Артур Джеймс Маршалл Смит: Канадский поэт и антологист

Canadian poet and anthologist (1902–1980)

Arthur James Marshall Smith (November 8, 1902 – November 21, 1980) was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" – the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A. M. Klein, and F. R. Scott — "who distinguished themselves by their modernism in a culture still rigidly rooted in Victorianism."

Smith was born in Montreal, but lived in England from 1918 to 1920, where he "studied for the Cambridge Local Examinations, 'and failed everything except English and history' (he later wrote)." In England he became aware of contemporary poetry: "he frequented Harold Monroe's bookshop, then the citadel of Georgian poetry, and read much in the recent war poets and the Imagists."

Returning to Montreal, Smith entered McGill University in 1921. While an undergraduate there in 1924 he wrote for and co edited the McGill Daily Literary Supplement; in 1925, as a graduate student, he and F. R. Scott founded the McGill Fortnightly Review, which billed itself as "an independent journal of literature, the arts, and student affairs edited and published by a group of undergraduates at McGill University." The Review was "the first journal to publish modernist poetry and critical opinion in Canada."

In 1936 Smith became a professor at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) and taught there until his retirement in 1972. "He became a naturalized American, but spent all his summers in his country place near Magog, Quebec." He became well known as both a scholar and an author of poetry, with many of his best known works focusing on Canadian themes (for example his 1929 poem "The Lonely Land," which was inspired by a 1926 Group of Seven exhibition). As early as 1939, Smith applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the preparation of an anthology of Canadian poetry. The book was praised by literary critic Northrop Frye, who called its publication "an important event in Canadian literature. For instead of confining his reading to previous compilations, as most anthologists do, he has made a first hand study of the whole English field with unflagging industry and unfaltering taste." The Encyclopædia Britannica says that The Book of Canadian Poetry, and Smith's later anthologies, "contributed greatly to the modernization of literary standards in Canada.

Smith won the 1943 Governor General's Award for English language poetry or drama for his own first collection of poetry, News of the Phoenix and Other Poems.

News of the Phoenix and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1943. New York: Coward McCann, 1943. A Sort of Ecstasy. Michigan State College Press, 1954. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954. Collected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962 Poems New and Collected. Toronto: Oxford U P, 1967. Early Beginnings to Confederation. Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1965.