The Vilest Verse West of Blanca

Canadian Poets in The Ubyssey

Abstract

Since 1918, The Ubyssey has been the primary student newspaper at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. Its pages offer an eclectic and idiosyncratic record of campus events and perspectives. This article proposes, in fact, that despite its ephemeral and sometimes jejune nature, The Ubyssey is an essential archive for historians of modern Canadian literature. Because UBC has been an important literary centre, The Ubyssey is distinctive as a literary-historical chronicle. The university played a variety of roles in the development of the major nationalist phase of Canadian literature in English – a period extending from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The Ubyssey is a lively source of local information about this period in Canadian letters. The article examines the literary scene at UBC as it was portrayed in The Ubyssey and pays particular attention to Tish, an influential journal of poetry and poetics.