Canonization Or Exclusion?: Dorothy Livesay's Wayward Modernism from the 1940S' (Poet‪)‬

The aim of this paper is to explore the contribution of the work of Dorothy Livesay to Canadian modernist poetry during the 1940s. My focus on Livesay's lyric poetry aims to productively link female subjectivity to a belated Canadian modernism which included female poets writing about themselves, their own gender and their belonging to Canada. Livesay's early work is focused not on the objectivity idealized by "post-Eliot" male modernists such as A.J.M. Smith, but on the subjectivity of an emerging female-centred poetics found in the work of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Edith Sitwell, and Amy Lowell. Inspired by feminist readings of Modernism, in this essay I am interested in reevaluating Livesay's "native" poetry in opposition to a male "cosmopolitan" Canadian modernism. The combination of her very long and accomplished literary career, her commitment to left-wing politics as well as her lifelong commitment to Canadian literature make her a crucial figure for the understanding and rereading of Canadian modernism.