The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape 9780773567221

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
An Introductory Ramble through the Picturesque and the Sublime
Canadian Prospects: Abram's Plain and Quebec Hill in Context
"After the Beauty of Terror the Beauty of Peace": Notes on the Canadian Sublime
The Waxing and Waning of Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"
The Keen Stars' Conflicting Message": Wordsworth, Shelley, and Charles G.D. Roberts' Ave
New Provinces? or, In Acadia, No Ego
Song to the Rising Sun
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

The Picturesque and the Sublime A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape

The Picturesque and the Sublime is a cultural history of two hundred years of nature writing in Canada, from eighteenth-century prospect poems to contemporary encounters with landscape. Arguing against the received wisdom (made popular by Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood) that Canadian writers view nature as hostile, Susan Glickman places Canadian literature in the English and European traditions of the sublime and the picturesque. Glickman argues that early immigrants to Canada brought with them the expectation that nature would be grand, mysterious, awesome - even terrifying - and welcomed scenes that conformed to these notions of sublimity. She contends that to interpret their descriptions of nature as "negative," as so many critics have done, is a significant misunderstanding. Glickman provides close readings of several important works, including Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm," Charles G.D. Roberts's Ave, and Paulette Jiles's "Song to the Rising Sun," and explores the poems in the context of theories of nature and art. Instead of projecting backward from a modernist perspective, Glickman reads forward from the discovery of landscape as a legitimate artistic subject in seventeenth-century England and argues that picturesque modes of description, and a sublime aesthetic, have governed much of the representation of nature in this country. SUSAN GLICKMAN is a poet living in Toronto. She is the author of Complicity, The Power to Move, Henry Moore's Sheep and Other Poems, and Hide and Seek.

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The Picturesque and the Sublime A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape SUSAN GLICKMAN

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 1998 ISBN 0-7735-1732-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-7735-2135-6 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 1998 Bibliotheque rationale du Quebec Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First paperback edition 2000 This book was first published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program. Permissions Margaret Atwood, from The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Survival, by permission of the author. Earle Birney, from The Collected Poems of Earle Birney. Used by permission of McClelland & Stewart, Inc., Toronto, The Canadian Publishers. Roo Borson, "Grove," by permission of the author. Barrie Davies, editor, At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in 'The Globe" 1892-93. Used by permission of the University of Toronto Press. Paulette Jiles, from Song to the Rising Sun, by permission of the author. Dennis Lee, from "Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space," by permission of the author. Sinclair Ross, from As for Me and My House. Used by permission of McClelland & Stewart, Inc., Toronto, The Canadian Publishers. W.W.E. Ross, poems from Shapes and Sounds by permission of the estate.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Glickman, Susan, 1953The picturesque and the sublime: a poetics of the Canadian landscape Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1732-4 (bnd) ISBN 0-7735-2135-6 (pbk) 1. Canadian poetry (English) - History and criticism. 2. Landscape in literature, i. Title. ps8i47-N3G55 1998 c8n.oo9'327i 098-900172-5 PR9190.9-N3G55 1998 Typeset in Palatine 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

Contents

Preface

vii

An Introductory Ramble through the Picturesque and the Sublime 3 Canadian Prospects: Abram's Plain and Quebec Hill in Context 20 "After the Beauty of Terror the Beauty of Peace": Notes on the Canadian Sublime 38 The Waxing and Waning of Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm" 60 "The Keen Stars' Conflicting Message": Wordsworth, Shelley, and Charles G.D. Roberts' Ave 81 New Provinces? or, In Acadia, No Ego 103 Song to the Rising Sun 128 Notes 155 Index 207

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Preface

I came to the study of Canadian poetry late. A poet myself, I wanted to know more about my antecedents, and perhaps because I never studied "Canlit" formally, my reading remained a private pleasure without obligation, and without preconceptions. It was random and idiosyncratic, and what I discovered never failed to interest and provoke me. Naively, I was delighted to discover that Canadian poetry compared favourably with the British and American works I had studied in university. But when I started reading Canadian literary criticism, I sometimes found it hard to believe that the critics were addressing the same texts I'd just been reading. The established consensus seemed to be that Canadian literature was irretrievably colonial, at least until it became explicitly "post" or "anti"-colonial, and that "colonialism," more than being just a transitional stage in social development, was a mental framework that automatically rendered poets incapable of meaningful response to the world they inhabited. That poets used traditional forms, imagery emphasizing the fearful, mysterious, or impersonal qualities of nature, and, according to some critics, the English language itself, was evidence of this blinkered and inadequate framework. In this book I adduce some of the same evidence to argue the opposite case. I believe that Canadian poets have consistently transformed their English (and broadly European) literary inheritance to make it speak of their experience in this country - in particular their confrontation with the land. Their recognition that it would be a

viii Preface

challenge to do so is articulated by one of the first anglophone poets in Quebec, J. Mackay, when he writes in 1797: The lawns of Virgil, and his silvan shade, Tho' in the poet's choicest colours clad, Should here confess description more sublime, Could my weak numbers emulate the clime. (Quebec Hill: "Summer," ll.y-io)1

That is, could he rival Virgil in skill, his readers would recognize how much "more sublime" the scenery is here than any across the Atlantic. Mackay's desiderata - to succeed according to traditional European poetics while discovering a new language of description - illustrate Donna Bennett's observation that "English-speaking Canadians originally conceived of their literary project as one of maintaining British standards while developing a literature that spoke for Canada. These two goals were joined by making content the repository of Canadian cultural patterns and concerns, while form was expected to adhere to an inherited English aesthetics."2 From its inception, our literature embodied an experimental mandate to "emulate the clime," as Mackay puts it. For this reason, the division of EnglishCanadian writing into colonial and post-colonial is problematic, and perhaps simplistic. Moreover, although Quebec Hill reads landscape in terms of the political goals held for it (as with many - perhaps most - topographical poems written according to picturesque techniques), a new element was creeping in under the influence of philosophers such as Shaftesbury, Dennis, and Burke, and poets like James Thomson. This is signalled by the word "sublime": poetry now interested itself in how nature made one feel, as opposed to how it looked, what moral lessons it taught, or how it could be exploited to make a more comfortable life. And the feelings clustered around the word "sublime" were radically individual and egalitarian. The significance of this cultural transformation should not be underestimated. As George G. Williams notes, Mankind has always taken an interest in nature; but not until the eighteenth century did the interest in nature become an elaborate cult, a self-conscious worship. Mankind has always loved nature; but not until the eighteenth century did the love of nature blossom out into a dependence on a great personified Nature for wisdom, spiritual comfort, and holiness, into an ability to derive from Nature and objects of the natural world religious enthusiasm, moral goodness, and mystical understanding of both man and God.3

