Confederation Poets
Encyclopedia
"Confederation Poets" is the name given to a group of Canadian poets
born in the decade of Canada's Confederation
(the 1860s) who rose to prominence in Canada
in the late 1880s and 1890s. The term was coined by Canadian professor and literary critic Malcolm Ross
, who applied it to four poets Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943), Bliss Carman
(1861-1929), Archibald Lampman
(1861-1899), and Duncan Campbell Scott
(1862-1947) in the Introduction to his 1960 anthology, Poets of the Confederation, which began: "It is fair enough, I think, to call Roberts, Carman, Lampman, and Scott our 'Confederation poets.'"
The term has also been used since to include William Wilfred Campbell
(?1860-1918) and Frederick George Scott
(1861-1944),, sometimes Francis Joseph Sherman
(1871-1926), sometimes Pauline Johnson
(1861-1913) and George Frederick Cameron
(1854-1885), and Isabella Valancy Crawford
(1850-1887) as well.
The Confederation Poets were the first Canadian writers to become widely known after Confederation
in 1867.
Charles G. D. Roberts (recognized in his lifetime as "the father of Canadian poetry") led the group, which had two main branches: One, in Ottawa, consisted of the poets Archibald Lampman
, Duncan Campbell Scott
, and William Wilfred Campbell
. The other were Maritime poets, including Roberts and his cousin, Bliss Carman
. The four major poets in the group were Roberts, Carman, Lampman and Scott, with Lampman "most often regarded as the finest poet" in the group, according to the Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary.
The group, which thrived from the 1890s to the 1920s, generally paid attention to classical forms and subjects, but also realistic description, some exploration of innovative technique and, in subject matter, an examination of the individual's relationships both to the natural world and modern civilization.
None of the above poets ever used the term "Confederation Poets", or any other term, for themselves as a distinct group. Nothing indicates that any of them considered themselves a group. In fact, they "were in no way a cohesive group." As a group, the "Confederation Poets" were formed by a retroactive process of canonization: "Malcolm Ross's retrospective application of the term ‘Confederation poets’ is a good example of canon-making along national
lines.
Despite the fact there never was such a group historically, there may be good reasons to treat the Confederation Poets as a distinct group in hindsight. First of all, "Roberts, Lampman, Carman, and Scott were among the first really good poets writing in the recently formed Dominion of Canada". For that matter, they were writing the first really good poetry ever written in the geographic area of the new country. As "Confederation Poet" Archibald Lampman said about encountering "Confederation Poet" Charles G.D. Roberts's work:
In addition: "There are several good reasons, both biographical and literary, for grouping them together. All were close contemporaries born in the early 1860s. Roberts and Carman were cousins; Roberts briefly edited Goldwin Smith
's Toronto literary magazine
The Week, in which Carman published his first poem." Lampman also published in the Week, and he and Roberts became friends by mail. In the early 1890s, when Carman worked on the editorial staffs of The Independent and The Chapbook, and other American magazines, he published poems by the other three.
"Lampman and Scott were close friends; with Wilfred Campbell they began the column ‘At the Mermaid Inn’ in the Toronto Globe
, in 1892."
The original idea was to raise some money for Campbell, who was in financial trouble. As Lampman wrote to a friend: "Campbell is deplorably poor.... Partly in order to help his pockets a little Mr. Scott and I decided to see if we could get the Toronto “Globe” to give us space for a couple of columns of paragraphs & short articles, at whatever pay we could get for them. They agreed to it; and Campbell, Scott and I have been carrying on the thing for several weeks now."
"Scott ... came up with the title for it. His intention was to conjure up a vision of The Mermaid Inn Tavern
in old London where Sir Walter Raleigh
founded the famous club whose members included Ben Jonson
, Beaumont and Fletcher
, and other literary lights."
Lampman and Scott "found it difficult to keep a rein on Campbell’s frank expression of his heterodox opinions. Readers attacked the Globe after Campbell outlined the history of the cross as a mythic symbol, and his apology for overestimating their intellectual capacities did little to redeem him in the eyes of either the Globe or his fellow contributors to the column."
