Confederation Poets - Poetry

Poetry

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."