ix Preface

Just as the exploration and occupation of this country by Europeans coincided with the scientific revolution, so the writing of English poetry in Canada coincided with another revolution that saw "Nature" become the chief term of aesthetic and moral approval, and sublime experience become a new kind of religion. In other words, ideas that were rather new to European culture were founding precepts of Canadian culture. Settlers brought with them ways of observing and interpreting nature that were to be domesticated along with their music, their crafts, their agricultural practices and so on. D.G. Jones puts it whimsically: "If in the lives of colonial cultures as in the lives of little ducks and chickens there is a moment of imprinting, that moment for Canada is located in the latter half of the eighteenth century."4 It is the argument of this book that eighteenth-century aesthetic conventions still inform English Canadian poetry, particularly the poetry of landscape. Picturesque emphasis on concrete description continues to support a sublime view of the natural world. And our poets continue to subscribe to the sublime paradox: nature ultimately transcends translation into words, despite the fact that it is through language that this failure of language can best be evoked. Therefore, despite my agreement with the authors of The Empire Writes Back that "even before the development of a conscious decolonizing stance, the experience of a new place, identifiably different in its physical characteristics, constrains ... the new settlers to demand a language which will allow them to express their sense of 'Otherness,'" I would contest their assertion that "of course, at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this sense of Otherness in a positive and creative way."5 The sublime was, and remains, an effective model precisely because it accepts that nature is always already Other, and will evade any net of language, colonial or otherwise. The "gap which opens between the experience of place and the language available to describe it," though it may well form "a classic and all-pervasive feature of post-colonial texts," is also the space inhabited by the sublime.6 Throughout these essays I generally use the word "landscape" in preference to both the more metaphysical "nature" and the more geographical "space," "environment," "terrain" and the like. The word came into common English usage around 1598, with the new vogue for landscape painting in Holland. And it has continued to maintain its pictorial associations: "landscape" is space as an aesthetic construct. As Janice Monk notes: "Discussions of landscape overlap with those of nature, environment, and place, but landscape

x

Preface

can be distinguished from nature by its incorporation of the cultural. It is a more restrictive concept than environment and place, first because of its focus on the visual and second because it includes only relationships between people and their material world, whereas place and environment may refer to relationships that are exclusively between people."7 Let me make clear from the outset that I am not interested in constructing a master narrative. This is a collection of essays in literary history, not the unfolding of a thesis. Continuity is implied by the chronological order of the pieces, coherence by the repetition of themes and variations, but the structure of the book, and of the essays themselves, is ruminative rather than linear. Like the poets who roam through this work, I too wish to wander, ponder, and digress, according to the dictates of the landscape. The book is, in part, an attempt to rehabilitate terms like "colonial" and "conservative," "Romantic" and "imitative," to allow them to be purely descriptive rather than evaluative (and negative). My mandate is twofold: to illuminate the contributions of European theories of the picturesque and the sublime to Canadian depictions of nature, and to explore the critical reception to poems informed by these aesthetics. It may seem that the picturesque and the sublime are being proposed as new - but not necessarily different - themes to replace more familiar generalizations about "the garrison culture" and "survival." But I hope to go beyond a simplistic reversal of popular stereotypes by focusing my discussion in each essay on only a few poems, and by reading them in the context of their production and in relation to the intellectual and emotional commitments of their makers. Such a methodology undoubtedly makes me vulnerable to charges of succumbing to both the intentional and the expressive fallacies. I accept the accusations cheerfully. I also take full responsibility for the narrowness of my enquiries into a field of such magnitude. This study is limited to English-language poetry and is by no means encyclopaedic; other, perhaps better, poems might have been considered than those I have chosen. I hope that those who recognize my lapses will remedy them. Nothing could please me more than knowing I had provoked more serious discussion of these issues. Perhaps because the big boom in Canadian literary studies took place in the full fervour of the post-Centennial nationalism of the 19605 and 19705, there was a reluctance to read works considered to be colonial - and even more resistance against reading the texts behind the texts because they were earlier, and British, and therefore presumed to be bad influences. Thus Paul Hjartarson argues that: "Literary criticism traces the figure of our desire. Our repeated desire as critics of Canadian literature has been to de/sire, to discover our

xi Preface own identity ... and thereby release ourselves from our literary and cultural precursors ... We desire a tradition to displace tradition."8 But part of growing up is forgiving one's parents, and more recently historical approaches and those emphasizing intertextuality have gained acceptance. For example, essential work in bibliography is being done by Carleton University's Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts and the Canadian Poetry Press at the University of Western Ontario. This book has benefited greatly from the conscientious work of textual scholars like these, and the constellation of literary critics around journals like Canadian Poetry, Canadian Literature, and Essays in Canadian Writing. Most of these essays were written while I was a Canada Research Fellow at the University of Toronto between 1988-93. I am very grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada for many years of generous support, and to the English Department of the University of Toronto for finding a niche for me. I especially want to thank my students at U. of T. for their enthusiasm; I learned a lot from them. After my university contract expired, my work was supported by Ontario Arts Council "Writers' Reserve" grants allocated by the editors of Arc, Books in Canada, Descant, The Canadian Forum, Mosaic Press, and the University of Toronto Press, and by an "Arts Grant B" from the Canada Council. Particular individuals who helped this book come into being are Joan Bulger, Mark Cheetham, Don Coles, William New, Sam Solecki, David Staines, Milton Wilson, and Sheldon Zitner. Thanks also to David Bentley of Canadian Poetry, where part of the essay on Ave first came out; Tom Adamowski at The University of Toronto Quarterly, where an earlier version of "Canadian Prospects" was published; and Laurie Ricou at Canadian Literature, where some of the chapter on Susanna Moodie appeared. Special thanks to my very capable and gracious editors at McGill-Queen's University Press, Joan McGilvray and Lesley Barry. For another kind of support, I'd like to thank my family's caregivers, Amparo Guardiola, Josie Cabading, and Gina Urbanozo, and all those friends who provided encouragement when things weren't going well, and tolerated my absent-mindedness when they were. And most of all thanks to my husband Toan Klein, and to our children, Jesse and Rachel, the "Little Ones under my heart" who enriched my own experience of the sublime by appearing while I worked on this project. This book is dedicated to my mother, Roslyn, and my late father, Buddy, who shared with me their reverence for and joy in the Canadian wilderness.

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The Picturesque and the Sublime

"...beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us." Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Duino Elegy, 11.4-7 translation by Stephen Mitchell

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An Introductory Ramble through the Picturesque and the Sublime

Writing a book about the poetics of Canadian landscape presupposes that landscape is a legitimate subject for literature. In Canada, this has always been taken for granted; we have assumed that engagement with the land is a subject of intense interest and depictions of its grandeur, immensity and variety a primary source of aesthetic pleasure. But taking the land to be the chief subject of art was, at one time, quite revolutionary. "Art knew man before it concerned itself with landscape. Man stood in front of the landscape and hid it," says Rilke.1 For centuries in Western art, nature was the setting for actions staged by humanity: it provided either decorative background for portraiture or an allegorical context for historical and religious narratives, but it held little intrinsic interest. In literature, natural forces like thunder or the ocean were often portrayed anthropomorphically. Greek and Roman writers, by transforming natural phenomena into the activities of capricious gods, were in part acknowledging that they found human behaviour more compelling. And their sculptors, by transforming marble into perfectly proportioned flesh, were implicitly stating that the highest purpose of art was to celebrate the human form. Nonetheless, some paintings and poems attempted to portray nature for its own sake. The classical painter Zeuxis is praised by Aristotle for his idealized portraits, but is most famous for having painted a bunch of grapes so lifelike that birds flew from the sky to peck at them. And one of the earliest known poems - now lost - was that by Scymnus of Chios describing the region found between the

