The poet Douglas LePan, one of my professors in graduate school at the University of Toronto, in an often-quoted poem title described Canada as “A Country without a Mythology.” In an article on Canadian literature, his colleague Northrop Frye quoted from LePan’s poem and linked it to the following quotation from
Douglas Lepan told me that Northrop Frye sent him a congratulator card on his seventieth birthday. He wrote on in words to this effect: "For someone who once called Canada a country without a mythology, you have done quite a lot to create it." Doug added that Norrie had missed the point of the poem, written about his experience on a solitary canoe trip in Algonquin Park.
Always nice to be reminded that you are out there reading the newsletters with thoughtulness and care, Tom. I'm not sure Norrie missed the point of the poem. Linking it with the George Grant quotation indicates to me that he understood it perfectly well I'm not sure what LePan means, and LePan is not one of my favorite people. I was in his Yeats/Eliot class, in which he cruelly and unnecessarily humiliated a student whose presentation he found inferior in a way that still shocks me when I think about it. I was a moral coward and did nothing. If it had happened now, I'd like to think I'd challenge LePan on it, walk out, and drop the class. It's not even a very good poem, full of that kind of New Critical Modernist elite-abstract gabble that mars much of early Robert Lowell. Norrie nailed that defect in his review of The Net and the Sword, and perhaps LePan had not forgiven him for it.
I'm not surprised to hear your comment. Lepan was going through a life change at the time you took the class. He had left his wife and family to admit that he was basically a gay man. He no doubt assumed that Norrie assumed the poem was basically ABOUT Canada rather than a particular region, while it's quite possible to see the Canadian identity as an extension.
Because Norrie went to Merton after doing the theologs' program at Emmanuel, people inevitably compared him to Doug, who was two years younger but had already done the BLitt. That was especially true of Blunden, who remembered Lepan as a colonial cricketeer who did not disgrace himself on the pitch and could talk about the game during a tutorial, while Norrie would rather to read Blake. Both Doug and Norrie were friends of my M.A. advisor Edward Weismiller, a Yale younger poet and Rhodes Scholar who overlapped their time at Oxford.
I’d have to agree with both you and Nietzche: god is dead, and the modern crisis is a crisis of mythology. If you need me, I’ll be in my office (111 Marting) pondering my future as Prometheus. What shall I do with my newly discovered powers?
Hey, are you teaching at BW? I had no idea! If so, congratulations, colleague! Yes, what shall we all do? Milton was right: we are given choices. Thanks for reading and caring.
Douglas Lepan told me that Northrop Frye sent him a congratulator card on his seventieth birthday. He wrote on in words to this effect: "For someone who once called Canada a country without a mythology, you have done quite a lot to create it." Doug added that Norrie had missed the point of the poem, written about his experience on a solitary canoe trip in Algonquin Park.
Always nice to be reminded that you are out there reading the newsletters with thoughtulness and care, Tom. I'm not sure Norrie missed the point of the poem. Linking it with the George Grant quotation indicates to me that he understood it perfectly well I'm not sure what LePan means, and LePan is not one of my favorite people. I was in his Yeats/Eliot class, in which he cruelly and unnecessarily humiliated a student whose presentation he found inferior in a way that still shocks me when I think about it. I was a moral coward and did nothing. If it had happened now, I'd like to think I'd challenge LePan on it, walk out, and drop the class. It's not even a very good poem, full of that kind of New Critical Modernist elite-abstract gabble that mars much of early Robert Lowell. Norrie nailed that defect in his review of The Net and the Sword, and perhaps LePan had not forgiven him for it.
I'm not surprised to hear your comment. Lepan was going through a life change at the time you took the class. He had left his wife and family to admit that he was basically a gay man. He no doubt assumed that Norrie assumed the poem was basically ABOUT Canada rather than a particular region, while it's quite possible to see the Canadian identity as an extension.
Because Norrie went to Merton after doing the theologs' program at Emmanuel, people inevitably compared him to Doug, who was two years younger but had already done the BLitt. That was especially true of Blunden, who remembered Lepan as a colonial cricketeer who did not disgrace himself on the pitch and could talk about the game during a tutorial, while Norrie would rather to read Blake. Both Doug and Norrie were friends of my M.A. advisor Edward Weismiller, a Yale younger poet and Rhodes Scholar who overlapped their time at Oxford.
I’d have to agree with both you and Nietzche: god is dead, and the modern crisis is a crisis of mythology. If you need me, I’ll be in my office (111 Marting) pondering my future as Prometheus. What shall I do with my newly discovered powers?
Hey, are you teaching at BW? I had no idea! If so, congratulations, colleague! Yes, what shall we all do? Milton was right: we are given choices. Thanks for reading and caring.