Who Was Doris Hedges?: the Search for Canada's First Literary Agent by Robert Lecker

Author:Robert Lecker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hedges reiterates her aesthetic principles, emphasizing clarity of expression in poetry and how its function and purpose are to move her readers. “The poet should bring his verse into the people’s lives through the medium of sheer clarity and pleasure.”54 She also claims to abhor art for profit’s sake and to hate how “nothing flourishes except those products which can bring in money.”55 She then expresses a deep nostalgia for “simple things” and a disdain for “abstractionism in paintings and obscurantism in poetry,” which, she argues, “lead to nowhere” other than “blind alleys of undisciplined self-expression.”56

Hedges did not offer much solace to those members of her broadcast audience who hoped to become poets: “I do not recommend any young writer who must earn his or her living, to attempt to do so by writing and publishing poetry! Unless these writers are very exceptional indeed, they will starve like the poet Chatterton, in an attic.”57 To put it bluntly, Hedges said, “there is no money in poetry. It is as simple as that. Poetry has prestige value, and very little else today.”58 Clearly, Hedges was preoccupied with the devaluation of poetry in favour of literature that could generate a profit. Prospective authors were living at a time when “nothing flourishes except those products which can bring in money.”59 The negativity did not stop there. Hedges felt that students did not truly enjoy reading poetry. Rather, “poetry is read forcibly by students, written by a few fanatics, and bought hardly at all.”60 Meanwhile, classroom teachers were doing little to remedy the situation because, lacking discernment, they pursued the latest literary fad rather than more demanding poetry. Hedges argued that “it is impossible for young people to make judgements on what is bad, unless they are first fully instructed in what is good.”61 Why has poetry failed to attract an audience? Why are teachers so misguided when they talk about poetry? Why does no one buy it? Hedges proposed this answer:

The mass of people we call the public, are today under a terrific strain of fear, and are haunted by a sense of insecurity. Poetry, generally speaking, is not down to earth enough to reach the heart of the ordinary man. It is fashionable in these days, to laud the novelist and decry the poet. Partly, this is because there is a particular school of poets who deliberately, or through lack of technique, make their poetry ineffective, from a human point of view, by being obscure in meaning. The ordinary man in the street cannot understand that kind of poetry, and who can blame him?62

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