4 The Picturesque and the Sublime

north coast of the Mediterranean and the shores of the Black Sea.2 But it is almost as rare to find poems describing particular landscapes in classical literature as in English literature before the eighteenth century. The two genres which engage most directly with natural scenery, pastorals and georgics, are primarily concerned with human activities taking place out of doors. Rural life is seen as a microcosm of the larger world, and the concerns of country-folk are paradigmatic for mankind in general. Pastorals, deriving from the Greek eclogues of Bion and Theocritus, are dialogues between shepherds or herdsmen; they include songs, stories, flirtatious exchanges and jokes. Georgics, originating in Hesiod's The Works and the Days, are less dramatic and more didactic, presenting the encyclopaedic reflections of a single narrator about the agricultural and political state of his land. One genre presents man at play and centres on private experience; the other, in which man interacts with nature through work, is public in emphasis. But although in both genres the rural setting provides the context for the speaker's meditations and his rural occupation the occasion, in neither is the focus the landscape itself. With the rediscovery of classical literature in the Renaissance, the precedent established by Virgil of a poet's progress from pastoral through georgic to epic became the model career. The meadows and mountains of Europe overflowed with lusty reapers, milkmaids and shepherds piping upon Doric reeds. Alternatively, the country-house poem imitated those works of Virgil, Horace and Martial which celebrated the benefits of bucolic retirement for learned gentlemen: distance from the corruption of the city was supposed to encourage the cultivation of wisdom, moderation, and other seemly virtues. In Tudor and Stuart England, this model was undoubtedly complemented by a burgeoning interest in landscape painting. Initially, "landscape pictures, except possibly in tapestries, were almost unknown. The word 'landscape' itself was new to the language ... the vogue grew, until by 1700 landscapes were to be seen in upper-class houses wherever one went... A new and wealthy merchant class had come into being and was bent on acquiring the culture of the aristocracy ... [and] the culture of the Continent."3 Such pictures frequently place a stately home or castle, surrounded by walled gardens and orderly rows of trees, in the midst of a pastoral scene. Human presence is still paramount, and nature speaks of its inhabitants. Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" (1616), Thomas Carew's "To Saxham" (1634), and Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" (ca. 1651), are all country-house poems which identify the beauty of particular estates with the refinement of their inhabitants. Marvell develops

5 An Introductory Ramble

this analogy between place and person in an extravaganza of ninetyseven eight-line stanzas of tetrameter couplets celebrating the house and grounds at Nun Appleton as "Paradise's only map" in a world "all negligently overthrown" ("Upon Appleton House," 11.761-68).4 This is the story of the House of Fairfax which, both architecturally and genealogically, is recommended for being exceptional, an alternative to the society which surrounds it, rather than a model of that society. Although Appleton House and its environs intermittently represent England - "that dear and happy Isle / The Garden of the World ere while" (11.321-22) - and indeed the whole fallen world in miniature, now reborn with the coming of a new saviour in Maria Fairfax, the very extravagance of such analogies reminds us that this poem is, above all, an aristocratic compliment. As G.R. Hibbard points out, "after 1660 this kind of poem was no longer written, because the way of life that it reflects, and out of which it grows, was on the decline."5 But contemporaneous with Marvell's work was another, which in describing a landscape at once real and ideal was to engender many descendants: John Denham's topographical poem Cooper's Hill. In this piece, the speaker surveys the scene around him. First his eye "contracts the space" (1.13) to St Paul's Hill, crowned by the city cathedral, after which "Windsor the next ... above the Valley swells / Into [his] eye" (11.39-41), and then St Anne's Hill, topped by the ruin of Chertsey Abbey (ll.m15).6 The speaker repeatedly emphasizes that he is describing what he can see - but in 1642, when the first version of Cooper's Hill was published by the royalist press at Oxford, each landmark was too value-laden to be mistaken for simple scenery. "Between these topographical symbols of the benevolent and the tyrannical, sincere and hypocritical, altruistic and selfish management of religion, placed as though to allow the monarch to make his choice of either, stands the royal hill of Windsor ... It is being implied, therefore, that the royal hill is Nature's manifestation of that harmony-through-opposition that the age continued to accept as the heart of the cosmic scheme."7 Denham prepares us to read this scene allegorically by telling us "Through untrac't ways, and aery paths I fly / More boundless in my Fancy than my eie" (11.11-12), and clarifies his cosmic scheme when he looks down the valley to the Thames, and discovers kingly behaviour incarnate in the impartial benevolence of the river. According to Dr Johnson, Denham "seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection

6 The Picturesque and the Sublime

or incidental meditation."8 Presumably Dr Johnson didn't consider country-house poems to satisfy these requirements because they were paradoxically too local, too private. In "Upon Appleton House/' both historical retrospection and incidental meditation are firmly anchored to the landscape surveyed, but the whole is expressive of the situation of one individual: Marvell's patron, Thomas Fairfax. And if we look at other types of English nature poetry before Cooper's Hill we find that landscape is either not "the fundamental subject of the poem" (but only its setting), or not "local" (Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion being obvious exceptions) or not "particular" (but - and this is true even of Spenser - generalized). What is new in Cooper's Hill, by comparison to English poems on classical models, is the poet's insistence that he is describing a real and specific scene that speaks to him of his own time and place. In Cooper's Hill, Denham is preoccupied with the principle of concordia discors, the reconciliation of opposites. It even governs his taste in landscape, allowing him to relish the contrast he experiences: While the steep horrid roughness of the wood Strives with the gentle calmness of the flood. Such huge extreams when Nature doth unite Wonder from thence results, from thence delight. (11.209-12)

This point of view is certainly not new; in the preface to Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, E.K. writes: "But all as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze and portraict not onely the daintie lineaments of beautye, but also rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy clifts, that by the basenesse of such parts, more excellency may accrew to the principall; for oftimes we fynde ourselues, I knowe not how, singularly delighted with the shewe of such naturall rudeness, and take great pleasure in that disorderly order."9 E.K.'s "disorderly order" closely resembles Denham's concordia discors: not much changed between the sixteenth century and the seventeenth in the poetic representation of landscape. But the eighteenth century, which began with an obsession for order, harmony, and balance eclipsing anything found in earlier English poetry, concluded with an unprecedented appreciation for all that is wild. And Denham, standing on his hilltop, surveying his tame emblematic scenery, was a model for later poets who preferred to observe the wilderness without such overt moralizing.

7 An Introductory Ramble

Separation of topographical and ideal landscape is never really possible - choosing a particular landscape to describe and a vantage point from which to view it implies an ideological agenda, conscious or not. Nonetheless, we find in English poetry an increasing attention to nature for its own sake.10 The most influential of the landscape poets to follow Denham was James Thomson, who exclaims in the preface to "Winter" (1726): "I know no Subject more elevating, more amusing; more ready to awake the poetical Enthusiasm, the philosophical Reflection, and the moral Sentiment, than the Works of Nature. Where can we meet with such Variety, such Beauty, such Magnificence? All that enlarges, and transports, the soul?" He claims that this point of view is traditional, for "the best, both ancient and modern, poets have been passionately fond of retirement and solitude" and therefore of "the wild romantic country." But although it is true that poets had always celebrated the opportunity to be, as Thomson puts it, "far from the little busy world ... at leisure to meditate, and sing the Works of Nature," nature, in his day, meant something else than it had in the past.11 Newtonian science, having demonstrated the conformity of natural laws with mathematics, had liberated the earth from its previous status as fallen matter. To Thomson, as to many later poets, it was no longer necessary to explain the existence of every rock, thistle and scorpion, or every stream, rose and bumblebee, as a divine exemplum for the edification of man. Each could be accepted as part of the exuberant variety of creation without having to be translated into moral terms (though for Thomson, as for many later poets, these moral terms were still readily elicited). Blake saw this acceptance of the material world as demonic. To him, humanity had become alienated from its spiritual nature because of the growing secularism of eighteenth-century society: Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave Laws and religions to the sons of Har, binding them more And more to earth; closing and restraining, Till a philosophy of five senses was complete. Urizen wept and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke. ("The Song of Los," 11.44-8)12

