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Literatura Canadiense

Unit 2 Table of Contents The Confederation Poets .................................................................................................... 1 From A History of Canadian literature (page 131) ......................................................... 3 From Canadian Literature (page 35)............................................................................... 6 From The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (page 165) ........................... 6 From The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (page 248).................................. 7 From The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature (page 46) ...................... 12 Poems ........................................................................................................................... 14

The Confederation Poets The first Canadian poets were United Empire Loyalists who left the United States after the American Revolution. They were interested in politics, and wrote to defend the King and manifest their loyalty to the British Empire in opposition to the American rebels. The Confederation settlement came about in 1867 with the Constitution Act, which was formerly known as the British North-America Act. The first distinctly Canadian school of poetry was the group of writers known as the Confederation Poets. The term “Confederation Poets” is generally used to refer to the four writers included in Malcolm Ross’s anthology, Poets of the Confederation (1960): Charles G.D. Roberts, his cousin Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott. o The members of this poetic movement were close contemporaries—all born in the early 1860s—and their paths often crossed. o All of them received a Victorian education and were trained in the Greek and Roman classics. o They blended their cosmopolitan interests with their nationalism, drawing much of their inspiration from the Canadian landscape. o Their worship of nature led them to adopt as the center of their mythology the rural figure of Pan, the Arcadian fertility god of wild nature who became the patron of pastoral poets from classical times onwards. o Their work shows a continuing link with the British Romantic-Victorian literary tradition and the influence of the American Transcendentalists , two approaches which they tried to reconcile in their own response to the Canadian landscape and its inhabitants.

Sir Charles G.D. Roberts: Being the oldest and the first to publish, is considered the founding father of the school. He was born in Canada, the son of British and American parents, and became an outspoken Canadian nationalist, the author of patriotic poems which urged his readers to take pride in their country. At the age of twenty he published his first collection of poetry, Orion, and Other Poems (Philadelphia, 1880), written under the influence of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Arnold. During his lifetime he published twenty-one volumes of poetry. In Divers Tones (1886) contains some of his most famous poems, of which “Tantramar Revisited” is the best known. He mythologized the Maritime environment: the French and English struggle for Acadia as well as the farming and fishing communities beside the Tantramar Marshes, which he had known as a boy. Apart from being a poet, Roberts was also a successful fiction writer. He has been credited with being the inventor of the modern animal story, where violence and destruction are the operative principles, for his animals are victims of the inexorable laws of nature. His animal stories, collected in the volume Earth’s Enigmas (1896) are based on direct observation and are free of didacticism, unlike the traditional animal story, which is generally a parable illustrating human behavior. Archibald Lampman: He and Roberts became close friends. In his brief career Lampman wrote a small body of nature poetry, in which he transformed inherited conventions into something fresh and personal. His minute descriptions tend to be more detailed than Roberts’s. He formed a close friendship with Duncan Campbell Scott, who was also a government employee. Since both of them disliked urban life, they often took short trips to the nearby countryside surrounding Ottawa in order to seek for natural settings. In his visionary poems Lampman presented the industrial city in nightmarish terms and contrasted it with vivid pictures of the Canadian landscape. Many of his poems reiterate the same pattern: the speaker contemplates a natural scene, reflects upon it and then, renewed, returns to the city. Duncan Campbell Scott’s love of music was one of the main sources of his skill with lyric forms. Being a musician—an accomplished pianist—he relied both on cadence and on rhyme. It has been claimed that “Scott’s poetry indeed abounds in the most ingenious and sensuously musical alliterative lines in Canadian verse.” His position first as a clerk in the Indian Branch (later the Department of Indian Affairs) and then as deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs allowed him to explore the Canadian wilderness and to come into contact with Native Canadians, thanks to a number of professional expeditions of inspection into the wilds and particularly during a trip to the James Bay area. For years, Scott’s reputation largely rested on his Indian poems, where he made ample use of Christian imagery. He projected his own romantic sensibility and stoic pessimism in his treatment of First Nation themes. Readers today, however, have become much more critical of his idealized representation of Native Canadians, who are invariably seen from an outsider’s perspective.

