The Montreal Group, sometimes referred to as the McGill Group or McGill Movement, was a circle of Canadian modernist writers formed in the mid-1920s at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. The Group included Leon Edel, John Glassco, A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, F. R. Scott, and A. J. M. Smith, most of whom attended McGill as undergraduates. The group championed the theory and practice of modernist poetry over the Victorian-style versification, exemplified by the Confederation Poets, that predominated in Canadian poetry at the time.
The Montreal Group is associated with the rise of the "little magazines", which published contemporary innovative prose and poetry in the style of British and American modernism, and later works from Europe's aesthetic and decadent movements. The Encyclopædia Britannica credits the group and its members with having "precipitated a renaissance of Canadian poetry during the 1920s and ’30s ... They encouraged an emulation of the realistic themes, metaphysical complexity, and techniques of the U.S. and British poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden that resulted in an Expressionist, Modernist, and often Imagist poetry reflective of the values of an urban and cosmopolitan civilization."
History
In the 1920s, most Canadian poetry was similar to that of English poets of the Victorian era. This style had been popularized around the time of Confederation by Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, and continued to prevail among Canadian poets until the early 1940s. Some Canadians, though, were writing modernist poetry: W. W. E. Ross, R. G. Everson, Raymond Knister, and Dorothy Livesay were each individually publishing Imagist poetry in free verse in American and English literary publications.
Over time these poets became known as the Montreal Group. They founded a number of "little magazines" which gave Canadian modernists the opportunity to publish in their own country. As Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski were to write four decades later, in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967):
McGill Daily Literary Supplement
This first publication began as a weekly supplement to the McGill Daily, the university undergraduate society's newspaper, and was edited by Allan Latham, A. P. R. Coulborn, and A. J. M. Smith. It included poems, articles, and book reviews.
When Scott submitted a translation of "an old French chanson", Smith printed it, and subsequently invited Scott to serve on the editorial board. The Literary Supplement contained no advertising, and after a time the students' society stopped funding it; Smith and Scott closed the Supplement and began work on an independent publication to replace it.
McGill Fortnightly Review
On November 21, 1925 the McGill Fortnightly Review published its first issue and branded itself and "independent journal devoted to purely literary, artistic and scientific matter." The editorial board was A. P. R. Coulborn, A. B. Latham, F. R. Scott, A. J. M and managing editor Leon Edel; the manager was Montreal businessman Lou Schwartz. The journal was one of the first to publish modernist poetry and critical opinion in Canada, and was considered as rebellious in tone. The journal published the work of Leo Kennedy; A. M. Klein's one submission was turn down because it included the word "soul", which the editors considered old-fashioned.
The name came from that bastion of Victorian tradition, the Fortnightly Review; and the first issue praised a talk Bliss Carman had given at McGill. By issue three, in which Smith offered readers an analysis of The Waste Land, the new biweekly was focused directly on the introduction of Modernism into Canadian poetry.
The publication regularly criticized the Canadian Authors' Association, which the editors saw as promoting the "quasi-Victorian" verse of the times. For example, the journal's second issue derided the CAA's promotion of a Canadian "Book Week", arguing that the association should focus on the development of excellence in Canadian literature rather than the promotion of existing books regardless of quality. F. R. Scott's satirical poem ‘The Canadian authors meet’, which claimed that the association encouraged amateurism, appeared in the last issue of the journal in 1927.