But his indictment of Newton was mistaken, for to Newton, the fact that the universe was governed by mathematical laws was proof not of its self-sufficiency but of the ubiquitous care of its author; as he declared, "Deus omnipraesens est, non per virtutem solam, sed etiam per substantiam: nam virtus sine substantia subsistere non potest."13

8 The Picturesque and the Sublime

And many of the thinkers who followed him in time also followed him in spirit - though perhaps not as conventionally as the religious establishment might have liked. In other words, the new religion of nature was religious. It was just as opposed to scientific materialism as was official dogma, but it found spiritual nourishment outside the doors of the Church. The most famous avowal of this new nature worship is that of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury: I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind: where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoiled their genuine Order, by breaking in upon that primitive State. Even the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto's and broken Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself, as representing NATURE more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.14

Obviously this passion is still in the "growing" phase: terms like "rude" and "horrid" suggest that the speaker has not quite overcome his Enlightenment standards, dismiss them though he might as "formal mockery"! Nonetheless, the gesture was sincere and the argument - that the primitive must be seen as "representing Nature more" - profoundly influential. As George G. Williams notes: "Had the century been any the less convinced of that good neo-classic doctrine that 'whatever is - is right/ the century would have been a good deal less inclined to love nature."15 Besides the new science and the philosophy of nature it encouraged, another catalyst for nature worship was the Grand Tour, so popular towards the end of the seventeenth century. The English aristocracy discovered not only European landscape but also European painting: the Alps were a guide to Salvator Rosa, peaceful countryside an introduction to Claude Lorrain and Caspar Poussin. Indeed, as Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring quips, the difference between Denham's descriptions of scenery and those of James Thomson in The Seasons is that "between a person slightly used to landscape pictures, and one well used to them."16 Raymond Williams has remonstrated: "It is an ironic insularity to suppose that eighteenth-century Englishmen consciously imitating seventeenth-century Italian painters were 'discovering' scenery."17 But this presupposes the possibility of an unmediated vision of nature such as no human being can sustain past infancy. Everyone learns to interpret the world according to local conventions of thought and language. So, although Thomson's generation were no more

9 An Introductory Ramble

discovering Europe than Columbus discovered America, they were recognizing how little of the world around them they had really seen. Their poetry attempted to record the newly sanctioned pleasures of the eye. The result, seen throughout eighteenth-century literature, was poetry organized according to techniques of painterly composition. For example, the poet is represented as seeing a "prospect," and describes it from foreground to middle ground to distance in an orderly progression of images, often held together by a road or a river. He or she describes gradations of colour and effects of light and shade, especially night-time chiarascuro. Words like here and there, above, beyond, behind, right and left, serve to place and orient the viewer. Laurence Lipking analyses the importance of visual imagery in eighteenth-century literature: Because painting, of all the arts, most clearly illustrates the doctrine that the arts are imitative, and because psychological analysis of the imagination took its pattern, after Hobbes, from the sense of sight, painting was invoked again and again in the early years of the eighteenth century as the model and test for all works of art. Ut pictura poesis, whatever it had once meant, exhorted poets to think of themselves as the wielders of a phantom brush; and poets like Pope ... were prepared to criticize poems as so many pictures, and to defend their own practice with paintings wielded like a shield of Achilles.18

Thus, in his 1756 Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, Joseph Warton praises Thomson for the "variety of new and original images, which he painted from nature itself, and from his own actual observations." He calls such images "picturesque": a new term, meaning that which is suitable for pictorial representation.19 The vocabulary of taste was rapidly changing; William Gilpin explored its implications in his Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792). By codifying the pic-

turesque, he and his followers, especially Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, helped to create an aesthetic that continues to affect our appreciation of landscape art today. They also legitimized a slippery aesthetic term to stand with the conventional "sublime" and "beautiful" of natural description. People in general tended to confuse and blend these two terms, applying both or either to any impressive or moving scene. But from the time of Edmund Burke's An Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), the sublime had signified that

io The Picturesque and the Sublime

which awes or terrifies, and the beautiful that which calms and pleases. Burke formalized an essentially bipolar aesthetics grounded in the psychology of pain and pleasure. Later thinkers, like Kant, were to develop the theory of the sublime - and the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful - more complexly. But as Martin Price notes: "By reducing the beautiful from a comprehensive aesthetic term to the name of a limited and lesser experience, Burke opened the way for others to identify new aesthetic categories!,]" the first of these being the picturesque.20 As originally promoted by Gilpin, the picturesque was not really a new aesthetic category at all, but rather a methodological description. The picturesque, that which was paintable, included aspects of both the sublime and the beautiful. To quote directly: that we may examine picturesque objects with more ease, it may be useful to class them into the sublime, and the beautiful; tho, in fact, this distinction is rather inaccurate. Sublimity alone cannot make an object picturesque. However grand the mountain, or the rock may be, it has no claim to this epithet, unless it's form [sz'c], it's colour or it's accompaniments have some degree of beauty. Nothing can be more sublime, than the ocean: but wholly unaccompanied, it has little of the picturesque. When we talk therefore of the sublime object, we also understand, it is also beautiful: and we call it sublime, or beautiful, only as the idea of sublimity, or simple beauty prevail.21

But almost immediately, (and even by Gilpin himelf), "the picturesque" began to be used as a third term to sit beside the other two and mediate between them. Gilpin's argument that many landscapes not "beautiful" were nonetheless very pictorial led, inevitably, to the description of such landscapes as picturesque rather than as beautiful or sublime - and not as "picturesquely" sublime or beautiful. Conventionally, the beautiful, as exemplified by the work of painters like Poussin and Claude, was all harmony, balance, and mellow light. Such paintings are frankly idealized: they evoke "a sense of a Golden Age, of grazing flocks, unruffled waters and a calm, luminous sky, images of perfect harmony between man and nature, but touched ... with a Mozartian wistfulness, as if [the painter] knew that this perfection could last no longer than the moment in which it takes possession of our minds."22 Landscapes of this sort were typically Mediterranean or classical. In contrast, sublime landscapes, representing tumult, vastness, and obscurity, were usually northern or alpine, or occasionally coastal or tropical. However, since sublimity was held to consist of that which is indefinable and immeasurable,

ii An Introductory Ramble

subjects incarnating these principles were often unsuitable - if not impossible - to paint. Coleridge muses about the relative shapeliness of the beautiful and formlessness of the sublime in a way that elucidates the problem: I meet, I find the Beautiful - but I give, contribute, or rather attribute the Sublime. No object of Sense is sublime in itself; but only as far as I make it a symbol of some Idea. The circle is a beautiful figure in itself; it becomes sublime, when I contemplate eternity under that figure - The Beautiful is the perfection, the Sublime the suspension, of the comparing Power. Nothing not shapely (formosus: nam etiam musice suam habet formam) can be called beautiful: nothing that has a shape can be sublime except by metaphor ab occasione ad rem.2^