The column ran only until July 1893. In that year Campbell was "given a permanent position in the Department of Militia and Defence
,", and his financial crisis eased. So as there was no longer the need for it, the column came to an end.
The Confederation writers' poetry, "although striving for a certain Canadian quality, was very much the offspring of English Victorian
verse."
As is clear from the Lampman quote, what Roberts was striving for, and what Lampman was responding to, was not the idea of a distinctly Canadian poetry, a poetry 'of our own'. Rather, it was that of a Canadian, 'one of our own,' writing "great" poetry. Irrespective of their explicit statements about nationalism, in terms of their aesthetics the Confederation Poets were not Canadian nationalists
, but thorough-going cosmopolitans
. They did not aim to create a Canadian literature
; they aimed at a world class literature created by Canadians.
In the late 19th century world class literature meant British literature
, which was Victorian by definition. The Confederation Poets were writing in the tradition of late Victorian literature
; and like most in that tradition, the most obvious influences on them were the Romantics
.
One thing that was uniquely Canadian about that was that it was being attempted by Canadians (for the first time, which is what excited Lampman). Another thing, just as new and potentially more exciting for the Canadian reader, was that for the first time there was poetry worth reading that talked about the country where he lived:
Roberts's Tantramar, Carman's Grand Pré, Lampman's Lake Temiscamingue, Scott's Height of Land, Campbell's Lake Region.
"The impact of Lampman, Carman, Roberts, and D.C. Scott on Canadian poetry was very much like the impact of Thomson
and Group of Seven
painting two decades later," wrote literary critic Northrop Frye
. "Contemporary readers felt that whatever entity the word Canada might represent, at least the environment it described was being looked at directly."
Frye saw other parallels between those four poets and the Group of Seven: "Like the later painters, these poets were lyrical in tone and romantic in attitude; like the painters, they sought for the most part uninhabited landscape."
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature says: "All four poets drew much of their inspiration from Canadian nature, but they were also trained in the classics
and were cosmopolitan
in their literary interests. All were serious craftsmen who assimilated their borrowings from English
and American writing in a personal mode of expression, treating the important subjects and themes of their day, often in a Canadian setting. They have been aptly called the first distinctly Canadian school of writers."
In 1883 Roberts's friend Edmund Collins published his biography, The Life and Times of Sir John A. MacDonald, which devoted a lengthy chapter to "Thought and Literature in Canada,." Collins lost no time in dethroning what had been English Canada's top poets, the 'three Charleses': Charles Heavysege
, Charles Sangster
, and Charles Mair
. "Collins allots Heavysege only one paragraph, dismisses Sangster’s verse as 'not worth a brass farthing,' and ignores Mair completely." In contrast, Collins devoted fifteen pages to Roberts. " more than anyone else, Edmund Collins is probably responsible for the early acceptance of Charles G.D. Roberts as Canada’s foremost poet."
In Songs of the Great Dominion
(1889), anthologist W.D. Lighthall
pronounced that "The foremost name in Canadian song at the present day is that of Charles George Douglas Roberts." Lighthall included poetry by Roberts (who had published two books by then), by Lampman, Campbell, and F.G. Scott (one book each), and also by Carman and D.C. Scott, although neither had published a book at that time.
"The publication in 1893 of a little anthology called Later Canadian Poems, edited by J.E. Wetherell, was a defining event in bringing attention to the Confederation Poets as a group." The 'three Charleses' are gone: Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, the Scotts, and George Frederick Cameron are the male poets represented. That would be the pattern repeated in subsequent anthologies, with minor variations: like A Treasury of Canadian Verse (1900), which Campbell boycotted; or The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), which Campbell edited, and "devoted more pages to his own poetry than that of anyone else."
The same poets were included in the books on Canadian literature that began appearing in the new century: Archibald MacMurchy’s Handbook of Canadian Literature (1906), followed by T.G. Marquis's English Canadian Literature (1913). "The decade following the First World War saw the appearance of five more handbooks on Canadian literature.... As different as these five books are from each other, they all recognize the accomplishments of the Confederation Poets as an important advance in Canadian literature."
in Canada. For example, the Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary says of them that: "Their legacy of Realism
, Romanticism
, and nationalism
was so powerful that it lasted well into the first decades of the 20th century, beyond when much of their best work had been published," according to the .
