SOURCE: Warkentin, Germaine. “The Problem of Crawford's Style.” Canadian Literature, no. 107 (winter 1985): 20-32.

In the following essay, Warkentin examines stylistic contradictions in Crawford's poetry.

Isabella Valancy Crawford is from one point of view a figure easily stereotyped. Though he wisely rejected any such pitfall, Northrop Frye nevertheless acknowledged that she was “an intelligent and industrious female songbird of the kind who filled so many anthologies in the last century.” But Frye also called her “the most remarkable mythopoeic imagination in Canadian poetry,”¹ and (although he himself has written nothing extended on Crawford) in so doing gave direction to three decades of study which has recaptured from sentimental history one of the strangest and most powerful figures of Canadian literary life. To modernist poets and critics like Louis Dudek, Crawford's work seems “all hollow convention,” “counterfeit.”² But James Reaney, operating within Frye's critical assumptions in a bravura essay of...