similarities because of his imagist style. Two Georgians who seem to have especially influenced Knister are Edward Thomas and Edwin Muir, both of whom often describe farm life. Poet Anne Burke says of Knister: "Like Edwin Arlington Robinson whom he reviewed as 'A Great Poet of Today' his work is exemplified by simple straightforward stanzas about modern life and aims at the starkness of absolute truth. Note 'Wind's Way,' 'Reply to August,' 'Night Whistling,' 'Moments When I'm Feeling Poems,' 'Autumn Clouds,' and others. The complexity of Knister's work, like that of Robert Frost, has been overlooked because of its surface simplicity, bucolic tone, and emphasis on exactly what the poet felt. Knister on his Ontario farm resembles the adolescent Frost especially A Boy's Will, 1913 and North of Boston, 1914."<ref name=burke>Anne Burke, Introduction to "Some Annotated Letters of A.J.M. Smith and Raymond Knister," Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews No. 11 (Fall/Winter 1982), Canadian Poetry, UWO, Web, Apr. 3, 2011.</ref> In 2003 After Exile, the first reprint of Knister's verse in over 20 years, was released by Toronto's Exile Editions. The book presents dozens of poems never before in book form, plus 30 new poems, and selected prose pieces and letters. Critical Writing Like his contemporaries in the McGill movement Knister was a rebel, and his criticism showed his dissatisfaction with the state of Canadian poetry and the Canadian literary milieu. The most important point raised in Knister's critical writings, one which is applicable to his own verse, was his rejection of the sublime in the language and thought of poetry. In general Canadian taste favoured a style of writing which was "a refreshing haven of genuine romanticism to which the reader may retreat when he seeks an antidote to the intellectual tension imposed by the future progeny of 'The Wasteland' and 'Spoon River' " Knister, however, valued plough horses above winged ones, and in the foreword to the Collected Poems he set out his objectives as a poet. His primary aim was to make his poems 'real' and to escape the false tone which made most Canadian poetry of his day an inaccurate portrayal of life. In order to do this he intended to drop all attempts at idealistic sublimity and instead simply present the images of things as accurately as possible. "We would feel differently about many other common things if we saw them clearly enough" (vii–viii). One more complaint which