Certainly that was a complaint of the Montreal Group
or McGill Movement, "a group of young intellectuals under the influence of Ezra Pound
and T.S. Eliot.... In Montreal the assault was spearheaded by The McGill Fortnightly Review (1925-1927), edited chiefly by two graduate students, A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott (son of Frederick George Scott)." "In various editorials, Smith argued that Canadian poets must go beyond the ‘maple-leaf school’ of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G.D. Roberts in favour of free verse
, imagistic treatment
, displacement, complexity, and a leaner diction free of Victorian
mannerisms." (The intentionally disparaging term “Maple Leaf School” was picked up from the progressive
magazine Canadian Forum
, which was waging a similar crusade for literary modernism.
"Probably the most resounding salvo by the Canadian Modernists is F.R. Scott’s 'The Canadian Authors Meet,' the first draft of which appeared in The McGill Fortnightly in 1927. One of its six stanzas lampooned the attention given to the Confederation Poets":
However, such complaints ignore that modernist poetry was being written in the 1920s: by W.W.E. Ross
, Dorothy Livesay
, Raymond Knister
, and even a couple of the Confederation Poets themselves.
By the 1930s Roberts had begun introducing the themes and techniques of Modernist poetry
into his work.. (See, for example, "The Iceberg" from 1931.) Scott had been doing the same since the early 1920s. (See, for example, "A Vision" from 1921.)
After he had won a reputation as an anthologist of Canadian poetry (The Book of Canadian Poetry 1943, Modern Canadian Verse 1967), Smith changed his opinion of the Confederation Poets' work, blaming his earlier disparagement on youthful ignorance: "Bliss Carman
was the only Canadian poet that we had heard of and what we heard, we didn't care for much. It was only later, when I began to compile books on Canadian poetry, that I found that Lampman, Roberts and Carman had written some very fine poetry."
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The rehabilitation of the Confederation writers began with a rise of Canadian nationalism
during the late 1950s, in what has been called "a cultural moment inspired by the founding of the Canada Council (1957), and the establishment of the New Canadian Library, with [Malcolm] Ross himself as general editor." Ross's Poets of the Confederation rolled off the press as New Canadian Library Original N01. "As Hans Hauge puts it, Ross ‘is beginning to construct a national literature and he does so by providing it with a past, that is to say, by projecting the project of a Canadian national literature into the past’ (‘The invention of national literatures’, in Literary responses to Arctic Canada, ed. Jørn Carlsen, 1993)."
Ross's claim was that his four Confederation Poets were Canadians who "were poets – at their best, good poets." "Here, at least, was skill, the possession of the craft, the mystery. Here was another
– one like oneself. Here was something stirring, something in a book by one of ourselves,' something as alive and wonderful in its own way as the [achievements] of the railway builders. Our empty landscape of the mind was being peopled at last."
Ross de-emphasized, but did not question, the modernist debunking of the Confederation Poets: "It is natural enough that our recent writers have abandoned and disparaged 'The Maple Leaf School' of Canadian poetry. Fashions have changed. Techniques have changed."
Indeed, fashions and techniques do change; and by the mid-1980s the modernist presumptions behind the Montreal Group's debunking were themselves being questioned. "A proper recognition of his nineteenth-century contexts can enhance our appreciation of Carman, and of his Confederation peers," Tracy Ware wrote in Canadian Poetry in 1984 "I am suggesting that Confederation poetry be given the respect that is customarily accorded the poetry of the McGill movement. Such a critical approach might succeed in removing the pervasive but dubious anti-Romantic tenets of Canadian modernism
, tenets that have lingered here long after they have been questioned elsewhere."
In the same issue, Canadian Poetry editor D.M.R. Bentley, using Lampman's term for himself, dubbed the Confederation school "Minor Poets of a Superior Order," and argued that "What James Reaney
has recently written of Crawford, Lampman and Roberts can be extended to Carman, Scott, Campbell, Sherman, Pickthall
and others: they 'wrote well and were of note.'"