And as Jacques Derrida remarks, pondering Kant: "From this definition - definition of the beautiful as definable in its contour and of the sublime de-fined as indefinable for the understanding - you already understand that the sublime is encountered in art less easily than the beautiful, and more easily in 'raw nature.'"24 For this reason, "picturesque" began to describe pictorial elements once called sublime: Salvator Rosa's banditti-haunted hillsides, for example. Indeed, even topographical features like caves or waterfalls could now be described as picturesque rather than sublime not on the basis of the feelings they elicited but simply because they could be painted in a straightforward way. Characteristics rendering scenery most picturesque were variety of colour, light and shade, and ruggedness of form; scenic elements like rocks, grottos and ruins were favoured for their brokenness and irregularity. The picturesque, thus based on principles of variety and contrast, offered endless opportunities both for artistic expression and imaginative reflection. Martin Price argues that the picturesque offers "an appeal to unlimited complexity against limited canons of beauty ... At its most extreme such criticism replaces categories of form by a measure of intensity."25 It may seem inevitable, therefore, that what Price has called the picturesque moment should lead to Romanticism. The picturesque fashion was transitional: before it, nature was emblematic of morality; afterwards, nature was mysterious, representing all that is primal and unconscious. Several paradoxes are inherent in this transition. On the one hand, the picturesque movement was egalitarian: anyone with a sketchpad could go out and discover the landscape; anyone could cultivate taste and sensibility. On the other, the picturesque attitude was

12 The Picturesque and the Sublime

detached and proprietory: the very apparatus which enabled the viewer to enter the landscape without owning it intervened between the viewer and the landscape, imposing conventional ways of seeing and prescribing conventional objects to be seen. This is symbolized by the popularity of the "claude-glass," a convex amber mirror used by fresh-air artists to reflect nature in the mellow tones of old paintings. The result was that a theory conceived to accommodate nature, to account for the appeal of certain landscapes which didn't fit into traditional categories, could be applied so rigidly as to suppress genuine appreciation by substituting yet another set of preconceptions. An instructive character in this regard is William Combe. In 1790 he edited John Meares' Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the Northwest Coast of America; in 1802, Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, through the continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the years 1789 and 1793.26 In between, he assisted with Humphrey Repton's Letter to Uvedale Price (1794) and his Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1795), both of which dissociated Repton from the picturesque fashion by arguing for design on the basis of function. Combe may have been predisposed to Repton's aesthetic independence from spending so much time polishing descriptions of North American scenery which didn't fit the contemporary preference for tumbledown thatched cottages overhung by melancholy willows. At any rate, the only original works for which Combe is remembered today are his "Doctor Syntax" poems, beginning with The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812), a delightful verse parody of the silliest contentions of Gilpin and his disciples. Gilpin seems to anticipate Combe's line of attack by remarking that admirers of the picturesque have been "a little misunderstood" BYTHJEPUBLIC IN THAT THEY ARE ASSUMED TO SUPPOSE consist in picturesque beauty - and the face of nature to be examined only by the rules of painting. Whereas, in fact, we always speak a different language. We speak of the grand scenes of nature, tho' uninteresting in a picturesque light, as having a strong effect on the imagination - often a stronger, than when they are properly disposed for the pencil."27 Nonetheless, he himself was guilty of such statements as: "We must ever recollect that nature is most defective in composition; and must be a little assisted. Her ideas are too vast for picturesque use, without the restraint of rules."28 He suggests that the artist should simply rearrange typical scenic elements, such as trees, rocks, cattle or cottages, to improve a picture. And so we find Doctor Syntax, dissatisfied with the prospect of a bare common inhabited only by a

13 An Introductory Ramble pack of donkeys and a weathered signpost, moving a distant pond into view before turning it into a stream and placing a bridge over it, declaring: I'll do as other sketchers do Put anything into the view; And any object recollect, To add a grace, and give effect. Thus, though from truth I haply err, The scene preserves its character. What man of taste my right will doubt, To put things in, or leave them out?29 Of course, Combe was neither the first nor the last critic of picturesque excess. In 1806, shortly after reading Uvedale Price's Essay on the Picturesque, William Wordsworth sent the aesthetician some notes on the sublime - presumably his own unfinished essay "The Sublime and the Beautiful."30 The poet maintained contact with Price until the latter's death in 1829; after a visit to his estate in 1811, Wordsworth mused in a letter that: "A man by little and little becomes so delicate and fastidious with respect to forms in scenery, where he has a power to exercise a controul [sic] over them, that if they do not exactly please him in all moods, and every point of view, his power becomes his law; he banishes one, and then rids himself of another, impoverishing and monotonizing Landscapes."31 These reflections are all the more poignant given his own early practice of selecting and arranging scenic details for thematic purposes. In fact, J.R. Watson accuses the young Wordsworth of "deliberate disregard of Lake District geography" in An Evening Walk, attributing this to the fact "that Wordsworth was at the time immersed in picturesque ideas and techniques."32 The whole picturesque movement in travel, painting, and poetry was associated, from the start, with the Lake District. But despite all those who had tramped through the hills before him, Wordsworth felt compelled to write his own Guide Through the District of Lakes (1810), declaring that he hoped it would encourage "habits of more exact and considerate observation than, as far as the writer knows, have hitherto been applied to local scenery."33 Even An Evening Walk, published in 1793, includes several footnotes addressing those accustomed to picturesque travel. For example, the note to line 171 informs us that: "Not far from Broughton is a Druid monument, of which I do not recollect that any tour descriptive of this country makes mention. Perhaps this poem may fall into the hands of some

14 The Picturesque and the Sublime

curious traveller, who may thank me for informing him, that up the Duddon ... may be found some of the most romantic scenery of these mountains."34 The poem, full of this kind of local detail, purports to represent a walk through a particular section of the Lake District from noon until night. A companion piece, Descriptive Sketches. In Verse. Taken During a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps is, as its title suggests, at once less unified and just as emphatic in its insistence on pictorial accuracy. The title's analogy with the visual arts extends into the ubiquitous language, imagery, and topoi of picturesque convention, including, among Nature's "varying charms" (I.i6) the chiaroscuro beauty of a sunset on Lake Como (11.101-13), and the sublime terrors of the Simplon Pass (11.2O1-62).35 Many of these scenes are footnoted, like those in An Evening Walk, to attest to their veracity and importance. However, the most famous footnote to Descriptive Sketches declares: "I had once given to these sketches the title of Picturesque; but the Alps are insulted in applying to them that term" (note to line 347 of the original 1793 text). Throughout the eighteenth century there was a preoccupation with the relative merits of particularity of description versus generality of ideas. Apparently Wordsworth, after his apprenticeship to the picturesque emphasis on pictorial accuracy, now tended towards Dr Johnson's opinion that: "Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness."36 So he rewrites Descriptive Sketches in the sixth book of the 1805 Prelude; in the eleventh, "Imagination, How Impaired and Restored," he attributes to this alpine expedition his shaking off the "habit" of viewing landscape in picturesque terms "Entirely and for ever" (XI, see 11.241-57).37 To be fair, he notes that his brief alienation from nature was not entirely the result of "rules of mimic art ... a strong infection of the age" (11.154-6), but also arose from the "twofold Frame of body and of mind" (1.170). He views his youthful preoccupation with judging nature according to its pictorial aspects as evidence of a state In which the eye was master of the heart, When that which is in every stage of life The most despotic of our senses gain'd Such strength in me as often held my mind In absolute dominion .... Though 'twas a transport of the outward sense, Not of the mind, vivid but not profound: Yet was I often greedy in the chace,

15 An Introductory Ramble And roam'd from hill to hill, from rock to rock, Still craving combinations of new forms, New pleasure, wider empire for the sight, Proud of its own endowments, and rejoiced To lay the inner faculties asleep. Amid the turns and counterturns, the strife And various trials of our complex being, As we grow up, such thraldom of that sense Seems hard to shun. (XI, 11.172-99)

