<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<?color><?param 0100,0100,0100><HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META content="MSHTML 5.00.2614.3500" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV>Dear Colleagues:</DIV>
<DIV>I thought you mind the message (see below) of interest.</DIV>
<DIV>Thanks.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Denis (Salter)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>PLEASE NOTE NEW EMAIL AND FAX ADDRESSES.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><BR>*************************************************<BR>"Doing a live
experiment is like the difference<BR>between cinema and theatre--the audience is
<BR>wondering if you will drop something"--Martyn<BR>Poliakoff (Chemist;
Stephen's brother)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Denis Salter<BR>Professor of Theatre<BR>McGill University<BR>853 Sherbrooke
St West<BR>Montreal <BR>H3A 2T6</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Telephone (514) 398 6550<BR>Email via Fax (309) 294
0444<BR>Regular Fax (514) 487 0157<BR>Email <<A
href="mailto:denis.salter@mcgill.ca">denis.salter@mcgill.ca</A>><BR>
<<A
href="mailto:d.salter@videotron.ca">d.salter@videotron.ca</A>><BR>
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Home Office<BR>4965, avenue Connaught<BR>Notre Dame De Grace<BR>Montreal
<BR>H4V 1X4</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Telephone (514) 487 2568<BR>Email via Fax (309) 294 0444<BR>Regular
Fax (514) 487 0157<BR>Email <<A
href="mailto:d.salter@videotron.ca">d.salter@videotron.ca</A>><BR>
<<A href="mailto:denis.salter@mcgill.ca">denis.salter@mcgill.ca</A>></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>********************************************</DIV><B>FACULTY OF ARTS:
McGill University<?/center></B><BR><BR><BR><B>Resolution on the Death of
Emeritus Professor Louis Dudek<BR><?paraindent><?param out></B>701.1 Professor
Kilgour presented the following resolution on behalf of the author Professor
Trehearne:<?/paraindent><BR><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth><?fontfamily><?param Times New Roman><?smaller>Louis
Dudek, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, passed away on Thursday,
March 22nd, 2001, at the age of 83. His contribution to Canadian literature as
essayist, polemicist, critic and commentator gave the Faculty of Arts one of its
most eminent scholars, but it is as a poet, and a defender of poetry’s value in
our lives, that he will be most keenly missed by a wider community of Canadian
writers and readers.<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth><?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>Professor
Dudek was born in Montreal in 1918. He took the B.A. at McGill in 1939, worked
briefly in advertising, and was prominent among the rebellious young poets who
participated in <I>First Statement</I> (1942-1945), a seminal “little magazine”
in the development of modern Canadian literature. In 1944 he left for doctoral
studies at Columbia University under the eminent scholars Lionel Trilling and
Jacques Barzun, then returned to McGill in 1951 to join the Department of
English. He established himself promptly on the Canadian scene with his long
poems <I>Europe </I>(1954) and <I>En Mexico</I> (1958). Dudek maintained his
commitment to the long poem throughout his life: <I>Atlantis</I>, a breakthrough
experiment in fragmented modern form, appeared in 1967; <I>Continuations</I>—an
ongoing record of the poet’s meditative life—appeared in four volumes from 1981
to 2000. In and among these high-water marks Dudek published another sixteen
volumes of poetry. His life-long commitment to self-publication, as a means of
ensuring the poet’s freedom from contamination by the marketplace, and his
advocacy of modernism were exemplary for generations of younger poets.<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth><?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>Indeed,
throughout his life, Prof. Dudek was active on their behalf. Although he
vigorously opposed the teaching of creative writing in universities as yet
another means of poetry’s institutionalization, he was generous with his time
and moral support whenever a young writer approached him with a sheaf of
poems—as they did, in their hundreds, across the four decades of his work at
McGill. The most famous of such encounters was the day in 1955 when a young
Leonard Cohen approached him; Dudek’s response was to establish the McGill
Poetry Series at his own expense, with Cohen’s <I>Let Us Compare Mythologies</I>
as its first title. (It may be apocryphal that he also had the young Cohen kneel
so he could strike him on either shoulder with the manuscript itself.) This
vital role was continued through the many presses with which he was involved:
most notably Contact Press, which he founded with Raymond Souster and Irving