Canadian poetry
- Beginnings:The earliest works of poetry, mainly written by visitors, described the new territories in optimistic terms, mainly targeted at a European audience...
born in the decade of Canada's Confederation
Canadian Confederation
Canadian Confederation was the process by which the federal Dominion of Canada was formed on July 1, 1867. On that day, three British colonies were formed into four Canadian provinces...
(the 1860s) who rose to prominence in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
in the late 1880s and 1890s. The term was coined by Canadian professor and literary critic Malcolm Ross
Malcolm Ross (literary critic)
Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, OC, FRSC, was a notable Canadian literary critic.-Education:Born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the son of Cora Elizabeth Hewitson and Charles Duff Ross, Ross attended Fredericton High School before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy from the...
, who applied it to four poets Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943), Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years....
(1861-1929), Archibald Lampman
Archibald Lampman
Archibald Lampman, was a Canadian poet. "He has been described as 'the Canadian Keats;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that he is "generally considered the finest of Canada's late 19th-century poets in...
(1861-1899), and Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott was a Canadian poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets....
(1862-1947) in the Introduction to his 1960 anthology, Poets of the Confederation, which began: "It is fair enough, I think, to call Roberts, Carman, Lampman, and Scott our 'Confederation poets.'"
The term has also been used since to include William Wilfred Campbell
William Wilfred Campbell
William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian poet. He is often classed as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included fellow Canadians Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott; he was a colleague of Lampman and Scott...
(?1860-1918) and Frederick George Scott
Frederick George Scott
Frederick George Scott was a Canadian poet and author, known as the Poet of the Laurentians. He is sometimes associated with Canada's Confederation Poets, a group that included Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. Scott published 13 books of Christian...
(1861-1944),, sometimes Francis Joseph Sherman
Francis Joseph Sherman
Francis Joseph Sherman was a Canadian poet.He published a number of books of poetry during the last years of the nineteenth century, including Matins and In Memorabilia Mortis .-Life:Sherman was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the son of Alice Maxwell Myrshall and Louis Walsh Sherman...
(1871-1926), sometimes Pauline Johnson
Pauline Johnson
Emily Pauline Johnson , commonly known as E. Pauline Johnson or just Pauline Johnson, was a Canadian writer and performer popular in the late 19th century...
(1861-1913) and George Frederick Cameron
George Frederick Cameron
George Frederick Cameron was a Canadian poet, lawyer, and journalist, best known for the libretto for the operetta Leo, the Royal Cadet.-Life:...
(1854-1885), and Isabella Valancy Crawford
Isabella Valancy Crawford
Isabella Valancy Crawford was an Irish-born Canadian writer and poet. She was one of the first Canadians to make a living as a freelance writer....
(1850-1887) as well.
History
Confederation
A confederation in modern political terms is a permanent union of political units for common action in relation to other units. Usually created by treaty but often later adopting a common constitution, confederations tend to be established for dealing with critical issues such as defense, foreign...
in 1867.
Charles G. D. Roberts (recognized in his lifetime as "the father of Canadian poetry") led the group, which had two main branches: One, in Ottawa, consisted of the poets Archibald Lampman
Archibald Lampman
Archibald Lampman, was a Canadian poet. "He has been described as 'the Canadian Keats;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that he is "generally considered the finest of Canada's late 19th-century poets in...
, Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott was a Canadian poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets....
, and William Wilfred Campbell
William Wilfred Campbell
William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian poet. He is often classed as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included fellow Canadians Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott; he was a colleague of Lampman and Scott...
. The other were Maritime poets, including Roberts and his cousin, Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years....
. The four major poets in the group were Roberts, Carman, Lampman and Scott, with Lampman "most often regarded as the finest poet" in the group, according to the Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary.
The group, which thrived from the 1890s to the 1920s, generally paid attention to classical forms and subjects, but also realistic description, some exploration of innovative technique and, in subject matter, an examination of the individual's relationships both to the natural world and modern civilization.
