The difficulty in writing about a modern movement in Canadian poetry is that many of its concerns appear to be local and national in a world in which, as Northrop Frye observes, "the nation is rapidly ceasing to be the real defining unit of society."' Obviously, the view that we are now "moving towards a post-national world"2 makes more cultural than political or social sense, though it is for that reason that the contemporary arts seem more closely connected with revolutionary attitudes than with traditional values. It is this revolutionary aspect of the " 'modern' element in the culture of the last century"3 that occupies Frye in The Modern Century. Considered as style, the modern exhibits characteristically anarchic features: deliberate fragmenting of literary form, either through disorder or parody; irrationalism; disruption or inversion of value systems; and disoriented versions of perception. In turn, the radicalism of style connects with radical, anarchic social (or anti-social) attitudes, particularly in what Frye calls a Freudian proletarianism that seeks to overthrow through pornography or sexual assault the repressive anxietystructure of society. What is modern in Canadian poetry, then, we would want to connect with aspects of radicalism in its style and attitude. What, in fact, we appear to be left with, as a sort of national residue, is that which seems impossible to reconcile with radicalism in our poetry: its nostalgia, its longing for history, its impulse to define a Canadian past and to create a useable tradition. On the whole, the sort of criticism which sees poetry as a reflection of environment simply resorts to any one of a number of dualisms to explain this apparent contradiction of the local and international in Canadian writing. Occasionally, we hear of the tension in Canadian life between vulgarity and daintiness. There are other, familiar pairs: American and British influences on Canadian poetry; realism and formalism; colonialism and nationalism; originality and imitativeness. Projected as a genuine rift in Canadian life, dualism becomes the ultimate secret, what Malcolm Ross speaks of as "the broad design of our unique, inevitable, and precarious cultural pattern." "This pattern, by the force of historical and geographical circumstances," Ross goes on to say, "is a pattern of opposites in tension ... the federal-regional tension . . . the American-British tension. . . the French-English tension."4 If Ross's is an extreme version of dualism in Canadian life, it at least has the merit of defining one limit of our discussion: poetry dissolves into the dualities of space and time. But time and space (or history and geography) can be resolved into poetry, perhaps at another extreme limit. Seen as sociology, con-