeting" A. M. Klein describes an orator addressing an anti-conscription rally in Quebec. The Orator, we are told, is "a country uncle with sunflower seeds in his pockets." The description of the sunflower seeds in the Orator's pockets is the most vivid physical detail in the poem. But it is more than just that. For anyone who knows "Political Meeting," the image of the sunflower seeds has the power to call up the complex mood of the poem, and, ...

[In recent discussions of Klein's work, his radical poems] have either been ignored or else dismissed as having no literary value. On the whole they have been considered as a regrettable and troubling episode in an otherwise virtuous literary life. (p. 31) My own view is that the radical poems are still fresh, interesting, and alive, not merely as biographical data but as literary works. Although I share many of the values which these poems assert, my interest is not based on a nostalgic hankering af...

"The poetry of Abraham Moses Klein springs from the roots of a consciousness where Hebrew and legal lore have become strangely and exotically intermingled with Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot," Leon Edel remarks. Klein's passion for English literature was second only to his love for Judaism, and in each the feeling was supported by a refined and extensive scholarship. His early work is thronged with Elizabethan locutions, some appropriate in that they fit in with the rhetorical Jewish tradi...

["Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,"] coming as it does after nearly twenty years of writing and publishing poetry, appears to present a view on what a poet's role might be in the society in which he finds himself. For this reason alone, if for no other, the poem might be accorded a close reading, an exploration of the idea of the "poet-as-Adam" which seems to have been a personal reflection of the poet. (p. 553) An attempt at a reconciliation [between belief and disbelie...

Klein is a product of three rich and distinct traditions, all of which formed his mind and imagination, determined his response to time past and present, to place, and to religious and literary forms and values. As a consequence, his contribution to the Canadian mosaic reflects the same elements. His major contribution stems primarily from his presentation of Jewish experience, historic and present, with its inherent ideas and values. It is a unique contribution, reflecting the religio-cultural heritage of ...

Klein's best poetry did, evidently, get into his [earlier] books. The lesser work [also included in The Collected Poems of A. M. Klein] is interesting, especially the "Radical Poems, 1932–1938", for the light it throws on Klein's growth. But most readers will return to Hath Not a Jew … (1940) and Poems (1944), and will agree with [the editor] Miriam Waddington that in his last volume, The Rocking Chair (1948), Klein "finally found his true tongue and voice.&#...