None of the above poets ever used the term "Confederation Poets", or any other term, for themselves as a distinct group. Nothing indicates that any of them considered themselves a group. In fact, they "were in no way a cohesive group." As a group, the "Confederation Poets" were formed by a retroactive process of canonization: "Malcolm Ross's retrospective application of the term ‘Confederation poets’ is a good example of canon-making along national
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
lines.
Despite the fact there never was such a group historically, there may be good reasons to treat the Confederation Poets as a distinct group in hindsight. First of all, "Roberts, Lampman, Carman, and Scott were among the first really good poets writing in the recently formed Dominion of Canada". For that matter, they were writing the first really good poetry ever written in the geographic area of the new country. As "Confederation Poet" Archibald Lampman said about encountering "Confederation Poet" Charles G.D. Roberts's work:
- One May evening somebody lent me Orion and Other Poems, then recently published. Like most of the young fellows about me I had been under the depressing conviction that we were situated hopelessly on the outskirts of civilization, where no art and no literature could be, and that it was useless to expect that anything great could be done by any of our companions, still more useless to expect that we could do it ourselves. I sat up all night reading and rereading Orion in a state of the wildest excitement and when I went to bed I could not sleep. (stress added)
In addition: "There are several good reasons, both biographical and literary, for grouping them together. All were close contemporaries born in the early 1860s. Roberts and Carman were cousins; Roberts briefly edited Goldwin Smith
Goldwin Smith
Goldwin Smith was a British-Canadian historian and journalist.- Early years :He was born at Reading, Berkshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after a brilliant undergraduate career he was elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford...
's Toronto literary magazine
Literary magazine
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
The Week, in which Carman published his first poem." Lampman also published in the Week, and he and Roberts became friends by mail. In the early 1890s, when Carman worked on the editorial staffs of The Independent and The Chapbook, and other American magazines, he published poems by the other three.
At the Mermaid Inn
The Globe (Toronto newspaper)
The Globe was a newspaper in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, founded in 1844 by George Brown as a Reform voice. It merged with The Mail and Empire in 1936 to form The Globe and Mail.-History:...
, in 1892."
The original idea was to raise some money for Campbell, who was in financial trouble. As Lampman wrote to a friend: "Campbell is deplorably poor.... Partly in order to help his pockets a little Mr. Scott and I decided to see if we could get the Toronto “Globe” to give us space for a couple of columns of paragraphs & short articles, at whatever pay we could get for them. They agreed to it; and Campbell, Scott and I have been carrying on the thing for several weeks now."
"Scott ... came up with the title for it. His intention was to conjure up a vision of The Mermaid Inn Tavern
Mermaid Tavern
The Mermaid Tavern was a tavern on Cheapside in London during the Elizabethan era, located east of St. Paul's Cathedral on the corner of Friday Street and Bread Street. It was the site of the so-called Friday Street Club...
in old London where Sir Walter Raleigh
Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh was an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularising tobacco in England....
founded the famous club whose members included Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
, Beaumont and Fletcher
Beaumont and Fletcher
Beaumont and Fletcher were the English dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, who collaborated in their writing during the reign of James I ....
, and other literary lights."
Lampman and Scott "found it difficult to keep a rein on Campbell’s frank expression of his heterodox opinions. Readers attacked the Globe after Campbell outlined the history of the cross as a mythic symbol, and his apology for overestimating their intellectual capacities did little to redeem him in the eyes of either the Globe or his fellow contributors to the column."
The column ran only until July 1893. In that year Campbell was "given a permanent position in the Department of Militia and Defence
Department of National Defence (Canada)
The Department of National Defence , frequently referred to by its acronym DND, is the department within the government of Canada with responsibility for all matters concerning the defence of Canada...
,", and his financial crisis eased. So as there was no longer the need for it, the column came to an end.
Poetry
Victorian literature
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria . It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century....
verse."
As is clear from the Lampman quote, what Roberts was striving for, and what Lampman was responding to, was not the idea of a distinctly Canadian poetry, a poetry 'of our own'. Rather, it was that of a Canadian, 'one of our own,' writing "great" poetry. Irrespective of their explicit statements about nationalism, in terms of their aesthetics the Confederation Poets were not Canadian nationalists
Canadian nationalism
Canadian nationalism is a term which has been applied to ideologies of several different types which highlight and promote specifically Canadian interests over those of other countries, notably the United States...
