The poets gathered under this umbrella share the remarkable capacity to evoke the immensity of our country. As the Group of Seven did for painting, these poets contributed significantly in making Canadian poetry distinctly ours. This is not, as Frye said, by writing about trees and snow and mountains, but by "trying to communicate the real feelings his country inspires in him" (BG 133). Each of these poets evokes the vast silence,"the frightening loneliness of a huge and thinly settled country" (138).
Robert Service (1874-1958), writing from the glory days of the Yukon Gold Rush, captured in romantic narrative verse the lives of trappers, miners and gold seekers whose fortunes were made and lost on the roll of a dice. He also wrote of the immensity of the land, but its loneliness, its silences, did not inspire terror in Service, but something mysterious, and alluring:
Have you ever stood where the silences brood,
And vast the horizons begin,
At the dawn of the day to behold far away
The goal you would strive for and win?
Yet ah! in the night when you gain to the height,
With the vast pool of heaven star-spawned,
Afar and agleam, like a valley of dream,
Still mocks you a Land of Beyond Service evokes, like the tide's undertow, the pull of the unknown, the spirit of adventure, and the call of the wild. His work has been rediscovered by a new generation in picture book collaboration with Ted Harrison, a Yukon painter. As Pierre Burton states, both were born in England, both traveled the world, both found their most important subject in the wilds of the North, and both were caught by "the spell of the Yukon".
Selected Titles: Songs of a Sourdough (1907); Collected Verse
W.W. Ross (1894-1966), poet, translator, wrote his best poems from deep inside the Canadian imagination. Munroe Beatty states (LH), Ross "had a gift for looking directly at a place or an object and recognizing the things about it that gave it identity. Since he usually recorded impressions gathered in the Canadian countryside, his best poemsƒ as 'The saws were shrieking', 'In the Ravine' and 'The Walk' perfectly create the effect that he said he wished to create:
Something "North American"--
and something of
the sharper tang of Canada." Ross is representative of Canadian poets who, inspired by the Modernists, were
experimenting with free verse, language appropriate to a modern sensibility, and new
subject matter, subjects largely neglected or shunned by earlier poets. These
innovations opened up a new field of poetic play.
Selected Titles: Laconics (1930).
A.J.M. Smith (1902-1980), poet, professor, critic, anthologist, also wrote of the loneliness of the land. In "To Hold in a Poem" he writes of taking words "as crisp and as white/ as our snow" and wants:
To hold in a verse as austere
As the spirit of prairie and river,
Lonely, unbuyable, dear,
The North, as a deed, and forever. In the 1920's, while at McGill University, Smith was a center for poetic activity. A school
of poets grew up around him also inspired by his influences: the Group of Seven, the
Imagists, the Symbolists, Yeats, Donne and Edith Sitwell. David & Lecker chart Smith's
poetic development: from "the tenets of an austere imagism to an interest in Metaphysical poetry. In the Depression years, he practiced a more socially committed verse leavened by satire, and in his later work grappled in a personal way with the themes of mutability and death" (70).
In "The Lonely Land" he evokes an austere beauty:
This is a beauty
of dissonance,
this resonance
of stony strand,
this smoky cry
curled over a black pine
like a broken
and wind-battered branch
when the wind
bends the tops of the pines
and curdles the sky
from the north.
This is the beauty
of strength
broken by strength
and still strong".
Like Service, the loneliness of the land does not break him; rather, he sees like Yeats
that nothing is made whole that is not first rent apart.
Selected Titles: News of the Phoenix (GG 1943); Collected Poems (1962).
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.