Canada: Political map

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Canada Political map
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Poetry

• Oliver Goldsmith The Rising Village (1825)
• The real beginning of poetry, according to R.
  Gustafson, is with
• Charles Sangster nature (1856)
• Charles Heavysege biblical verse drama (1857)
• Charles Mair verse drama mythologizing the
  Native canadian (1886)
• Edward Hartley Dewart proposes in the only
  anthology of pre-Confederation Canadian poetry
  that poets should find their inspiration in the
  land search for national identity

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Oliver Goldsmith

• Grand-nephiew of the Anglo-Irish author of the
  Deserted Village (1770)
• The Rising Village (1825) begins where the
  earlier poem left off, and traces on the opposite
  side of the Atlantic the rise of a new community
  from the ruins of the old.

• Allusions to the earlier poem by means of brief
  quotation or through descriptions that compare or
  contrast to equivalent passages in the original
  Similarity with a difference
• Similarities subject-matter, verse form,
  language
• Differences
• Emphasis on growth rather than decay
• Golden Age located in the future rather than in
  the past

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Charles Sangster (1822-1893)

• CHARLES SANGSTER was born at the Navy Yard, Point
  Frederick, Kingston, Ontario, on the 16th of
  July, 1822. He was the son of a joiner in the
  British Navy, and the grandson of a United Empire
  Loyalist, a Scotch soldier who had fought in the
  American Revolution.

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• Charles was but two years old when his father
  died and when he was but fifteen years of age he
  retired from school to assist his mother in
  providing for the family.
• It was during his journalistic career in the
  'Limestone City' that he accomplished his best
  literary work. His first volume, The St. Lawrence
  and the Saguenay, and Other Poems, appeared in
  1856, published by subscription and his second,
  Hesperus, and Other Poems and Lyrics, in 1860.

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Charles Sangster (1822-1893)

• When forty-six years of age he accepted a
  position in the Post-Office Department at Ottawa,
  where his poetic energy and ambition succumbed,
  apparently, to the incessant drudgery and to the
  hampering cares of ill-paid employment.
• Sangster was a poet born, but his literary genius
  was handicapped by his elementary education and
  limited reading. For his opportunities, he
  achieved notably. He died in 1893.

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From Confederation to the 1920s

• Without a revolution or a sharp cultural break
  from Britain, Canada became a nation in 1867.
• Confederation alone did not create a nation
  forging a distinctive cultural identity seemed
  essential to counterbalance
• the threat of political annexation by the USA
• The colonial dependence on Britain

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The Confederation Poets

• So-called because they were born in the 1860s
• Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943)
• Bliss Carman (1861-1929)
• Archibald Lampman (1861-99)
• Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947)
• Some times added to the group are the names of
• Isabella Vallancy Crawford (1850-87)
• Wilfred Campbell (1858-1918)
• George Frederick Cameron
• Stylistically they were often imitative of Keats,
  Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, and Emerson.
• The content of their work was in tune with the
  growing nationalistic feeling

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Common traits

• Tensions between technological change and notions
  of ideal values
• Sense of tradition rooted both in place and in
  time
• Continuing link with Britain and growing links
  with the USA
• Illustrative of late Romantic literary
  conventions outside Canada (regular verse form,
  high ethical tone, pantheist sentiment, elevated
  diction)
• Struggle with Canadian dilemmas created by
• Imperial conservatism
• Contrast between urban life and the values
  attached to rural poetic imagery
• Disparity between literary landscape conventions
  and empirical landscapes

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Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943)

• He was the most energetic and precocious of the
  group he published Orion and Other Poems in
  1880.
• This first work follows the English tradition
  Roberts himself describes the book as concerned
  with alien matters in distant regions.
• The impact of Roberts first book on the rest of
  the group is suggested in Lampmans words

It was almost ten years ago, and I was very
young, an undergraduate at college. 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 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 re-reading Orion in a state of the
wildest excitement and when I went to bed I could
not sleep. It seemed to me a wonderful thing that
such work could be done by a Canadian, by a young
man, one of ourselves. (Two Canadian Poets A
Lecture', 1891)
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Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943)

• Other works
• In Divers Tones (1886)
• Songs of the Common Day (1893)
• Instead of concentrating on unity of thought, he
  takes the traditional sonnet form for a series of
  descriptive miniatures portraying life and nature
  in the Maritimes
• Balance between the sanctioned methods of the Old
  World and the fresh approaches of the new
• In 1887 he left for the United States and Europe,
  returning to Canada in 1925. During this period
  his best work is to be found in animal stories

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Bliss William Carman (1861-1929 )

• Born April 15, 1861 in Fredericton, New
  Brunswick. Son of William Carman and Sophia Mary
  Bliss (Sophia Mary Bliss was a descendent of
  Daniel Bliss of Concord, Massachusetts, the
  great-grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson and was
  the aunt of Charles G.D. Roberts)
• Depressive character with spells of manic joy
• Works produced over 50 books and chapbooks,
  among which
• April Airs A Book of New England Lyrics
• Echoes from Vagabondia
• Later Poems
• Low Tide on Grand Pré A Book of Lyrics
• Sappho One Hundred Lyrics