, but thorough-going cosmopolitans
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
. They did not aim to create a Canadian literature
Canadian literature
Canadian literature is literature originating from Canada. Collectively it is often called CanLit. Some criticism of Canadian literature has focused on nationalistic and regional themes, although this is only a small portion of Canadian Literary criticism...
; they aimed at a world class literature created by Canadians.
In the late 19th century world class literature meant British literature
British literature
British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...
, which was Victorian by definition. The Confederation Poets were writing in the tradition of late Victorian literature
Victorian literature
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria . It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century....
; and like most in that tradition, the most obvious influences on them were the Romantics
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
.
One thing that was uniquely Canadian about that was that it was being attempted by Canadians (for the first time, which is what excited Lampman). Another thing, just as new and potentially more exciting for the Canadian reader, was that for the first time there was poetry worth reading that talked about the country where he lived:
Roberts's Tantramar, Carman's Grand Pré, Lampman's Lake Temiscamingue, Scott's Height of Land, Campbell's Lake Region.
"The impact of Lampman, Carman, Roberts, and D.C. Scott on Canadian poetry was very much like the impact of Thomson
Tom Thomson
Thomas John Thomson , also known as Tom Thomson, was an influential Canadian artist of the early 20th century. He directly influenced a group of Canadian painters that would come to be known as the Group of Seven, and though he died before they formally formed, he is sometimes incorrectly credited...
and Group of Seven
Group of Seven
Group of Seven can refer to:*G7 - the "Group of seven" industrially advanced nations .*Group of Seven - a group of Canadian landscape artists....
painting two decades later," wrote literary critic Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
. "Contemporary readers felt that whatever entity the word Canada might represent, at least the environment it described was being looked at directly."
Frye saw other parallels between those four poets and the Group of Seven: "Like the later painters, these poets were lyrical in tone and romantic in attitude; like the painters, they sought for the most part uninhabited landscape."
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature says: "All four poets drew much of their inspiration from Canadian nature, but they were also trained in the classics
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
and were cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
in their literary interests. All were serious craftsmen who assimilated their borrowings from English
English poetry
The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have written some of the most enduring poems in Western culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe. Consequently, the term English poetry is...
and American writing in a personal mode of expression, treating the important subjects and themes of their day, often in a Canadian setting. They have been aptly called the first distinctly Canadian school of writers."
Canonization
Like Thomson and the Group of Seven, the Confederation Poets became the new country's canon. This canon-building began even in their lifetimes.In 1883 Roberts's friend Edmund Collins published his biography, The Life and Times of Sir John A. MacDonald, which devoted a lengthy chapter to "Thought and Literature in Canada,." Collins lost no time in dethroning what had been English Canada's top poets, the 'three Charleses': Charles Heavysege
Charles Heavysege
Charles Heavysege was a Canadian poet and dramatist. "He was one of the first serious poets to emerge in Canada, and his play Saul was hailed on its appearance as the greatest verse drama in English since the time of Shakespeare." -Life and Writing:Born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England,...
, Charles Sangster
Charles Sangster
Charles Sangster was a Canadian poet whose 1856 volume, The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, "was received with unanimous acclaim as the best and most important book of poetry produced in Canada until that time." He was "the first poet who made appreciative use of Canadian subjects in his poetical...
, and Charles Mair
Charles Mair
Charles Mair was a Canadian poet and journalist. He was a fervent Canadian nationalist noted for his participation in the Canada First movement and his opposition to Louis Riel during the two Riel Rebellions in western Canada.-Life:Mair was born at Lanark, Upper Canada, to Margaret Holmes and...
. "Collins allots Heavysege only one paragraph, dismisses Sangster’s verse as 'not worth a brass farthing,' and ignores Mair completely." In contrast, Collins devoted fifteen pages to Roberts. " more than anyone else, Edmund Collins is probably responsible for the early acceptance of Charles G.D. Roberts as Canada’s foremost poet."
