THE WHITE SAVANNAHS. Signed

Toronto: MacMillan, 1936. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Dust Jacket Included. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Signed. THE DEDICATION COPY OF THE FIRST STUDY OF CANADIAN-LITERATURE FROM A MODERNIST POINT OF VIEW. Collin, W. E. THE WHITE SAVANNAHS. Toronto: MacMillan, Toronto, 1936. First Edition. Green cloth. (X), 288pp. A fine lovely copy in a remarkable dustwrapper. THE DEDICATION COPY, inscribed: "from Edwin / June, 1936" after the printed dedication: " For Louise", the author's wife. This important volume has the distinction of being both "the first book length work on English-Canadian literature written from a purely critical standpoint" (Germaine Warkentin) and the first book of modernist criticism in English-Canadian Lit. containing essays on Lampman, Pickthall, Pratt, Kennedy, Klein, Smith, Scott, Le Franc, and Livesay originally published as a series in the Canadian Forum and in the University of Toronto Quarterly. Collin apparently titled the collection The White Savannahs because he was living in London Ontario at the time, which he felt was so devoid of culture it was much like living in a desert. [William Edwin Collin, literary critic (b at Oakenshaw, Eng 9 May 1893; d at London, Ont 21 Dec 1984). The White Savannahs, a modernist study of 9 Canadian poets, established him as a major Canadian critic. Collin applied the ideas of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Sir James Frazer & the French Symbolists to Canadian poetry. A fine prose stylist, he also wrote a study of Paul-Jean Toulet and many articles and reviews, including from 1941 to 1956 the yearly review of French Canadian literature for the University of Toronto Quarterly - The Canadian Encyclopedia]. "In 1982 critic, W. E. Collin recalled the excitement with which he discovered the poems of Leo [Kennedy] in a copy of the FORUM in 1930, and the urgency that sent him hurrying to Montreal to meet with the poet and his colleagues. The FORUM's editor had supplied him with addresses. Collin was struck by the proximity of the poets who were turning the desert imagery of T.S. Eliot to their own uses: "I exclaimed, 'They all live in Montreal, Kennedy, Smith, Scott, Klein, They all live in Montreal.'" Collin would eventually celebrate the group in his critical anthology THE WHITE SAVANNAHS [1936]." - AS THOUGH LIFE MATTERED, by Patricia A. Morley, 1994. The most extraordinary copy.