His is istt ory of Cana nadi di diaan literature (page 131 F r om A H 131)) In the work of the Confederation Poets, the tensions between technological change and notions of ideal values found further expression. The most important Canadian poetic movement of the nineteenth century, the Confederation Group-so-called because its 'members' were all born in the 1860s- involved Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943), his cousin Bliss Carman (1861-1929, a distant relation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-82), Archibald Lampman (1861-99), and Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947). They constitute a 'group' more for the purposes of literary classification than for any shared cause, though they were all shaded by the late-Victorian romanticism of Tennyson and the American Transcendentalists. An Arnoldian pessimism coloured the work of Lampman and others as well, though none of the writers was without joy. Their imagery and cadences spoke, however, more often of tension, in which the character of their closing century was out of kilter with the ideals that their culture had led them to perceive as the actuality of times past. In many respects illustrative of late Romantic literary conventions outside the country regular verse form, high ethical tone, pantheist sentiment, elevated diction - Confederation poetry also struggled with many Canadian dilemmas, especially those created by imperial conservatism, by the contrast between urban life and the values attached to rural poetic imagery, and by the disparities between literary landscape conventions and empirical landscapes. These dilemmas showed in shifts of subject, in the handling of form, and in a variety of inconsistencies of stance. Though Scott was the most innovative stylist, Crawford most openly displays the poetic effort to find an appropriate form. Roberts wrote patriotic verses celebrating Canada, but Campbell more clearly reveals the tensions between imperial desire and colonial resentment. In the work of Roberts and Lampman, the pleasure the poets took in nature reveals itself in a detailed descriptive diction, which never quite succeeds in erasing their uneasy sense that beauty and harmony are illusions and dreams. Both writers ultimately resist identifying with nature- retreating to discretion when faced with adventure. This tension between ideas of change and eternity surfaces repeatedly in Confederation poetry. Both Lampman and Roberts show signs of their Victorian education in the classics like Carman, Roberts had been a pupil of George Parkin-and their poetic subjects, like their modes of technical experiment, hint at Tennyson (1809-92), Macaulay (1800-59) and Arnold. Classicism did not extend particularly to attitude. Lampman, from Among the Millet (1888) to Lyrics of Earth (1895) and Alcyone (1899), wrote of 'Xeonaphanes', 'Chione' and 'An Athenian Reverie' with the same attitude he took to Arabic and Icelandic subjects: here were conventional contexts for reflecting on romantic choices. Roberts's 'Memnon', 'Ariadne' and 'Marsyas' similarly evoke the poignancy of the emotional moment more than they attempt to portray through character any eternal forces of fate and circumstance. Hence these poets adopted the form of the monologue but without much of its drama; the

