The Group included Leon Edel, John Glassco, A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, F. R. Scott, and A. J. M. Smith, most of whom attended McGill as undergraduates.
The Montreal Group is associated with the rise of the "little magazines", which published contemporary innovative prose and poetry in the style of British and American modernism, and later works from Europe's aesthetic and decadent movements.
This style had been popularized around the time of Confederation by Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, and continued to prevail among Canadian poets until the early 1940s.
"[4]This first publication began as a weekly supplement to the McGill Daily, the university undergraduate society's newspaper, and was edited by Allan Latham, A. P. R. Coulborn, and A. J. M.
[4] On November 21, 1925 the McGill Fortnightly Review published its first issue and branded itself and "independent journal devoted to purely literary, artistic and scientific matter."
[7] The journal published the work of Leo Kennedy;[citation needed] A. M. Klein's one submission was turn down because it included the word "soul", which the editors considered old-fashioned.
By issue three, in which Smith offered readers an analysis of The Waste Land,[citation needed] the new biweekly was focused directly on the introduction of Modernism into Canadian poetry.
[4] In his editorials, Smith argued that Canadian poets must go beyond the traditional poetry of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G. D. Roberts, and open themselves to contemporary forms, such as free verse, imagistic treatment, displacement, and complex poetic structure.
Publisher Louis Schwartz, contributed an article to The McGill Fortnightly Review in which he calls Mencken "the creator of a new sort of writing ... Americanese of a racy bumptiousness so vivacious and interesting that he is eagerly followed by a large number of people. ...
"[citation needed] The writers who contributed to the publication gained editorial experience and direction, and eventually formed a new literary movement, the McGill group, consisting originally of Scott, Smith and Leo Kennedy.
Unlike the McGill-affiliated publications, the Mercury solicited contributions from a wider group of Canadian writers, and was targeted to readers beyond the Montreal area.
Attacks on the CAA continued, such as Leo Kennedy's polemic, "The Future of Canadian Literature," in which he accused the Association of promoting "archaic transplanted Victorianisms.
[11] Under Lewis the magazine became more political: It published editorials about his anti-communist views, though the December 1930 issue included his article expressing approval of the Russian Revolution and calling for a greater understanding of the Soviet Union.
The McGill Group came together with the aim of modernizing Canadian poetry, by encouraging the inclusion of imagism and symbolism, which were already being used by poets from outside Canada, including William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, H.D., Wallace Stevens, E. E. cummings and Marianne Moore.
Although members of the Group sometimes criticized the "Maple Leaf school" of poets for being wholly dependent on an imported tradition, some detractors pointed out that they themselves usually found their influences outside Canada.
In his Rejected Preface to New Provinces, Smith's discussion about the poets' attempt to "get rid of the facile word, the stereotyped phrase and the mechanical rhythm ..." and "to combine colloquialism and rhetoric. ..."
Smith went on to give a definition of imagism: "The imagist seeks with perfect objectivity and impersonality to recreate a thing or arrest an experience as precisely and vividly and simply as possible.
Some later critics noted that these poems didn't incorporate imagism as expressed by Pound and Hulme, but instead adapted imagist ideas in new ways, combining the imported practices to Canadian culture and environment.
It was not until the 1940s that Smith, who at the time described Canadian literary works as backward when compared to international poetry, repudiated his stance, which he blamed on youthful ignorance.
He acknowledged the work of some of his Canadian contemporaries, including W. W. E. Ross and Dorothy Livesay, and also admitted that "Lampman, Roberts and Carman had written some very fine poetry.