[The poems of Green Pitcher and Sign Post] give testimony that Dorothy Livesay belonged to the new dispensation. She had felt the effects of the free-verse movement and of the work of several American poetesses. Affinities of attitude rather than imitation explain the echoes of Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Emily Dickinson…. Probably, in first working out her own way of writing, she had no conscious intention more deliberate than to be unlike the Canadian poetesses of her mother's generation.

This required, for one thing, complete avoidance of facile metrical effects. Dorothy Livesay never indulged in the glib appeal of lilting stanza or coy anapaest. She learned early to use muted rhymes, broken rhythms, tentative stanza forms; all these expressed a particular temperament and vision of life, but they were signs, as well, that she shared the determination of the other new poets to...