The sardonic, sceptical habit—itself entirely salutary—has won Frank Scott many satirical victories but they've always struck me as rather easy ones. There are a few more such victories in [Signature]…. Good Bye to All That, while not exactly a case of easy temptation-easy victory, would perhaps do better as a … gap-filler in the bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. I am making a literary, not a moral objection. Cheap victories have soured all attempts of Canadian poets at satire. In The Blasted Pine, for instance, not even Scott's contributions managed to get the old Canadian pine really blasted; it was left a bit charred, but still flourishing in its inimitable, betundra'd fashion. The object of a satiric blast must be either obliterated or transfigured; you have to be left either with a smoking crater open to the chancey seed and fall of rain or...