"A Strange Gestation": Periods of poetic silence in modern Canadian creative careers

This dissertation unites a diverse group of Canadian poets who all fell silent for a prolonged period in the middle of otherwise productive and successful poetic careers: P.K. Page, Phyllis Webb, John Newlove, Anne Marriott, and Leonard Cohen. Their "silences" are characterized not by an absence of creative energy or effort, but by the poets' reluctance to publish and their struggles to bring new work to satisfactory completion. The dissertation's four chapters approach the gaps in creative careers from several methodological angles in order to develop a multidimensional definition of "poetic silence," while also offering insight into individual poets and their oeuvres. Part I of the dissertation concerns critical constructions of creative silence, first from the outside looking in—the perspective of critics—and then from the inside looking out—the perspective of poets. "Silence" is a malleable metaphor with both deathly and regenerative connotations, and Chapter One reviews the ways in which critics have seized upon the concept to advance a wide variety of critical and theoretical projects. The poets, meanwhile, have frequently reflected retrospectively on their own fallow periods; Chapter Two surveys the material, psychological, and creative barriers that they have cited as impediments to their progress, and shows that the writers who moved most fully beyond those obstacles also idealized middle silence as a phase of rebirth. Part II of the dissertation narrates the experience of silence as the writers represented and worked through it in their pre- and post-lapsus poetry. Drawing on both published and unpublished, complete and incomplete poetic work, Chapter Three demonstrates that Page, Webb, and Cohen all underwent a crisis of poetic authority in the middle of their careers; when they lost confidence in their mastery as "makers" of artistic order and meaning, "silence," a feeling of impotence that they often expressed through images of excess and disorder, began to invade the poems. Chapter Four, finally, illustrates that once these three writers stopped fighting against silence, they learned to embrace it as a receptive and fertile creative condition. Newlove and Marriott's returns to writing were less dramatic than Page, Webb, or Cohen's because they never fully released the shame and guilt that creative obstruction had initially implied for all five writers. The most innovative and confident post-hiatus poetry was composed by the poets who came to believe that fallow periods were in fact an integral part of their creative careers, and that the most sustainable models of creativity are fuelled by the silences at their core.

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