Actually, the very absence of cluttering example and traditions in the arts is the main Canadian opportunity. The only possible strategy for the Canadian writer, poet, artist (as it was for Joyce, Pound, and Eliot when they found themselves in cultural backwaters) is to conquer the old traditions through the most revolutionary artistic techniques suggested by the current modes of science and technology. This is the really great advantage enjoyed by any provincial in a time of rapid change. He can not come to the new through the old, but must discover and master the old through what is most recent. By the very nature of his situation, he is familiar with the new and somewhat at a loss in the presence of the traditional. This was the advantage of the Elizabethans confronted by the high art of Italy and France. It was the advantage of Walter Scott and Tolstoy and Faulkner bringing the newest art techniques to unexploited provincial subject matter. For the men in the center of change have less opportunity for appraisal and invention than those on the periphery.