In Songs of the Great Dominion
Songs of the Great Dominion
Songs of the Great Dominion was a pioneering anthology of Canadian poetry published in 1889. The book's full title was Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada. The collection was selected and edited by William Douw Lighthall of Montreal...
(1889), anthologist W.D. Lighthall
William Douw Lighthall
William Douw Lighthall , K.C., LL.D., F.R.S.C. , can be and has been described as a Canadian "lawyer, historian, novelist, poet, philosopher, anthologist, and editor."...
pronounced that "The foremost name in Canadian song at the present day is that of Charles George Douglas Roberts." Lighthall included poetry by Roberts (who had published two books by then), by Lampman, Campbell, and F.G. Scott (one book each), and also by Carman and D.C. Scott, although neither had published a book at that time.
"The publication in 1893 of a little anthology called Later Canadian Poems, edited by J.E. Wetherell, was a defining event in bringing attention to the Confederation Poets as a group." The 'three Charleses' are gone: Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, the Scotts, and George Frederick Cameron are the male poets represented. That would be the pattern repeated in subsequent anthologies, with minor variations: like A Treasury of Canadian Verse (1900), which Campbell boycotted; or The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), which Campbell edited, and "devoted more pages to his own poetry than that of anyone else."
The same poets were included in the books on Canadian literature that began appearing in the new century: Archibald MacMurchy’s Handbook of Canadian Literature (1906), followed by T.G. Marquis's English Canadian Literature (1913). "The decade following the First World War saw the appearance of five more handbooks on Canadian literature.... As different as these five books are from each other, they all recognize the accomplishments of the Confederation Poets as an important advance in Canadian literature."
Debunking
As the canon, the Confederation Poets set the standard. Their work became the type of poetry Canadian readers wanted and expected, and therefore Canadian magazines published. Since that standard was Romantic and Victorian, the Confederation Poets were blamed by some for retarding the development of Modernist poetryModernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
in Canada. For example, the Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary says of them that: "Their legacy of Realism
Realism
Realism, Realist or Realistic are terms that describe any manifestation of philosophical realism, the belief that reality exists independently of observers, whether in philosophy itself or in the applied arts and sciences. In this broad sense it is frequently contrasted with Idealism.Realism in the...
, Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, and nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
was so powerful that it lasted well into the first decades of the 20th century, beyond when much of their best work had been published," according to the .
Certainly that was a complaint of the Montreal Group
Montreal Group
The Montreal Group was a circle of Canadian modernist writers formed in the mid-1920s at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, which included Leon Edel, John Glassco, A.M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith. Most of the group's members attended McGill as undergraduates. Due to this...
or McGill Movement, "a group of young intellectuals under the influence of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and T.S. Eliot.... In Montreal the assault was spearheaded by The McGill Fortnightly Review (1925-1927), edited chiefly by two graduate students, A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott (son of Frederick George Scott)." "In various editorials, Smith argued that Canadian poets must go beyond the ‘maple-leaf school’ of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G.D. Roberts in favour of free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
, imagistic treatment
Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
, displacement, complexity, and a leaner diction free of Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
mannerisms." (The intentionally disparaging term “Maple Leaf School” was picked up from the progressive
Progressivism
Progressivism is an umbrella term for a political ideology advocating or favoring social, political, and economic reform or changes. Progressivism is often viewed by some conservatives, constitutionalists, and libertarians to be in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies.The...
magazine Canadian Forum
Canadian Forum
The Canadian Forum was a left-wing literary, cultural and political publication and Canada's longest running continually published political magazine.It was founded in 1920 at the University of Toronto as a forum for political and cultural ideas...
, which was waging a similar crusade for literary modernism.
"Probably the most resounding salvo by the Canadian Modernists is F.R. Scott’s 'The Canadian Authors Meet,' the first draft of which appeared in The McGill Fortnightly in 1927. One of its six stanzas lampooned the attention given to the Confederation Poets":
-
-
-
- The air is heavy with Canadian topics,
- And Carman, Lampman, Roberts, Campbell, Scott,
- Are measured for their faith and philanthropics,
- Their zeal for God and King, their earnest thought.
