A. J. M. Smith
| A.J.M. Smith | |
|---|---|
| Born | Arthur James Marshall Smith November 8, 1902 Montreal, Quebec |
| Died | November 21, 1980 (aged 78) East Lansing, Michigan |
| Occupation | professor |
| Language | English |
| Nationality |
 Canadian |
| Citizenship | British subject |
| Alma mater | McGill University |
| Genre | poetry |
| Literary movement | Montreal Group |
| Notable works | The Death of the Phoenix and Other Poems |
| Notable awards | Governor General's Award, Lorne Pierce Medal, FRSC |
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."
Smith was born in Montreal, but lived in England from 1918 to 1920, where he "studied for the Cambridge Local Examinations, 'and failed everything except English and history' (he later wrote)." In England he became aware of contemporary poetry: "he frequented Harold Monroe's bookshop, then the citadel of Georgian poetry, and read much in the recent war poets and the Imagists."
Returning to Montreal, Smith entered McGill University in 1921. While an undergraduate there in 1924 he wrote for and co-edited the McGill Daily Literary Supplement; in 1925, as a graduate student, he and F. R. Scott founded the McGill Fortnightly Review, which billed itself as "an independent journal of literature, the arts, and student affairs edited and published by a group of undergraduates at McGill University." The Review was "the first journal to publish modernist poetry and critical opinion in Canada."
"The McGill Fortnightly drew to it other young writers – among them A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel – on whom, as well as on Scott, Smith had an enduring influence."
"While still at McGill," Scott later noted, "Smith had poems accepted by the Dial, then in the last days of its glory as an expounder of new aesthetic values, and which only a few years previously had printed Eliot's Waste Land. Such an honour was a stimulus to our whole group."
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