This thoughtful examination of how a preoccupation with appearances may serve as a refuge from the complexity of moral life goes far beyond any simple repudiation of picturesque principles of representation. It is true that in The Prelude he often opposes sight to true vision, the earthly "eye" to the transcendent "I," and that he seems to associate the former with the picturesque and the latter with the sublime, or epiphanic. And many critics have been happy to follow his lead. Indeed, James B. Twitchell translates this argument as follows: What was needed was visionality, not visuality - a landscape not only of the external world but of how the perceiver saw that world. The artist must return himself to participate in his "text" not as a spectator but as an organizer. The artist needed to leave his Claude-glass at home, needed to stop climbing those hills in search of downward "prospect," needed to stop "sweeping the horizon from commanding height"; in short he needed to commit himself.38

But no such opposition was envisioned by theoreticians of the picturesque, for whom the new credo promised, along with greater imaginative freedom, a way of accommodating the sublime within pictorial representation. Indeed, Wordsworth is being unfair to himself (if not to the entire picturesque tradition) in assuming that the "inner faculties" must be asleep during "a transport of the outward sense." Moreover, as R.A. Foakes objects, on Wordsworth's part this scheme is not only "a rationalization of his own development into a recognizable growth by stages" but also "appears to be at odds with another powerful sense the poem conveys, partly in the diminishing vitality of much in the middle books, of a development from the 'seeing' boy to the adult as one who sees "by glimpses now' (11.338)."39 What seems to be happening here is that Wordsworth has decided that the real power of words lies in their suggestive rather than their

16 The Picturesque and the Sublime

representational ability. In 1759, Edmund Burke observed that: "In reality, poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is, to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of things in themselves."40 And a year later, Lessing's tremendously influential Laokoon put paid to the notion that poetry could really do the job of painting, and pictorialism quickly declined as the central tenet of poetic theory.41 The increasing descriptive sophistication of the nature poets had led, by the middle of the eighteenth century, to anxiety about what, exactly, it was that they were imitating. Geoffrey Hartman argues that the abrupt transitions between places and seasons, the emphasis on contrasts, and the modulation between gothic sublimity and sentimental pastoral in Descriptive Sketches result from Wordsworth's need to find in nature the mirror of his own mind. Descriptive Sketches is therefore "not a portrait of nature, or the projection on nature of an idea, but the portrayal of the action of a mind in search (primarily through the eye) of a nature adequate to its idea."42 But, as we have seen, portraits of nature for its own sake were rare in English literature. Even the most picturesque analyses of natural phenomena by Thomson and his followers express some aspect of human experience. Wordsworth gives many examples of this sentimental and moralistic imperative throughout his work, both early and late. In An Evening Walk, for example, the serene activities of a family of swans prompt the speaker to imagine the slow deaths from exposure, in their vagrant mother's arms, of two human children (11.195-300). And Descriptive Sketches has several such interpolated episodes: the most important concern a hermit (11.164-75), a gypsy woman (11.188-242), and a hunter (11.366-413); the longest, about a young herdsman, blends into a meditation on the life of primaeval man and human liberty (11.424-590) which anticipates the section on liberty which closes the poem. Hartman's other distinction - between the projection of an idea upon nature and the process of the mind discovering itself through nature - helps considerably in distinguishing between poetic representations of landscape before and after Wordsworth. As Paul de Man observes, Romantic nature poetry is based on the same principle of analogy as eighteenth-century loco-descriptive verse but, rather than being formal and associative, analogy now tends to be more idiosyncratic in that "the relationship with nature has been superseded by an intersubjective, interpersonal relationship that, in the last analysis, is a relationship of the subject toward itself."43 Another framework for understanding the same development is offered by David B. Morris, who distinguishes between "an eighteenth-

17 An Introductory Ramble

century sublime, fundamentally affective and pictorial, and a Romantic sublime, fundamentally hermeneutic and visionary."44 In other words, whether our basis of comparison is formal literary figures like analogy or broader aesthetic theories like the sublime, as the century progresses, nature poetry increasingly describes the experience of the observer rather than that which is observed. For example, the 223 heroic couplets of An Evening Walk not only describe the beauties of the landscape but also anticipate the great theme of Wordsworth's later work: that the observer views familiar scenes "with other eyes, than once" (l.iy), and longs to return to the simple joys of childhood. Even in Descriptive Sketches, the traveller is most moved not by the view itself but by its correspondence to the inner states he projects upon the archetypal man of the mountains: For images of other worlds are there, Awful the light, and holy is the air. Uncertain thro' his fierce uncultur'd soul Like lighted tempests troubled transports roll; To viewless realms his Spirit towers amain, Beyond the senses and their little reign. And oft, when pass'd that solemn vision by, He holds with God himself communion high, When the dread peal of swelling torrents fills The sky-roof'd temple of the eternal hills, And savage Nature humbly joins the rite, While flash her upward eyes severe delight. Or gazing from the mountain's silent brow, Bright stars of ice and azure worlds of snow, Where needle peaks of granite shooting bare Tremble in ever-varying tints of air, Great joy by horror tam'd dilates his heart, And the near heav'ns their own delights impart. (11.544-61)

Those "viewless realms ... beyond the senses and their little reign" (11.548-9) may only be reached by travelling through "savage Nature" (1.564). They - and not the material world - are the ultimate goal of this traveller. As Paul Carter notes, such "communions" were encouraged by picturesque habits: "Picturesque prospects were ones that allowed the eye to wander from object to object: they had their mental counterparts in complex ideas that sparked off trains of thought. Picturesque views might give rise to all kinds of pleasant ideas, but the primary pleasure they gave resided in their picturesqueness itself -

i8 The Picturesque and the Sublime

in the fact that their structure of casually interlinked and contrasting forms enticed the eye (and the mind) to wander."45 So, tempting as it is to describe Wordsworth as rejecting the picturesque for the sublime, or of rescuing the sublime from the picturesque, it is just not accurate. Though his orientation towards sublimity was present from the start (as in the archetypally sublime line above: "great joy by horror tam'd dilates his heart"), so was his picturesque practice. Moreover, as James Heffernan notes, he continued to address nature in picturesque terms long after his boast to have thrown off the "critic rules" of picturesque convention in the 1805 Prelude (XI. 146-64).46 Wordsworth anticipated the general rejection of the picturesque that was to follow with the Romantic movement, but not until he had incorporated its central tenets of enthusiasm for nature, and respectful attention to all its manifestations, into his own work. Thus, Wordsworth's depiction of his younger self as "craving combinations of new forms, / New pleasure, wider empire for the sight" (The Prelude, XI.192-4) reminds us of Gilpin's admonition that the picturesque traveller should "suppose the country to have been unexplored. Under this circumstance the mind is kept continually in its agreeable suspense. The love of novelty is the foundation of this pleasure."47 However, the mature poet rejected this premise, arguing that "conceptions of the sublime, far from being dulled or narrowed by commonness or frequency, will be rendered more lively & comprehensive by more accurate observation and by increasing knowledge."48 Wordsworth endorsed a Heraclitean route to novelty, returning again and again to the same scenes, each time a different man. But other writers, keener travellers than he, were inspired by the picturesque injunction to explore new places. To them, "The eighteenth century earth has become a wide, wide world indeed, with extraordinarily extensive panoramas and prospects, in which mountains, plains, rivers, and seas are on a majestic scale and caverns actually seem measureless to man. The Muse refuses to be bounded by England."49 And the newest frontier was North America. As early as 1756, Joseph Warton speculated that a journey west might have inspired some really original work from Alexander Pope. He wrote: "I remember to have been informed by an intimate friend of Pope that he had once laid a design of writing American eclogues. The subject would have been fruitful of the most poetical imagery and, if properly executed, would have rescued the author from the accusation here urged of having written eclogues without invention."50 And almost a hundred years later we find Anna Brownwell Jameson suggesting that English travellers should camp in the Canadian North as she has "if they be contemplative lovers of the