-
-
However, such complaints ignore that modernist poetry was being written in the 1920s: by W.W.E. Ross
W.W.E. Ross
William Wrightson Eustace Ross was a Canadian geophysicist and poet. He was the first published poet in Canada to write Imagist poetry, and later the first to write surrealist verse, both of which have led some to call him "the first modern Canadian poet."-Life:Ross was born in Peterborough,...
, Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Kathleen May Livesay, was a Canadian poet who twice won the Governor General`s Award in the 1940s, and was "senior woman writer in Canada" during the 1970s and 1980s.-Life:...
, Raymond Knister
Raymond Knister
John Raymond Knister was a Canadian poet, novelist, story writer, columnist, and reviewer, "known primarily for his realistic narratives set in rural Canada .....
, and even a couple of the Confederation Poets themselves.
By the 1930s Roberts had begun introducing the themes and techniques of Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
into his work.. (See, for example, "The Iceberg" from 1931.) Scott had been doing the same since the early 1920s. (See, for example, "A Vision" from 1921.)
After he had won a reputation as an anthologist of Canadian poetry (The Book of Canadian Poetry 1943, Modern Canadian Verse 1967), Smith changed his opinion of the Confederation Poets' work, blaming his earlier disparagement on youthful ignorance: "Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years....
was the only Canadian poet that we had heard of and what we heard, we didn't care for much. It was only later, when I began to compile books on Canadian poetry, that I found that Lampman, Roberts and Carman had written some very fine poetry."
Re-evaluation
Canadian nationalism
Canadian nationalism is a term which has been applied to ideologies of several different types which highlight and promote specifically Canadian interests over those of other countries, notably the United States...
during the late 1950s, in what has been called "a cultural moment inspired by the founding of the Canada Council (1957), and the establishment of the New Canadian Library, with [Malcolm] Ross himself as general editor." Ross's Poets of the Confederation rolled off the press as New Canadian Library Original N01. "As Hans Hauge puts it, Ross ‘is beginning to construct a national literature and he does so by providing it with a past, that is to say, by projecting the project of a Canadian national literature into the past’ (‘The invention of national literatures’, in Literary responses to Arctic Canada, ed. Jørn Carlsen, 1993)."
Ross's claim was that his four Confederation Poets were Canadians who "were poets – at their best, good poets." "Here, at least, was skill, the possession of the craft, the mystery. Here was another
– one like oneself. Here was something stirring, something in a book by one of ourselves,' something as alive and wonderful in its own way as the [achievements] of the railway builders. Our empty landscape of the mind was being peopled at last."
Ross de-emphasized, but did not question, the modernist debunking of the Confederation Poets: "It is natural enough that our recent writers have abandoned and disparaged 'The Maple Leaf School' of Canadian poetry. Fashions have changed. Techniques have changed."
Indeed, fashions and techniques do change; and by the mid-1980s the modernist presumptions behind the Montreal Group's debunking were themselves being questioned. "A proper recognition of his nineteenth-century contexts can enhance our appreciation of Carman, and of his Confederation peers," Tracy Ware wrote in Canadian Poetry in 1984 "I am suggesting that Confederation poetry be given the respect that is customarily accorded the poetry of the McGill movement. Such a critical approach might succeed in removing the pervasive but dubious anti-Romantic tenets of Canadian modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, tenets that have lingered here long after they have been questioned elsewhere."
In the same issue, Canadian Poetry editor D.M.R. Bentley, using Lampman's term for himself, dubbed the Confederation school "Minor Poets of a Superior Order," and argued that "What James Reaney
James Reaney
James Crerar Reaney was an influential Canadian poet, playwright, librettist, and professor, "whose works transform small-town Ontario life into the realm of dream and symbol."...
has recently written of Crawford, Lampman and Roberts can be extended to Carman, Scott, Campbell, Sherman, Pickthall
Marjorie Pickthall
Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall , was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven...
and others: they 'wrote well and were of note.'"
External Links
- The Confederation Poets at Canadian Poetry website
- Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews No. 14 (Spring/Summer 1984) - Issue on Confederation Poets