On the stage of Canadian literary history, A.J.M. Smith and John Sutherland are usually seen as protagonist and antagonist. They should also be viewed, however, as successor and precursor, and — in the terms they used to describe each other — bishop and deacon. To reconstruct the debate between them is to discern that their early opposition gradually collapsed, as Smith incorporated Sutherland's view of Engtish-Canadian poetry into his own. Because both ultimately seek to validate a present unity that harmonizes conflicting past traditions (native and cosmopolitan), the evaluative ideal that informs their anthologies and criticism might well be called literary confederation
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