Abstract

This thesis recovers and contextualizes the works of the Canadian painter/poet Eldon Grier (1917-2001). Grier was a painter first, studying under John Lyman in Montreal and Diego Rivera in Mexico City before beginning, “quite inexplicably, to write poetry.” This thesis recuperates and makes use of archival sources in order to ascertain the reasoning for this switch, ultimately situating Grier within a trend of Canadian “painterly poets” which includes P.K. Page-Irwin, Roy Kiyooka and Phyllis Webb. Each of these poets changed artistic mediums in the latter half of the twentieth century as they contended with the formal conventions of literary modernism. Not yet the concrete poetry of postmodernism, theirs is a poetics that recruits the visual at the level of methodology. As a foregrounding figure in this tradition Grier helps to chart the development of visual poetry in Canada, writing through what Len Early calls the “ambiguous fault-line” between modernism and postmodernism in Canada.