SOURCE: Aichinger, Peter. “Conclusion: People and Politics.” In Earle Birney, pp. 142-63. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

In the following essay, Aichinger addresses the influence of Birney's extensive travels, political allegiances, and global perspectives on his development as a Canadian poet.

I the Lonely Observer

In the 1940s Birney and some of his contemporaries—F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, and P. K. Page—had begun to define a new attitude in Canadian poetry; where Canadian poets in the nineteenth century had tended to settle for a glorification of nature's beauties and the morally invigorating challenge of the frontier, Birney and the others “… sought in man's own mental and social world for a subject matter they can no longer find in the beauty of nature—a beauty that seems either deceptive or irrelevant.”¹ Thus, poems like “David” and “Climbers” acknowledge the beauty of the landscape while they underline its...