19 An Introductory Ramble

picturesque, biases with Italy and elbowed out of Switzerland, let them come here and find the true philosopher's stone - or rather the true elixir of life - noveltyV'51 Some critics have argued that literary travellers like Jameson were incapable of recognizing anything really new because their frames of reference were so narrow that novelty itself was contained within picturesque limits. This may be why Pope, despite having failed to write American eclogues himself, proved such a durable poetic model to so many others who crossed the Atlantic. But we have to be careful not to confuse conventional language with conventional feelings or behaviour. The two poets we will look at in the next essay are not particularly inventive: there is little novelty in their imagery, still less in their diction. However, their visions of Canada couldn't differ more. The road from Cooper's Hill led each on his own voyage of discovery, as much inward as westward. These journeys are a legacy of, the picturesque.

Canadian Prospects: Abram's Plains and Quebec Hill

in Context

In 1789 Thomas Gary's Abram's Plains, A Poem was published in the city of Quebec, with a preface which commented genially on the author's literary taste and ambitions. He judges "descriptive poetry, that exhibits a picture of the real scenes of nature, to be the most difficult to excel in" and blank verse in general to be superior to rhyme because it requires "greater strength of imagination," and holds that "amongst the moderns ... the harmonious Thomson ... [is] unrivalled" as a practitioner of both. "I cannot help making this avowal however much it may operate against myself," he declares, for his poem is in the most popular form of the period, the heroic couplet.1 He elucidates his choice of models with more of the same self-deprecating humour: Before I began this Poem I read Pope's Windsor-Forest and Dr. Goldsmith's Deserted Village, with the view of endeavouring, in some degree, to catch their manner of writing; as singers in country-churches in England, to use a simple musical comparison, modulate their tones by the prelusive sound of a pitch-pipe. How far I have succeeded I must leave to my readers to determine; trusting, however, for a favourable decision more to their good-nature than to my deserts.

His own good nature inclines one to take up the invitation at once, though there is more to be found in Abram's Plains than simply the catching - successful or otherwise - of a certain "manner" of writing. Gary's emphasis on form and genre leads us to a central theme of Canadian literary history: that of "Tradition in Exile," to borrow John

21 Canadian Prospects

Pengweme Matthews' phrase.2 Critics have often disparaged early Canadian writers for their use of conventional forms. For example, while Sandra Djwa concedes that Gary's preface provides the "most attractive rationale for the general practice of literary imitation," she nonetheless finds all Canadian poetry before EJ. Pratt to be both overly indebted to English literary models, and directed too narrowly towards an English audience. Arguing that such an allegiance "would not encourage the development of an indigenous Canadian tradition," she implies that there was no literature of cultural importance before the modern period.3 Djwa condemns our early writers for not being original, apparently expecting new ways of seeing and describing the world to have sprung magically from the foam as European ships sailed the St Lawrence. R.E. Rashley tries to present the immigrant writer's situation objectively, but words like "failure" and "handicapped" betray a perception of intrinsic limitation: "the chief characteristic of the pioneer's environment, as revealed in his poetry, is its externality, the result of his failure to transmute the physical world into the world of idea ... Since the immigrant's world of idea is formulated elsewhere and his language is the most suitable vehicle for storing and modifying and handling it, he is handicapped in dealing with a new country."4 Rashley's view, written in 1958, expresses a central preoccupation of Canadian literary criticism which has been reiterated over time. In 1974, for example, Peter Stevens declares that nineteenth-century Canadian poets "do not appear to be really seeing the landscape before their eyes ... Most of them model their poems on the Romantic responses of the English poets of the nineteenth century, and such responses are not viable in the new world."5 But neither Stevens, nor any of the others who reprise this argument, demonstrate how it is that such responses are not viable. So in 1992 we hear, yet again, that "even the best early poems were shackled by the imitative and awkwardly transposed modes and imagery of English Romantic poetry."6 One can only wonder where the right language is supposed to be found, if the voice of a writer in his or her own day is deemed inauthentic. Ultimately, such arguments defeat their own purpose, because emphasizing the inadequacy of an imported tongue to describe the New World "might be seen to encourage an assumption that a language somehow may be inherently inappropriate for use in another place. This suggests an essentialism which, taken to its logical extreme, would deny the very possibility of post-colonial literatures in english [sic]."7 But even Northrop Frye, who concedes that when "a poet is confronted by a new life or environment, the new life may suggest

22 The Picturesque and the Sublime

a new content, but obviously cannot provide him with a new form. The forms of poetry can be derived only from other poems", goes on to argue that "echoes and influences are not a virtue in Canadian poetry, but one of its major weaknesses."8 Generally, Frye has an idiosyncratic view of the relationship between our poets and English literature; ignoring what writers like Gary have to say about the subject, he argues that, to an English poet, the tradition of his own country and language proceeds in a direct chronological line down to himself, and that in its turn is part of a gigantic funnel of tradition extending back to Homer and the Old Testament. But to a Canadian, broken off from this linear sequence and having none of his own, the traditions of Europe appear as a kaleidoscopic whirl with no definite shape or meaning, but with a profound irony lurking in its varied and conflicting patterns.9

One might well ask how the Old Testament can be said to be European property! Frye attributes a similar insecurity to the Canadian literary critic who "has to settle uneasily somewhere between the Canadian historian or social scientist ... and the ordinary literary critic." This position is undoubtedly a demotion, for when the critic approaches Canlit he becomes "unexpectedly incompetent, like a giraffe trying to eat off the ground."10 Pity the poor aesthete, used to stretching out for green thoughts in Albion's green shade, now browsing moss on the barren tundra! In contrast, J.M. Zezulka finds everywhere in early Canadian poetry deliberate evocations of literary continuity, and a confident expectation of being read as part of the English tradition. To return to Abram's Plains, Zezulka commends Cary not only for the frankness of his avowal of indebtedness, but for having a strong sense of purpose in the choice of his literary models. Zezulka argues that European pastoral, fusing art and nature in the service of an ideal social vision, dominated Canadian poetry up to Confederation, and that therefore the "real import of Gary's Preface lies not in the poets he chose to emulate, but in the specific poems he turned to for his inspiration, Thomson's descriptive verse and two socially-oriented pastoral poems."11 The critic who has most consistently given early Canadian poetry unbiased and attentive readings is D.M.R. Bentley. It is difficult to discuss the poem without echoing him frequently, and indeed I begin by quoting him: "From a literary-historical perspective, Cary is less remarkable for his relentless progressive conservatism or his unwavering British suprematism than for the fact that in 1789 he

