Can one dare to call this the Age of Roberts? As editor, critic, historian, translator, poet, novelist, and short story writer, Roberts had a profound influence on the Canadian imagination. In his article, "The Poetry of Nature." written in 1897, he argues:
Man, looking upon external nature, projects himself into her workings. His
own wrath he apprehends in the violence of the storm; his own joy in the
loveliness of opening blossoms, his own mirth in the light waves running in
the sun; his own gloom in the heaviness of rain and wind. In all nature he
finds but phenomena of himself. The poets discussed in this section share this sensibility, that reflection on nature connects language and perception in an integrated vision, not of nature, but of the human being in nature. We find ourselves in the heart of the ancient wood.
This poetic is a step beyond that of earlier writers who, for the most part, found the woods silent and impenetrable, and the transitional poets who tried to impose a purely Wordsworthian vision, a pastoral world "trailing clouds of glory" on an unlikely northern landscape. With these poets, the Dominion poets, we move into a new era, in a more authentic realization for Canadian poetry.
Sir Charles G.D. Roberts(1860-1943) did not escape the English romantic tradition, but he did try to see the Canadian landscape for what it was. Sir Charles was raised at the old Westcock Parsonage of St. Ann's in Sackville, New Brunswick, overlooking the Tantramar Marshes. His father was an Anglican minister, a teacher of Greek and Latin. At fourteen, Roberts's family moved to a rectory in Fredericton. This was a period, Roy Daniels argues, when Fredericton originated "a cultural impulse which produced some of Canada's best writing" (LH 218). His father instilled in him a pride in the new nation and a desire for a national literature to body forth the new nation. Both Roberts and Bliss Carmen attended Collegiate School where they were well versed in Homer, Virgil, Horace, Keats, Shelley, the Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson, Browning and Arnold. Roberts first book of poems, Orion and Other Poems was first published in 1880, when he was only 20 years old.
Roberts first job was as a teacher, indeed as Head master in grammar schools in Chatham and then in Fredericton. He began writing for Sports and Outdoors magazines. He edited Toronto's The Week, which published the early works of Roberts, Carman, Lampman, Scott and others. In 1885 King's College in Windsor, N.S. appointed him as Professor of English, French and Economics. Bliss Carmen visited him there, and inspired by the neighbouring village of Grand Pre wrote "Low Tide on Grand Pre". Ten years later, Roberts returned to Fredericton, freelancing and editing. In 1907 he left Canada for 17 years spent in London and on the continent. During the First World War he joined the British army, transferring to the Canadian army in 1916. After the war, he continued to travel in England, Europe and North Africa.
On his return to Canada in 1925, Roberts was made a fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada and the Royal Society of Literature. Recognized and admired by Matthew Arnold, Oliver Wendell Homes and Rudyard Kipling, Roberts inspired the young writers around him, showing them that a Canadian could gain recognition abroad. He was knighted in 1935.
Roberts wrote fifty books of fiction--mainly animal stories, but also historical romances and Acadian stories.
Roberts' poetry was written primarily before middle age. His best poems, such as
"Tantramar Revisited," capture his beloved New Brunswick woods and Fundy shore. An
unabashed Canadian nationalist, he understood that the proper study for Canadian poets was Canada:
Here from my vantage ground, I can see the scattering houses
Stained with time, set warm in orchards, meadows, and wheat,
Dotting the broad light slopes outspread to southward and eastward,
Wind-swept all day long, blown by the southwest wind.
Skirting the sunbright uplands stretches a ribald of meadow,
Shorn of the labouring grass, bulwarked well from the sea,
Fenced on in seaward border with long clay dykes from the turbid
Surge, and flow of the tides vexing the Westmoreland shores,
Yonder, toward the left, lie broad the Westmoreland marshes--
Miles on miles they extend, level, grassy, and dim,
Clear from the long red sweep of flats to the sky in the distance,
Save for the outlying heights, green-rampired Cumberland Point;
Miles on miles outrolled, and the river channels divide them--
Miles on miles of green, barred by the hurtling gusts. Into this timeless landscape, Roberts projects the all too human emotion of nostalgia. He is not seeing; rather, he is remembering his beloved Tantramar Marshes. Remembering the grey masts of fishing boats, the foraging gulls, and one grey hawk wheeling above the haystacks. He concludes with a lonely thought, reminiscent of Arnold:
Ah, the old-time stir, how once it stung me with rapture--
Old&endash;time sweetness, the winds freighted with honey and salt!
Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland--
Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion,
Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change. In 'Kinship' Roberts invokes Mother Earth to take him back to the "grave beginning", to an ancient stillness, where all wonder-tales, all strong enchantments, strange successions, all mysteries are true. He invokes his muse to tell him the ancient stories, lest we forget:
Back to wisdom take me, Mother
Comfort me with kindred hands;
Tell me tales the world's forgetting,
Till my spirit understands. With Roberts and the other Dominion/Confederation/Maple Leaf poets (the group of poets writing directly after Confederation that includes Roberts, Carmen, Crawford, Drummond, Scott and others) Canadian literature was no longer understood as situated in the backwoods, on the margin; our first national literary movement was born.
Selected Titles: Orion and Other Poems (1880) In Divers Tones (1886) Songs of the Common Day (1893)
Bliss Carmen (1861-1929) was Roberts' cousin, named after their United Loyalist ancestor, the Rev. Daniel Bliss, grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Carmen was born in Fredericton, educated at the Collegiate School and the University of New Brunswick. He was the product of the same social and educational background as was Roberts. He, too, was caught up in 19th century romanticism. He, too, ignored "the visible evidences of industrialism" in favour of a "simple, local, accessible, native ethos" (Daniels LH 431). What Carmen found in the Canadian landscape and its changing seasons was the embodiment of love and death. Like Keats, Carmen was a wanderer and a dreamer and his poems reflect his vague but frank emotional response to nature's magnitude and splendor. "Low Tide on Grande Pre" with its hypnotic rhythms illustrates his mystic rather than intellectual approach to nature:
Night has fallen and the tide
Now and again comes drifting home
Across these aching barrens wide
A sigh like a driven wind or foam
In grief the flood is bursting home. Carmen explains the necessity for the sleep of reason in his essay "Subconscious Art". He argues that an intellectual response is not enough for art. We also need the response of the subjective self. Metre is the hypnotist that allows our "deeper unthinking self" to emerge--both as writer and reader. "To attain the best results in art we must have both the personalities working at once." However, only by subordinating our cunning to intuition can we access the soul. "The soul has memories of regions and lives of which we have never heard." In order to secure free communication of spirit, the poet must lull, charm, hypnotize reason that is the warder of the house of the spirit, to allow entry. This, for Carmen, is the role of metre and rhythm. In this is the wisdom of the snake charmer.
Living in a simpler time, Carmen was able (and I envy him this) to express an "unscreened joy". We hear it in " A Vagabond Song":
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name. Like Roberts, Carmen's faith is steadfast. Even as late as 1921, after the First World War, Carmen would take "a day to search for God" and find him "just where one scarlet lily flamed"; that is, in nature:
At last with evening as I turned
Homeward, and thought what I had learned
And all that there was still to probe--
I caught the glory of his robe
Where the last fires of sunset burned. But it is not only God that Carmen finds in nature. In "The World Voice" he is listening to the wind at the shore's edge. He hears "some endless story of a wrong/the whole world must deplore". But he discovers this isn't an objective world voice:
And then it came to me
That all that I had heard
Was my own heart in the sea's voice
And the wind's lonely word. Carmen finds his own heart in the voice of nature; we could also say that he too finds his own voice in the heart of the ancient wood.
Selected Titles: Low Tide on Grande Pr³ (1893)
William Drummond (1854-1907) was born in Dublin, and immigrated to Canada in 1864. He received a medical degree at the age of 30 and, like William Carlos Williams, took up the practice of a country doctor. Drummond later moved his practice to Montreal. He published six volumes of poetry about habitant life that were widely read throughout Canada.
Roy Daniels points out that "so few Canadian poets induce their characters and readers to join in cheerful and kindly laughter that Drummond has the advantage of being almost unique" (LH 438). Unique also is his easy and amicable interchange between the two solitudes. In "The Wreck of The Julie Plante" a hurricane on Lac St Pierre destroys everyone aboard the ship. Drummond's moral is straightforward:
Now all good wood scow sailor man
Tak' warning by dat storm
An' go an' marry some nice French girl
An' leev on wan beeg farm
De wind can blow lak hurricane
An' s'pose she blow some more
You can't get drown on Lac St. Pierre
So long you stay on shore. Drummond's poetry, like Robert Service's, is hard to label, harder still to evaluate. But, like Crawford, he writes at the threshold of an emerging Canadian tradition. His is still an adopted land, and an adopted stance, (one that would be difficult to pose in our century), but he as well recognizes and is recognizable in the heart of the ancient wood.
