Confederation Poets

Confederation Poets

"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.