poetry of their stance lay in the mellifluousness of line and the fact of observation in its own right. In the Canadian environment, they sought contextual equivalents for these same stances; both found them in stories of lndians (Roberts versifying Malecite tales of Gluskap, and Lampman invoking Manitou), in the landscape (rivers were particularly attractive, but they inherently implied movement, change), and in the heroic version of Adam Daulac's (163560) doomed defense against the Iroquois at the Long Sault. Both tried their hands at nature sonnets, but portraying landscape was not an end in itself; it was a way of using the external world to probe what was conceived as a parallel condition inside the human breast. As Lampman wrote on 25 April 1889, to his friend Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), who had challenged his poetic technique: 'My design ... in writing "Among the Timothy" was not ... to describe a landscape, but to describe the effect of a few hours spent among the summer fields on a mind in a... despondent condition. The description of the landscape was really an accessory to my plan.' Such a distinction emphasizes (despite the parallel) the continuing separation between man and nature, and reinforces what for both poets would be the discomforting role of onlooker. Both felt ill at ease with the kinds of change they observed in society. Lampman lived for a dream of peace and harmony, in his later years even taking up the ideas of Fabian socialism. 'In November' closes with a persona 'alone I ... neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray, / Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.' But this dream proves transitory. 'The Land of Pallas' (a Tennysonian vision of the future) anticipates a time when 'the traps and engines of forgotten greed, / The tomes of codes and canons' will be abandoned, kept only to remind the young and the restless of 'the world's grim record and the sombre lore', but when the poem's traveller-in-dream returns to the present, he is considered an anarch for preaching peace. An evocative sonnet called 'Winter Evening' reinforces this result, ending: 'Glittering and still shall come the awful night'. 'The City of the End of Things', an even grimmer vision of social desolation, closes intoning that only 'the grim Idiot at the gate / Is deathless and eternal' in the technological future. The eternity bred of (social, moral) decay holds little attraction, and despite the mellow music of so many of Lampman's lines, the prevailing note he sounds is one of despair. Roberts could eloquently adapt classical metrics to English, as he did with the elegiacs of one of his most sustained works, 'Tantramar Revisited' (1883), which opens: 'Summers and summers have come, and gone with the flight of the swallow: I Sunshine and thunder have been, storm, and winter, and frost. ... ' The repetitions, the rhythm, the line length, all conspire to suggest the spatial distance associated with the subject - the tidal flats of the Tantramar Marshes - and the temporal distance implied by memory. Once stirred to 'rapture' by living in this place, however, the poet now experiences it as scene rather than activity, and he resolves finally to stay his steps, not revisit it in fact, but Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see, −

Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion, Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change.

In 'The Skater' (1901), too, the persona, speeding to the heart of the wilderness, turns away at a critical moment, resisting transformation; 'I turned and fled, like a soul pursued, / From the white, inviolate solitude.' Almost as though he were posing the same dilemma that the quantum theorists were trying simultaneously to resolve, Roberts was ratifying the outer world, but resisting the world of inner space which threatened its substantiality. That his poems should nonetheless claim to be expressions of the self has certain political as well as personal implications. A perspicacious observer of natural detail, Roberts adapted received forms to local occasions and local values, and renewed the life of the old forms by means of his accurate local diction. But he was no rebel. His poems give credence to the Canadian landscape as a setting for poetry by making it seem respectable, not by describing it in a distinctively new way. His resistance to the psychological implications of his images shows him to be a man of another age, for whom 'rather remember than see' was a sign of literary persuasion as much as a statement about a momentary choice. If the poems of Duncan Campbell Scott appealed more to later twentieth-century readers, that is not because Scott was more revolutionary in belief (a conservative civil servant, he opposed 'irrationality' and approved the orderly extension of 'civilisation' to 'primitive' peoples), but because he was more adventurous with form. He did not hide his lack of empathy with organised religion, or (even in his biography of Governor Simcoe) with the supercilious Britishness of certain elements in his culture. Fabianism attracted him. But so did the Romantic attitudes of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, and such words as 'rhapsody', 'dream', and 'compline', which give his work its studied melancholy, testify to his sense of evanescent beauty. The musical allusions-reed-players, piano, lute, 'Fantasia', 'Adagio'-at once echo this sensibility (music being an aural process, a ringing of changes) and indicate one source of Scott's skill with lyric form. A musician himself, he relied on cadence as well as rhyme, but not on the incantatory effect of rhythm, as Carman did. Even when 'Powassan's Drum' does employ deliberate drum beats, Scott's purpose is more resistant than submissive, concerned to warn against the dangers of 'primitive' superstition. Through recurrent aural motif, often combining lines of unequal lengths (as in 'Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon'), and by breaking rhyme free from regular metric patterns , he made the phrasing of his poems serve his effects. A combination of free-flowing and occasionalrhymes, for example, marks the dramatic and cumulative tensions of 'At Gull Lake: August 1810' (a poem from his late collection The Green Cloister, 1935); comparably, a vernacular dramatic monologue called 'At the Cedars' (The Magic House, 1893) tells with spent breath of a Quebec raftsman's accident: The whole drive was jammed In that bend at the Cedars, The rapids were dammed With the logs tight rammed

And crammed; you might know The Devil had clinched them below.

