Introduction:
Al Purdy’s poetry is deeply rooted in the realities of human limitation, where failure is not merely an end but a beginning of insight. Al Purdy’s paradoxical vision of redemption emerges from the very experiences of loss, inadequacy, and disillusionment that often define modern existence. Rather than seeking idealized triumph, Purdy finds meaning in brokenness, suggesting that failure can lead to self-awareness, humility, and a renewed understanding of life. Through his candid and reflective voice, he transforms ordinary setbacks into moments of quiet revelation, revealing that redemption does not lie in success alone, but in the acceptance and reinterpretation of failure itself.
Rejection of Traditional Ideals and Limits of Intellectual Vindication:
In the poetry of Al Purdy, the realistic recognition of human despair and defeatism can inspire a devaluation of such traditional ideals as success and power, social status and centricity. Such rejection of modern western idealism however, only one of several possible responses to presumed failure, transience, and insignificance in Purdy’s poetic cosmos. The deflation of idealism is this poet’s means of vindicating assumed failures through intellectual or theoretical argument. However, such reasoning holds insufficient emotional appeal to satisfy his intense involvement with direct, personal reality. While devaluation of social ideals might intellectually satisfy for his concern with failure, it does not appease his emotional and spiritual faculties. For Purdy, theoretical argument can only vindicate supposed inadequacy; it cannot alter or redeem the immediate emotional reality of human kind. His poems which openly challenge pre- conceived standard often descend into didacticism, such being the circumstance of ‘The Country of the Young’, in which Purdy instructs:
“And you can’t be looking for something else
money or a night’s lodging on earth
a stepping stone to death may be
or you’ll never find the place……”
Such didacticism aspires to alter perception through intellectual rather than imaginative or emotional appeal. More instruction generally concludes such poems, as in ‘Interruption’, in which Purdy writes, “We have set traps, /and must always remember/to avoid them ourselves.” Such didacticism and closure are at odds with the structural and philosophical open-endedness of most Purdy poems.
Reductionist Realism and Literary Influence:
His cynical and theoretical involvement with human failure, signifies only one of the seemingly diverse ideologies, being in this case ‘what might be considered reductionist realism, which inform and influence his vision of existence and experience. Such realism is notably in much of modern English literature, and Purdy’s own involvement with this perspective is undoubtedly influenced by the contemporaneous literary milieu.
Paradoxical Vision of Redemption and Multiple Personae:
In contrast to or, more appropriately it seems, in reaction to such awareness of bleak corporeal reality, Purdy does propose emotional and spiritual redemption from the modern sense of defeat and futility. In his poetic cosmos, redemption is realised through divergent means. Purdy is a paradox— a romantic and realist, dreamer and cynic— and his literary reactions to failure correspond to his mutable personae. While he can indeed give certain credence to defeat and transience or, by contrast, challenge traditional conceptions of success and significance, he can also promote his own ideals or absolutes, depending upon the persona of the individual work. His absolutes are neither ideologically consistent nor do they, together, constitute any coherent philosophy of human redemption. As ideals or absolutes, the realistic Purdy personae advance the consolations of everyday experience or promote hedonistic indulgence, while the sensitive poet champions eternal significance and fraternity. His absolutes can be informed by realistic experience, romantic aspirations, or elements of both ideologies. John Lye’s characterization of the different Purdy personae, an effective vehicle for an inquiry into his different absolutes and his paradoxical means of conferring value on human life and achievement. The common man and boisterous personae are informed by immediate, realistic experience and, as such, propose what might be considered mundane, everyday goals, such as contentment and acceptance of one’s circumstance. The sensitive persona proposes absolutes which are romantically charged and sweeping in their transcendental applications. In the case of Purdy’s common man and boisterous personae, the redemption offered is limited; the individual simply resists and survives bleak modern reality and failure. For the sensitive poet, redemption is more than resistance and survival; this persona transforms barren experience into eternal, valuable existence.
Internal Debate and Dynamic Perspective on Redemption:
Manifest in Purdy’s corpus, of poetry and prose is a vigorous internal debate over the means of human redemption from failure and defeatism. His intense and persistent involvement with redemption is perhaps due to the divergent, sometimes even contradictory ideologies of realism and romanticism which inform his poetry. He does not fall prey to fixed, unequivocal vision which he himself maintains is a major misfortune of Irving Layton’s poetry. When asked about his “Portrait” of Layton, Purdy tells interviewer, Garg Geddes:
“……I think the thought on my mind was that somebody had fixed themselves, pinned themselves down, taken a stance, identified themselves far too fully……in my own case I like to think of a continual becoming and a changing and a moving. I feel that Irving takes such positive stances that I’m a little disappointed, because I think he could have done much better.”
For Purdy, the continual variance of perspective within his own work is a vehicle for reflection, argument, and, ultimately, development. As Tom Marshall has noted, in ‘Space and Ancestors: Al Purdy’, “He articulates both isolation and connectedness. Ancestral voices both human and natural are heard; a multiple perspective is achieved.” It is this expansive perspective, what Mike Doyle has called the “protean personality”, that has developed as a primary characteristic of Purdy’s voice and poetry. Though his vision of redemption is inconsistent. His will to transcend failure and transience within his own literary work is sure and confident. As Purdy writes in what is perhaps the bleakest of his poems, ‘Remembering Hiroshima’, “I always expect the sunlight”.
