Vancouver Lights Essay & Criticism

Vancouver Lights Critical Overview

Birney began writing poetry in earnest after the outbreak of World War II. In a burst of creative energy he wrote many of the poems that would be included in  David and  Other  Poems,   his   first collection. "Vancouver Lights" was one of these. Peter Aichinger writes that it is "one of the few poems Birney ever wrote that expresses any sort of pride or satisfaction in the human race and its accomplishments." Aichinger believes that the poem "suggests the cyclical pattern in the affairs of men, of grand achievement followed by wretched disaster. It is an expression of pride in man's ability to raise a Camelot at the same time that it acknowledges the probable victory of the forces of darkness in man's spirit." Frank Davey in Earle Birney sees "Vancouver Lights" as an indicator of Birney's own movement away from Trotskyism and towards a sense of himself as a...
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