Write a note on Atwood and Ondaatje’s contribution to Canadian Poetry.

Ondaatje also, like Ahwood, has been a model and an inspiration for the development of the neo-surrealist method in Canadian poetry. One difference is that whereas the woman novelist sticks to a monotone to underline a bizarre shift in image, Ondaatje brings together a shifting voice and unpredictable juxtapostious. His well-known hybrid work The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

The two novelist-poets just discussed have put Canada on the world map in poetry as well as fiction. Both use a number of modernist and postmodernist elements in their poems. The imagery is many times surrealistic and always arresting. Ondaatje as poet is more a mixer of genres and Atwood less so. Ondaatje’s mastery of the ‘long-poem’ from is also quite striking.