Spiritual Continuity and Transcendental Redemption:
Purdy’s proposed redemption from failure can be informed by a seemingly casual spirituality and sensitivity which identifies all of human life, effort and opinion as being intricately interwoven and eternally accessible. The poet’s perceptions of continuity and an ‘eternal none’ completely override such possibilities as transience and insignificance; the finality of death itself, which might be perceived as the ultimate human failure, is transformed through his vision of eternal community. As Dennis Lee writes, in ‘The Poetry of Al Purdy: An Afterward’, “Continuity in time may not remove the scandal of transience and death. But it qualifies them in an important, nourishing way”. When acknowledged and accessed, the spiritual continuity of time and place immediately confers meaning and effectuality upon all the poet perceives and articulates. Purdy voices such a transcendental view of existence in ‘Method for Calling up Ghosts’, proposing that
“…. everything we do or say has an effect somewhere
passes outward from itself in widening circles
a sort of human magic by which
a word moves outside the nature of a word
as side effect of itself
the nature of a word being
that when it’s been said it will always be said
—a recording exists in the main deep of sound.”
This continuity of communication and community has been extensively considered by Purdy critics. Continuity is the absolute of the sensitive Purdy, and that it is through the individual imagination that such redemption can be offered. It is the individual— the poet himself—who perceives the continuity of life and it ultimately redeemed from a sense of barren effort and the burden of past defeats.
Transcending Species and Time through Imaginative Sympathy:
In his meditations on eternal sympathy and fraternity, Purdy can even transcend the “difference between man and other species on earth”. Purdy, in On the Bearpaw Sea, for instance, suggests the realistic, evolutionary connection between an extinct dinosaur and contemporary humanity, as well as their spiritual connection through a shared sense of failure. He writes:
“And what may have seemed comic
about the great patient reptile
with wounded tail who once lived and moved
in the exact space I move in now
and criss-crossed my life track
has lost any possible humor for me
……………………………………..
In my mind the healed wound
becomes a kind of bridge
the scar tissue extending across aeons of time
and I a mammal witness
a bright thread connecting my brain
to savage brains in the Bearpaw Sea
but with an eerie feeling
in the backbone of being
observed myself.”
Limited Redemption through Realism and Present Experience:
The poet’s affirmations of enduring experience, however, do not always reach such romantic and transcendental surety; Purdy cannot always surmount the mundane and oppressive reality of the present moment and circumstance. When his poetic stance is governed by realism, the redemption offered— if any is offered at all—is limited in scope, emphasising the heightened, yet common place experience and the simple security of the here and now. This is resistance rather than redemption. Such a restrained assertion of a sure and steady now is seen in ‘After Rain’:
“Of course, there’s death
cruelty and corruption
likewise shit in the world
to hell with that
one day at least stands
indomitable as a potato…”
Redemptive Power of Recognizing Significant Moments:
The common man must recognise and appreciate those moments of being realistically which influence or rise above the rest to not acknowledge the realistically influential moments in one’s life is to precipitate failure. As Purdy writes in ‘What it Was”:
“Of course, other problems exist here now
the necessary for pattern and pattern-makers
deciding which are certainties and which variables
(and very few of the farmer and mostly latter)
and always making mistakes
and sometimes the brain and heart’s failure
to know say
this is the moment you’ll always remember
this is wind-blown instant of time
that swings you into the future……”
The lines of ‘What is Was’ suggest how the recognition of the consequences of one’s own realistic experiences can alter the perception of meaning and purpose; the acknowledgement of “this is the moment” frees the poet’s imagination, as illustrated by the liberated structure of the poem’s conclusion. For Purdy, simply acknowledging the value of experience itself can redeem the individual from a sense of insignificant being and inconsequential existence. As he writes in The Jackhammer Syndrome’:
“There are moments of such elation
in a man’s life it’s like being struck
alive on the street by the first
god one meets at an intersection
whom one must believe in a second
time often twenty years of atheism…”
These “moments of elation” are, for Purdy, innately meaningful, allowing the individual a glimpse of the value of his or her existence, giving the individual seeming evidence that there is something more noble and magnificent in life than the mundane, day-to-day reality.
Humour and Self-Deprecation as Resistance to Failure:
Like his affirmations of an eternal now or his enthusiasm for the potent moment of being, much of Purdy’s self-deprecation and humour can be understood in terms of resistance to failure and defeat. The common man and achieve limited redemption through the boisterous personae can acknowledgement of their failures, as opposed to acknowledging their consequential moments of being. Simply by reacting to failure, though that reaction might be comic and absurd, Purdy can transcend the serious gloom of his own sense of inadequacy. In ‘House Guest’, for instance, he depicts the failure of tolerance and understanding between himself and his friend, Milton Acorn. The sober reality of failed friendship is partially transformed through the humorous perspective of the poet himself who writes:
“……one night we quarrelled over how to cook eggs
In the morning driving to town we hardly spoke
and water poured downhill outside all day for it was spring
When we were gone with frogs mentioning lyrically
Russian steel production figures on Robin Lake which were almost
I left him hitch hiking on Highway to Montreal
and I guess I was wrong about those eggs.”
Here, it is Purdy’s comic handling and recognition of failure which redeems the poem itself from complete despair. The friendship in question will not be terminated since the poet has humorously accepted his own culpability. By maintaining a certain humour, the common man and boisterous personae can evade a thoroughly dismal perspective on reality and can also avoid certain failures. It is dangerous in the Purdy cosmos to take oneself seriously, without allowing for humour and open possibilities, for as he writes in ‘About Being a Member of Our Armed Forces’:
“Not that the war was funny
I took it and myself quite seriously
the way a squirrel in a treadmill does
too close to tears for tragedy
too far from the banana peel for laughter
and I didn’t blame anyone for being there
that wars happened wasn’t anybody’s fault then
Now I think it is.”
In taking himself and his circumstance seriously and without question, Purdy had become like a squirrel in a treadmill, having lost physical and mental control over the course of his experience. Through humouring oneself, reacting to and questioning one’s circumstances, present and future failure can be avoided and as in the case of this poem, past failures can be better understood and partially transcend, at least within the individual’s own perspective.