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Bliss William Carman (1861-1929 )

• Characteristics of his work
• In his day, extremely popular and critically
  acclaimed
• Light verse celebrating a nostalgic carefree
  world pastoral landscape, simple life
• The Edenic setting of his earlier works becomes
  obscured in later volumes by his interest in
  quasi-religious philosophies and pantheism
• He writes of feelings, not thoughts, impressions,
  not descriptions (unlike Roberts and Lampman)
• His best poetry captures the ephemeral quality of
  a melancholic dream, a glimpse of a world always
  remote, yet never far away

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Archibald Lampman (1861-1899 )

• Widely regarded as Canada's finest 19th-century
  English-language poet, Archibald Lampman was born
  in 1861 in Morpeth, Ontario, a village near
  Chatham. In 1867, his family moved to Gore's
  Landing in the Rice Lake district, where Lampman
  came to know the Strickland sisters, Susanna
  Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.
• Characteristics of his poems
• Topics seasons, rural places
• Minute descriptions
• Emotional restraint
• Overemphasize imagery of dream and reverie
• Moralistic Victorian style
• Some of his most celebrated poems (Morning on
  the Lièvre) are the product of canoe trips into
  the northern bush, accompanied by Duncan Campbell
  Scott

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Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947 )

• Scott was born in Ottawa in 1862, where he lived
  for his entire adult life. From his parents,
  Scott developed a love of literature and of
  music, and became an accomplished pianist. In
  1879 entered the federal civil service as a clerk
  in the Department of Indian Affairs, where he
  worked until his retirement in 1932. Scott's
  career brought him into contact with Native
  people in isolated settlements in the Canadian
  wilderness, and he drew upon these experiences in
  his literary career.
• It was Lampman who encouraged Scott to try his
  hand at poetry and prose.

Works Poetry The Magic House and Other Poems
(1893) Labor and the Angel (1898) New World
Lyrics and Ballads (1905) Lundy's Lane and Other
Poems (1916) Beauty and Life (1921) The Poems
of Duncan Campbell Scott (1926) The Green
Cloister, Later Poems (1935)
Fiction In the Village of Viger (1896 1945)
The Witching of Elspie, A Book of Stories (1923)
The Circle of Affection and Other Pieces in
Prose and Verse (1947) Untitled Novel ca. 1905
(1979)
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Isabella Valancy Crawford" (1850-1887)

• born of cultured parents in Dublin, Ireland, on
  Christmas day, 1850.
• In 1858, the family emigrated to Upper Canada and
  settled at Paisley, on the Saugeen river.
• Of these pioneer days in Bruce county, Maud
  Wheeler Wilson writes

The village was but just struggling out of the
embrace of the forest, and it was here that the
little Isabella, who had developed into a shy and
studious child, blue-eyed and with a beautiful
profile, beheld the practical results of those
harbingers of civilizationthe axe, the plough
and the hammerwhose work she afterward depicted
in Malcolm's Katie. . . . . Their children's
education was conducted by both Dr. and Mrs.
Crawford. The girls were carefully grounded in
Latin, as well as in the English branches. They
spoke French readily and were conversant with the
good literature of the day, Isabella especially
being an omnivorous reader, fondest of history
and of verse, and claiming Dante as her favourite
poet.
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Isabella Valancy Crawford" (1850-1887)

• In a few years, disease had taken nine of the
  twelve children, and a small medical practice had
  reduced the family to semi-poverty.
• Prior to her sudden and premature death from
  heart failure, on February 12th, 1887, Miss
  Crawford and her mother had lived for nearly a
  decade in the city of Toronto. Here this
  brilliant writer strove with tireless pen, to
  earn sufficient for their support.

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Emily Pauline Johnson, aka Tekahionwake,
(1861-1913)

• born at 'Chiefswood' on her father's estate, in
  the Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, in 1862. She
  was the youngest of four children, and early
  showed a marked tendency towards the reading and
  the writing of rhymes.

• Her father was Head Chief of the Six Nations
  Indians, of Hiawatha's Confederation, founded
  four centuries ago. Her mother was Emily S.
  Howells, of Bristol, England.
• Pauline's education in school lore was meagre,
  but her education in the School of Nature was
  extensive, and that with her voracious readingof
  poetry particularlyand retentive memory, richly
  stored her naturally keen mind.
• As a poet and recitalist, Miss Johnson won her
  first distinction of note in 1892, when she took
  part, in Toronto, in an unique entertainment of
  Canadian literature, read or recited by the
  authors themselves

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Emily Pauline Johnson, aka Tekahionwake,
(1861-1913)

• There followed a series of recitals throughout
  Canada, in the hope that their financial success
  would be such as to enable the poet to go to
  England and submit her poems to a London
  publisher.
• In two years this object was attained, and The
  White Wampum appeared. It was received with
  enthusiasm by the critics and the public
  generally. Pauline Johnson had 'arrived,' and as
  a poet and entertainer she was henceforth in
  demand in the British Isles, as well as in Canada
  and the United States.
• Miss Johnson continued her recitals for sixteen
  years, when failing health compelled her to
  retire. She located in Vancouver, B.C., where she
  lived until her death in 1913.