[citation needed] In 1936 he began the column "Letters in Canada", an annual survey in the Quarterly of the year's crop of Canadian poetry.
[citation needed] In 1941 Brown edited a special all-Canadian issue of prestigious Chicago magazine Poetry.
[3] From 1941 to 1944 Brown chaired Cornell University's English Department, except for six months on staff as a speechwriter to Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
[3] In 1943 Brown and Duncan Campbell Scott edited Archibald Lampman's posthumous volume, At the Long Sault and Other Poems.
Not long before the volume came out, Brown had written to Duncan Campbell Scott that "our literary history must be rewritten and some old landmarks removed."
Of the other Confederation Poets, William Wilfred Campbell was cursorily dismissed as a "minor figure," while F.G. Scott and Pauline Johnson were not mentioned at all.