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Articles

Volume 14, Number 1 (1989)

"After the ebb-flow": A.J.M. Smith's Nature Poetry

  • Anne Compton
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1989-01-01

Abstract

Few Canadian poets write of nature as objectively as A.J.M. Smith does in the ten poems which make up section two of Poems, New and Collected: "To Hold in a Poem," "Sea Cliff," "The Creek," "Swift Current," "Walking in a Field, Looking Down and Seeing a White Violet," "Wild Raspberry," "Birches at Drummond Point," "Tree," "The Lonely Land," and "The Convolvulus." Smith carefully avoids imposing or implanting human shapes and characteristics on nature. He embraces the Imagist practice of "seeing the thing in itself," which he refers to as "nakedness of vision," but he subjects what he sees to analysis. Where he differs from the Imagists, he resembles Thomas Traherne, whose notion of "pure seeing" includes analysis and leads to felicity.