Reviews for Tish, a movement

The average rating for Tish, a movement based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-27 00:00:00 Joshua Hare Canadian literature is full of books that are mentioned but never read. That's especially true of the long expanse of fitful publications prior to WWII. "The White Savannahs" is often mentioned in historical articles that talk about the development of Canadian literature. The thing is, it's hard to see that the world would have been any different if this book had not been written. There are not any really interesting ideas in it, and none of Collin's contemporaries seems to have been really influenced by it. Yet it is "the first book to approach Canadian literature from a Modernist perspective," and for that reason gets mentioned in historical articles. The thing about Collin's essays is that they are almost completely pointless. He doesn't really have a "take" on his subject. He just wants to introduce them to you. And in between his copious quotations from Canadian poets, he takes aggressive postures on all things modern. "Honesty! These words have a new sound, a rather odd silver timbre as tough they were foreigners but, in contrast to the Imagist use of words, they do not refer immediately to some object in order to present a new analogy. They are Latin, not Saxon words, used in an intellectual, not merely poetic, sense. Dorothy Livesay so completely repudiates the romantic tradition that she abhors words which are supposedly poetic" (152-153). This excerpt gives a good sense of his style. Each sentence, each clause even, jumps from one thing to the next. He writes as if out of white-hot intensity. At the same time, though, when his thoughts are dull or commonplace, it becomes irritating that he expresses them so energetically. That said, he's definitely a knowledgeable guy. Born in England, he was educated at the Sorbonne before taking a job in London, Ontario in 1923. He wanted to learn about the literature in Canada and write about it as part of global modernism. He had his finger on the intellectual currents of modern life and found them very thrilling. I just wish his own position weren't so dogmatic. According to Collin, T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme have basically figured it all out. We are living in a spiritual wasteland, romanticism is dumb, positivism is dumb, we need a spiritual renewal. Collin spends a lot of time enthusiastically casting out the old and proclaiming the new order. I did like how seriously he takes poetry. In a way, I'm sad that our intellectual world today is not much like this. For all that modern intellectuals are trying to change the world, so often it feels like they aren't trying to reimagine it. Collin is proposing a total spiritual renovation through poetry. It's a vital thought. All the same, his rejection of the past, his acceptance of Eliot and Hulme at face value, it all just seems so arbitrary now. So, I can't really recommend this book to anyone. It's a curiosity, nothing more.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-13 00:00:00 Anella Perez CLASSIC