Background
John Sutherland was born on February 21, 1919, in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was the son of Frederick McClae, a vice president and manager of the New Brunswick Light, Heat and Power Company, and Lois (Parker) Sutherland.
99 University Ave, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
From 1936 to 1937, Sutherland attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
845 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal, QC H3A 0G4, Canada
Sutherland attended McGill University in Montreal, in 1941.
99 University Ave, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
From 1936 to 1937, Sutherland attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
845 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal, QC H3A 0G4, Canada
Sutherland attended McGill University in Montreal, in 1941.
John Sutherland was born on February 21, 1919, in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was the son of Frederick McClae, a vice president and manager of the New Brunswick Light, Heat and Power Company, and Lois (Parker) Sutherland.
From 1936 to 1937, Sutherland attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and McGill University in Montreal, in 1941.
In his later years, Sutherland was involved in editing the journal Index, but it is for the several transformations of First Statement that he is mainly remembered.
Sutherland - who, as a child, lost his mother to tuberculosis and as a teenager lost a kidney to renal tuberculosis - seemed to have inherited a susceptibility to disease. It was during one period of enforced rest that Sutherland began to write. In 1942, dissatisfied with current publishing trends and tastes and unhappy when the newly founded Montreal little magazine Preview rejected his poems, founded a magazine called First Statement. First Statement, sustained a lively and sometimes waspish relationship with Preview, but in late 1945 the two journals merged as Northern Review of which Sutherland became managing editor.
Even more barbed than the Preview-First Statement interactions was the relationship between Sutherland and A. J. M. Smith, who had been one of the rebels of the preceding generation but was now considered an establishment voice. New explained, When Smith published his influential 1943 anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry, Sutherland took exception to both the selection and the critical categories outlined in Smith’s introduction. The result was Other Canadians (1947), a 113-page First Statement anthology of the new poets of the 1940s - especially Layton, Dudek, and Raymond Souster - who Sutherland felt had been ignored in Smith’s book and were not read as individual writers. The introduction took Smith to task for opposing the terms ‘native’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ as though they were meaningful in the first place and mutually exclusive in the second.
During his lifetime Sutherland published only about twelve poems altogether, most in First Statement, four in Poetry (Chicago). At his death, he left a manuscript of forty-three poems, titled ‘First Poems.’ By the time of his death, much had changed. As Northern Review continued Tafter 1947 with Sutherland alone in the editorial chair, it became more conservative.
John M. A. Sutherland is remembered as an editor and critic, one whose voice spoke out forcefully and forthrightly in the 1940s, calling for greater attention to specific literary texts and less tolerance of literary generalizations.
Although he published numerous poems of his own, he was perhaps better known as the founder and editor of two important Canadian literary magazines, First Statement and Northern Review. He remains an important figure in the history of Canadian poetry.
(anthology of the new poetry in Canada 1940-1946)
Sutherland converted to Roman Catholicism and given up much of the Nietzschean stance of his earlier criticism.
Sutherland castigated the older ‘nature poets’ for their provincialism; and while acknowledging the creative energies and social and psychological commitments of some of his contemporaries, he was at pains to point out that their so-called cosmopolitanism did not free them from provinciality.
On November 27, 1943, Sutherland married Audrey Aikman.
Arthur James Marshall Smith (November 8, 1902 – November 21, 1980) was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" – the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A. M. Klein, and F. R. Scott — "who distinguished themselves by their modernism in a culture still rigidly rooted in Victorianism.
