Critique

A Canadian won a medal for explaining the "painful plight" of Canadian letters. The Canadian Authors' Association adjudged Toronto-born Edward Killoran Brown's On Canadian Poetry the best academic nonfiction work of 1943 by a Canadian, awarded him the annual Governor-General's medal.

Expatriate Brown, now teaching at Cornell, wrote that: 1) Canadians are regional in outlook and "regionalist art fails because it stresses the superficial at the expense ... of the universal"; 2) Canadians are strong Puritans and "Puritanism . . . dis-believes in the importance of art"; 3) Canadians live a disguised form of the frontier life where art plays second fiddle to the hockey game and whiskey bottle; 4) for all of Canada's Dominion status, the average Canadian is still colonial-minded -- "an unwholesome state of mind in which great art is most unlikely to emerge."

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