The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada gathers together primary literary documents including manifestos, reviews, critical essays, and recollections to illustrate the most significant developments in the rise of modernist English Canadian poetry. Rather than present exclusively academic criticism, the editors have carefully selected original texts by the principal figures of modernism to offer readers a behind-the-scenes look at twentieth-century poetry in Canada. Collecting several decades of writings by luminaries beginning with pivotal essays by John Sutherland and A.J.M. Smith, and including George Bowering, Northrop Frye, Irving Layton, P.K. Page, F.R. Scott, Raymond Souster, and William Carlos Williams, this volume also provides explanatory notes to guide the reader and to evaluate the significance of each piece in its literary and historical context. This classic work of Canadian literary studies is now back in print with a substantial new introduction and appendices by Michael Gnarowski, who explains and interprets the essence of key initiatives in the unfolding of a modernist point of view. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada offers a comprehensive chronological path from the earliest examples of Canadian modernism to the beginning of the postmodern period.

Trehearne observes that in most cases the Aesthetic influence was sustained through the entire career of the poets whose work he examines. Although later affected by the Modernists, their works continued to be shaped and distinguished by an early Aesthetic training. In the case of A.J.M. Smith, for example, his initial thematic and stylistic Aetheticism affects his mature critical pronouncements. John Glassco, who was influenced by the Aesthetic and Modernist ideas throughout his career, created a unique form of Aesthetic modern poetry. Trehearne's new readings of major and minor Canadian poets make Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists a central text in the assessment of Canadian literary history from a contemporary point of view.

Northrop Frye's Canadian Literary Criticism examines the impact of Frye's criticism on Canadian literary scholarship as well as the response of Frye's peers to his articulation of a 'Canadian' criticism.

An examination of the connections between modernist writers and editorial activities, Making Canada New draws links among new and old media, collaborative labour, emergent scholars and scholarships, and digital modernisms. In doing so, the collection reveals that renovating modernisms does not need to depend on the fabrication of completely new modes of scholarship. Rather, it is the repurposing of already existing practices and combining them with others – whether old or new, print or digital – that instigates a process of continuous renewal. Critical to this process of renewal is the intermingling of print and digital research methods and the coordination of more popular modes of literary scholarship with less frequented ones, such as bibliography, textual studies, and editing. Making Canada New tracks the editorial renovation of modernism as a digital phenomenon while speaking to the continued production of print editions.