Working within the "topocentric" assumption that Canadian culture derives part of its vitality and coherence from the dialectic between the sections and spaces of the country, it can be argued that from the beginning to the present there has been in Canadian poetry the possibility of two distinct and antithetical stances: that of the baseland and that of the hinterland, which correspond to the broad divisions in the Canadian landscape and their resulting psychological orientations. It can be shown that the radical disjunction between these two stances, though by no means incapable of reconciliation, has, at times, caused considerable animosity between poets and critics of opposing perspectives, and, moreover, has since World War II played a considerable part in the development of Canadian poetry.