Scott's poems are aural works, asking to be heard. Conscious of change and loss, Scott himself sought in practice to find ways of linking an aesthetics of contemporary speech with the aesthetics of beauty to which his education and inclination had trained him.

Canadian ian LLit it iter er erat at atu ure(p F r om Canad (paage 35 35)) Following the confederation of Canada as a dominion (that is, a self-governing territory within the British Empire), the imperialist movement began to advocate a strengthened empire in order to counteract the influence of America. Similar ideals were held by ‘Canada First’, a political, intellectual and literary grouping whose founders included the poet Charles Mair. He and his contemporaries, including Isabella Valancy Crawford and the Confederation Poets (Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott), attempted to treat the universal human themes of western literature while using local settings and history to add a specifically Canadian dimension. During the 1890s, they called for the establishment of an association for Canadian authors and a national literary magazine, but it would be more than twenty-five years before these things took place.

Caa mbri bridg dg dgee Compa pan nion to Ca na nad dia n Lite terratu ture re (page 165 F r om The C 165)) For Archibald Lampman, Charles G. D. Roberts’s Orion in 1880 provided the first glimpse of a Canadian poetry. And it was in the last two decades of the nineteenth century that the first poets of the Canadian landscape wrote compelling verse. There were four poets born in the 1860s who formed what Malcolm Ross terms “Poets of the Confederation”: Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943) and his cousin Bliss Carman (1861–1929), Archibald Lampman (1861–99), and Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947). They constitute a group more for literary classification than for any shared purpose, a group to which must be added the slightly older Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850–87) and W. W. Campbell (1858–1918). Roberts and Carman came from New Brunswick; Lampman, Scott, and Campbell settled in Ottawa; and Crawford’s family settled in Toronto. These six poets give voice to the flowering of a distinctive Canadian poetry as it moves into the twentieth century. As a poet, Roberts is attracted to particular areas of landscape, the tides, the rolling hills, and the Canadian backwoods, and this landscape is drastically altered by the seasons, the power of seasonal changes playing a primary role in his work. In such poems as “Tantramar Revisited” and “The Skater,” the visual images combine to form the equivalent of an impressionistic painting. With a painter’s eye he creates his own moods. He often takes subjects, not necessarily original but uniquely Canadian, and presents them with precise and unpretentious details. Suggesting affinities with Wordsworth, Keats, and the early Tennyson, Roberts turned to nature for the inspiration of his poetry, and nature and its varied manifestations became

his poems’ focus. In his poetry Roberts is the masterful Canadian heir of Wordsworth’s pictorial art. But in his prose, especially in his many animal stories, he masters the Victorian as opposed to the Romantic vein, showing graphically the savagery and horror of nature. Thus he begins what will become a distinctive Canadian strain in poetry, the ambidextrous musings of major poets in prose as well as in poetry. Of the six Confederation poets, Archibald Lampman is the most gifted and the most adventurous. In such early lyrics as “April,” “Heat,” and “In October” are detailed landscapes of a semicultivated nature somewhere between the urban and the primeval. In “The City of the End of Things,” he paints a grim indictment of social desolation in an increasingly mechanistic universe. And in his posthumously published “At the Long Sault: May, 1660,” he reimagines an incident from the past to enhance the stature of the poem’s heroes. Lampman’s early death in 1899 deprived Canada of a major poet who was already charting the literary map for future generations. Whereas Roberts and Carman write of their Maritime worlds, Duncan Campbell Scott chooses lands much less cultivated and more primeval. By his choice of what he considered to be the wild and savage parts of the country, he brings Canadian poetry into a world where human beings are part of the landscape, where the landscape is distinctly Canadian, and where the form of the poem is a valiant attempt, as in “At the Cedars” or “The Forsaken,” to be part of the story itself. Markedly different from the formal poetry of Roberts and Carman, Scott’s verse moves into the realm of contemporary speech.

pan nion to Ca na nad dia n Lite terratu ture re (page 248) F r om The Oxford Compa Confederation poets: Publishing their first volumes of verse...