which they ran until 1986, and which is still in operation. He wrote a column on books, film and the arts for the Montreal Gazette between 1965 and 1969. "This activity together with his reviews, articles and radio talks has remained fundamental to Dudek's perception of the poet's and the critic's role in society." His collected columns were published in 1988 as In Defence of Art. Dudek regularly contributed to Canadian academic journals, "and, in keeping with his commitment to literature as part of daily life", made frequent appearances on CBC Radio and in various newspapers as a commentator on arts and culture. The First Person in Literature was originally broadcast as a series of CBC Radio lectures. He "kept up a lifelong battle against some of the most famous and influential voices in Canadian cultural writing, including Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan." Perhaps for that reason, some major awards passed him by. Dudek always preferred to publish in the small press. "He was incredibly supportive of small publishers and writers," Simon Dardick, publisher of Véhicule Press, said of him. "There are dozens and dozens of writers and publishers who owe him so much. There was such a generosity of spirit there." In return, the small press contained some of his strongest supporters (including Véhicule Press), who continued to release Dudek's books through his lifetime. Dudek's poetry "was a beacon to three generations of Canadian poets, and among them are names like Daryl Hine and Doug Jones in the '50s, George Bowering and Frank Davey in the '60s, and Ken Norris, Endre Farkas and Peter Van Toorn in the '70s and '80s." Writing Dudek began as a realist lyric poet influenced by the Imagists. Unit of Five (1944) shows a style that employs few adverbs and adjectives, as well as direct descriptions. His social impulse is also strong in East of the City (1946), which uses the city as the setting for most of its poems. Social realism is absent form Dudek´s two next books, Twenty Four Poems (1952) and The Searching Image (1952). The first shows a strong influence of Imagism and its accumulative method. The second shifts drastically towards stylism and artifice with dense and obscure metaphors and elaborate syntax. His "later poetry, typified by the collection Continuation 1 (1981), harks back to an earlier book, Epigrams (1975), and is an experiment in recording the fragmentary poetic moment."