Item 0064 - Letter, East Lansing, Mich., to Frank

Arthur James Marshall Smith FRSC (November 8, 1902 – November 21, 1980) was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" – the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A. M. Klein, and F. R. Scott — "who distinguished themselves by their modernism in a culture still rigidly rooted in Victorianism." Smith was born in Montreal, but lived in England from 1918 to 1920, where he "studied for the Cambridge Local Examinations, 'and failed everything except English and history' (he later wrote)." In England he became aware of contemporary poetry: "he frequented Harold Monroe's bookshop, then the citadel of Georgian poetry, and read much in the recent war poets and the Imagists."