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An English Canadian
Poetics, Volume 1: The Confederation Poets
Robert Hogg, ed.
Vancouver: Talonbooks,
2009, ISBN: 978-0-88922-613-5, 319 pp., $29.95 paper.
Poetics is writing in prose about poetic theory. Canadian academic Robert Hogg plans to edit a series of anthologies of English Canadian poetics.The first volume to appear in the projected series is a collection of the prose writing of a group that came to be known as the Confederation Poets. This group, the first Canadian poets to expound a poetics, consisted of Wilfred Campbell (1858-1915), Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943), Bliss Carman (1861-1929), Archibald Lampman (1861-1899), and Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947).
Hogg provides a brief biographical account of each of these figures.
Campbell, Lampman, and Scott, in the early 1890s, wrote a literary column for the Toronto Globe newspaper. Hogg includes numerous examples of the column in this anthology. These articles are among the most interesting selections that Hogg has assembled; they have an incisiveness appropriate to literary journalism.
If there is one theme that permeates this volume, one quality that unites the Confederation Poets and defines them as a group, it is idealism. There is none of the cynicism and nihilism that would characterize subsequent generations of Canadian poets.
The Confederation Poets articulated an exalted conception of poetry and the role of the poet. Bliss Carman epitomized the idealism of this group. The poet, he said, "appeals to our sense of beauty, but not to that sense alone; he appeals to our sense of goodness, but not to that sense alone; he appeals to our sense of truth, but not to that sense alone. His appeal is to all three, and to all three equally." (192)
Poetry, for Carman, "teaches us how to live, how to be happy, how to love the right and appreciate the beautiful and perceive the true." (195)
In a similar vein, Wilfred Campbell wrote that the poet "must be, first and foremost, a man of ideas and ideals, a burning soul, lifted above the ordinary plane by a passionate interest in the race as a whole." (99)
Concomitant with the Confederation Poets' idealism was their critique of what they saw as the materialism of their era. Sir Charles G.D. Roberts noted that Canadian poets of his time "are all fundamentally antagonistic to everything that savours of materialism." (147) Contemporary society, Carman wrote, cares only for wealth, and respects "only those relentless and barbarous traits of character by which it is attained." (202) He continued: "One cannot but recognize the shameless materialism of the age, its brutal selfishness, ignoble avarice, and utter disregard of all the generous ideals of the spirit." (203)
This book is a window into English Canadian culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Confederation Poets elaborated a substantive poetics; this anthology of their literary theory and criticism is a significant document of Canadian intellectual history.
Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.