Selected Titles: The Habitant Poems selected and introduced by Arthur L. Phelps, 1959
Isabella Crawford (1850-1887) was nine years older than Roberts. Like Drummond, she was also born in Dublin, but to a Highland Scottish family. She immigrated to Canada in 1858 to Paisley in Upper Canada. Her father was a doctor inept in financial matters, tried and convicted for misappropriation of
public funds. Crawford senior moved the family to Lakefield, and then later to
Peterborough where he died in 1875. Crawford's family was rife with misfortune. She was one of 13 children, seven of whom died one year of high fevers while the father was away in Australia. Of the six remaining children, four died of a hereditary heart condition. Only Isabella and a chronically ill sister lived longer than their father. After his death, the sisters moved, with their mother, to Toronto living off a small allowance from an uncle and the extra money Crawford made selling stories, novels and poems to papers such as The Globe, and The Mail. Crawford did not escape the family's curse; she died young, of heart failure, at 37.
Only one small, poorly edited and poorly printed collection of poems was published in her lifetime--published at her own expense: Old Spookes Pass, Malcolm's Katie and Other Poems, 1884. It was up to others to bring Crawford's talent to the notice of the literary establishment. John W. Garvin was the first to publish a collection of her poems in 1905.
Subsequently, attention by AJM Smith, Carl Klinck, and Northrop Frye, among others, have assured her deserved place in Canadian poetry.
Like Roberts and Carmen, Crawford is indebted to English Romanticism, a Victorian concern with landscape, knowledge of classical literature, and a vague idealism. Unlike her predecessors such as Suzanna Moodie, whose poetry, as David & Lecker aptly put it, "were part of the cultural wall that pioneer groups raised against a hostile world" (5),
Crawford was able to see the truth of the Canadian landscape and to infuse it with her own vision of love, struggle and death. It was, for her, still an adopted land; it was still filled with shadows. But, as Roy Daniels argues, Crawford used poetry to liberate rather than defend (LH 424). Like Emily Carr amongst the Haida, she was a sympathetic outsider.
Northrop Frye argues that Crawford's greatest gift was her use of myth, or more
precisely, her mythopoeic imagination. Indebted to the Victorians, her poetry is full of medieval lovers, classical shepards, and biblical figures, but so too the Viking sagas, Indian legends and pioneer figures. Daniels argues her greatest gift, her "real part (in
Canadian poetry) was the assimilation of Canadian landscape into the realm of the
imagination, or, conversely, the infusion of passionate love, love strong enough to
overcome death, into the substance of the simple, Canadian scene"(424).
She can move us mystically, as she does with the final image in "The Canoe". The canoe is personified speaking to us, a "slender lady of the tides", of the hunt "loud of the chase, and low of love," of the slaughtered deer and fish, hung "like scimitars/bright and ruddied from new-dead wars". The final stanza, though, evokes something deeper, darker, and more universal, the mystery of death:
The darkness built its wigwam walls
Close round the camp, and at its curtain
Pressed shapes, thin woven and uncertain
As white locks of tall waterfalls.
Selected Titles: Old Spookses, Malcolm's Katie and Other Poems (1884)
Pauline Johnson (1862-1913) was not an outsider. She stands comfortably in the heart of the ancient wood. Unlike Crawford and Drummond, Johnson was born in Canada, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and an Englishwoman. She was raised on the Six Nations Indian Reserve near Brantford, Canada West. Johnson adopted the Mohawk name, Tekahionwake. Her work was warmly received and admired. For sixteen years she was a popular performer, giving concert readings in Canada, the United States and England.
Johnson is, perhaps, our closest Wordsworth. Her romanticism arises out of her love for the land; unlike Moodie or even Crawford, her vision is not shadowed by something foreign, menacing or dark.
When the river mists are rising
All the foliage baptizing
With their spray
There the sun gleams far and faintly
With a shadow soft and saintly
In its ray. Her voice, however, is not without sadness or longing. In "Shadow River" shadows are
undertones of "warm midsummer air that lightly lies", twilight that spawns the dream of a neo-romantic ideal. In "The Corn Husker" she paints a portrait of an Elder, stooped, hungry, labouring in the cornfields:
And all her thoughts are with the days gone by
Ere might's injustice banished from their lands
Her people, that today unheeded lie,
Like the dead husks that rustle through her hands. Selected Titles: Flint and Feather (1912)
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.