SOURCE: "The Poetry of P. K. Page," in Poets and Critics: Essays from Canadian Literature 1966–1974, edited by George Woodcock, Oxford University Press Canada, 1974, pp. 80–91.

Smith was a Canadian educator, anthologist, award-winning poet, and critic. In the following essay, originally published in Canadian Literature in 1971, he examines the imagery and themes in Page's major collections of poetry.

Of the Canadian poets who led the second wave of modernism in the forties and fifties, P. K. Page holds a curious and somewhat anomalous position; she had certainly not received the critical attention that the remarkable fusion of psychological insight and poetic imagination which characterizes and individualizes her poems would lead one to expect. Perhaps the effort to discriminate between the subjective and objective elements of her work, or between image and symbol or memory and desire, has been thought by the critics too unprofitable or found too fatiguing. There is...