Layton in 1954, Delta Canada (named after his own one-man little magazine), and
DC Books, which he ran with his wife Aileen Collins well into the 1990s. In the
course of these efforts such poets as Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, George
Bowering, Daryl Hine and D.G. Jones received vital early publication.<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth><?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>Dudek
also earned distinction among the founders of Canadian literary criticism. His
pithy, demanding essays were collected in various volumes, most notably in
<I>Selected Essays and Criticism</I> (1978) and in a special issue of <I>Open
Letter</I> (1981). He was a regular contributor of articles to Canadian academic
journals and—in keeping with his commitment to literature as part of daily
life—made frequent appearances on CBC Radio <?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>and in
various newspapers as a commentator on the arts and culture. Some of his most
noted publications registered his ongoing disagreements with Northrop Frye and
Marshall McLuhan. In the former he found a dangerous critical propensity to
value the
<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>contemporary
writer only insofar as he or she replicated the patterns of some earlier,
universalizing vision; in the latter he condemned the implicit validation of a
new popular culture less attentive to the poet’s vital function. Meanwhile he
pronounced substantially on the complexities of modernism, statements that have
since become required reading such as <I>The Theory of the Image in Modern
Poetry</I> (1981) and <I>The First Person in Literature</I> (1967), from his
lectures on CBC Radio’s “Ideas” program. Dudek did not see such public and
scholarly commitments as detracting from his vocation as a poet. On the
contrary, he always sought forms and modes of poetry that would allow the
expression of intellect and insight as readily as the articulation of feeling,
and later in his career he found striking new forms for their convergence,
perhaps most notably in <I>Ideas For Poetry</I> (1983).<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>A
gifted and natural lecturer, Dudek created one of the most popular and
challenging courses in the history of the Faculty of Arts. “Great Writings of
Europe,” a linked two-year course, brought together the finest literature of the
last three centuries in an attempt to understand the dynamic of tradition and
subversion that had reached disastrous climax in the twentieth century. The
course swelled rapidly from an early enrolment of thirty to five hundred but (to
my personal regret as his later student) was abandoned in the campus disruptions
and curricular re-directions of the 1960s. He never relented, however, in the
Socratic pedagogy that was his hallmark. A visit to his office was a vital
experience of intellectual uplift and challenge that never left one indifferent.
I still remember scoffing at T.S. Eliot, thinking to please the man who had
himself shorn Eliot of a few feathers, only to have Dudek wheel his chair around
to my side of the desk, <I>The Waste Land</I> in hand, and declaim from it
passages of such intense beauty that I date my own dedication to modernist
studies from that moment. It could not be more fitting that the Department of
English Students’ Association has named their annual award for excellence in
teaching The Louis Dudek Award, a mark of gratitude that touched him deeply as
he presented the first in 1996.<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>Though
he received such prominent honours as the Order of Canada, Dudek’s poetry
received little critical attention during his lifetime, a lack I believe he felt
keenly, even though he had always shunned the kinds of fame and reputation that
popular poets will sometimes earn from their publishers and readers. His death
will surely bring about a deepening of attention to his poetry’s beauty and
accomplishment as much as to its capaciousness of idea. That so much of that
work was written during his years at McGill is telling of the university as it
was once conceived—as a place in which Matthew Arnold, for instance, to whom
Dudek has often been compared, might fulfill both scholarly duties and creative
genius with equal brilliance. We can be grateful for the reminder.<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><BR><?paraindent><?param left><?flushboth>I
move, Mr. Dean, that the Faculty send a copy of this resolution, along with an
expression of its deepest sympathy, to Prof. Dudek’s widow, Aileen Collins, and
to his son, Professor Gregory Dudek of the School of Computer Science.<?/paraindent><?/flushboth><BR><BR><?paraindent><?param out><?fontfamily><?param Courier (W1)><?bigger>701.2
Faculty unanimously accepted the
resolution.<?/paraindent><BR><BR><BR><BR></BODY></HTML>