23 Canadian Prospects

published a poem in English in Lower Canada for an audience that was coming to think of this country as home."12 Part of the process of inhabiting Canada, of making it habitable, has been to describe it in poetry. In doing so, writers such as Cary claim the space in the name of the English language. A British journalist who founded a library and later a newspaper, The Quebec Mercury,13 Cary was a man with a strong commitment to literature. He was also committed to British North America: his preface, datelined "Quebec, 24th Jan. 1789," heralds the poem's publication "at a time when literature seems to be emerging from the closet to illuminate our horizon [my emphasis]." That is, he asks to be recognized as a particular writer in a particular place and time. The very title of Abram's Plains demands our engagement with history, just as the preface makes it clear that, far from feeling belated, or in exile from Western culture, Cary saw himself in a continuous line of descent from poets like Pope. Moreover, topographical poems, such as this one, illustrate the inseparability of myth and history - how a poet "reads" the landscape he surveys has as much to do with mythology about the place as it does with the actual events enacted there. Topographical poetry was the typical response of settlers in North America, where the first known poem was William Morrell's NewEngland; or, A Briefe Ennarration of the Ayre, Earth, Water, Fish, and Fowles of that Country, with a Description of the Natures, Orders, Habits, and Religion of the Natives (1625).14 As D.E.S. Maxwell notes, in colonies "where different races and cultures cross, the land naturally assumes these symbolic meanings of possession of title. It comes to signify the qualities of the society that inhabits it, and prompts the imagination to see in it the imprint of the past which the present must try to understand."15 Gary's poem falls squarely in this tradition: it follows the course of the Great Lakes from west to east, then down the St Lawrence River to Quebec (cataloguing the "Water, Fish and Fowles of that Country, with a Description of ... the Natives"), before crossing the St Charles River to the lie D'Orleans. Finally we enter the citadel of Quebec to climb Cape Diamond and, "glancing round with comprehensive view," pursue "the varied landscape" (11.492-3) for a final medley of observations on the changing seasons and changing fortunes of that place, as the sun sets and the poem draws to a close. As Bentley suggests, the descriptive imagery of Abram's Plains owes a great deal to picturesque conventions. Gary creates a vivid sense of the pictorial, locating the reader at the same vantage point as the speaker, and, by means of repeated adverbs of locale

24 The Picturesque and the Sublime such as "Here" and "There" (a device 'caught', in all likelihood, from WindsorForest), succeeds in composing the landscape as a painter would a picture space ... [and] in remarking the harmonious and pleasing diversity of the scene, its irregularities of of form and texture, and its variety of colour and lighting.16

In such passages, Gary conforms to the convention of the "prospect" as taken over from visual artists by poets. As we have seen, the prospect - a long view of an outdoor scene clearly divided into foreground, middle ground and distance - was the most popular form of landscape illustration in seventeenth-century England.17 Milton provides an early poetic example when "L'Allegro" enumerates the sights of morning: Streit mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the Lantskip round it measures Russet lawns, and Fallows gray, Where the nibling flocks do stray, Mountains on whose barren brest The labouring clouds do often rest: Meadows trim with Daisies pide, Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide. (11.70-6)18

Eighteenth-century verse on various subjects is inset with similar panoramic views of the English countryside. Occasionally a whole poem may be described as a prospect: for example "Grongar Hill" (1726), whose author, John Dyer, was an accomplished painter as well as a poet.19 But generally, prospects were incidental virtuoso pieces, engaging the poet's descriptive powers to provide variety of imagery to complement the action of a long poem. And this is how Gary employs the prospect: as a moment of narrative stasis when the speaker can see the scenery he is describing, rather than when he is imaginatively tracing the course of British North America's waters and history. He returns "to ease the dazzled eye" (1.399) with gazing on the St Charles River after his long central meditation on war and peace, as though finding relief in landscape from the perplexities of human experience. Only then are we invited to follow his gaze from the "slow meand'ring stream that tardy moves" (1.400) to the cows grazing nearby, the cottages of Lorette "further left," and finally past Beauport to the limits of vision: Beyond the vales, still stretching on my view, Hills, behind hills, my aching eyes pursue.

25 Canadian Prospects Till, in surrounding skies, I lose my way, Where the long landscape fading dies away (11.425-8)

The movement from foreground to horizon in this passage of description is entirely conventional; "The congregation of plural nouns representing things seen at a distance is a marked feature of the prospect poem, while nearby objects are often presented by a cluster of singular nouns."20 And in order to give a feeling of space, and to imitate vision and perspective, it is necessary for the description of faraway objects to be less precise than that of near ones. Such passages are indeed "picturesque": they imitate, as closely as verbal description can, the painter's brush. At the same time, the view is not merely decorative. An Englishman, standing on a Quebec hillside naming French villages and rivers and commenting on the fertility and beauty of all he surveys, is by no means a neutral figure. When the St Charles becomes emblematic of the moral that "in life's course, who with wise caution treads, / Tho' slow, yet sure his influence widely spreads" (11.404-5), the association of thoughts, though presented as idle meditation, is politically motivated. As the river moves beneficently through this pastoral landscape, so should British power infiltrate the French colony. An obvious model for the prospect as allegory is Denham's Cooper's Hill, but Gary never openly acknowledges the influence. However, in modeling Abram's Plains upon Pope's Windsor-Forest, he was by association in Denham's debt. For example, Pope's speaker requests to be carried to "where ye Muses sport on Cooper's Hill. / (On Cooper's Hill eternal Wreaths shall grow, / While lasts the Mountain, or while Thames shall flow)" (11.264-6).21 Pope imitates many of the episodes of Denham's poem, as well as reiterating its Tory philosophy.22 But where for Denham Windsor Hill, as his "Mighty Masters Embleme" (Cooper's Hill, 1.47), was a symbol of enlightened monarchy, Pope's forest is the domain of a transcendent power, (Di)Anna. Let old Arcadia boast her ample Plain Th'Immortal Huntress, and her Virgin Train; Nor envy Windsor*, since thy Shades have seen As bright a Goddess, and as chast a Queen; Whose Care, like hers, protects the Sylvan Reign, The Earth's fair Light, and Empress of the Main. (11.159-64)

In Pope's poem, history is identified with, and enhanced by, mythology. The forest is at once a natural paradise whose archetype is biblical Eden/classical Arcadia, and a microcosm of English history

26 The Picturesque and the Sublime

and geography. It exists on both the real and ideal planes; indeed, it is the site where they intersect to generate a nation's destiny. Pope's reading of history itself becomes mythical: Windsor-Forest celebrates Queen Anne's recent ascension as the return of a Britain oppressed by foreign tyranny to "Fair Liberty, Britannia's Goddess" who "leads the golden Years" (11.91-2). Her predecessor, William of Orange, is identified with William the Conqueror and presented allegorically as a greedy hunter in Windsor Forest.23 Under his "Despotick Reign" (1.58), "Savage Laws" turned England into a private preserve, and the order of Nature was reversed: In vain kind Seasons swell'd the teeming Grain, Soft Show'rs distill'd, and Suns grew warm in vain; The Swain with Tears his frustrate Labour yields, And famish'd dies amidst his ripen'd Fields. (11.53-6)

But now that "a STUART reigns" (1.42) the balance of nature has been restored; farmers reap their harvest, and both game (11.93-134) and fish (11.135-46) are so abundant that "Youth rush eager to the Sylvan War" (1.148) of the hunt. This is in striking contrast to the days of the "haughty Norman" (1.63) when they were themselves "the Royal Game" (1.64). However, at the same time that Pope praises domestic peace he also praises foreign conquest, seeing "future Navies" growing in the forest oaks (11.219-22). Wars for the control of colonial lands and trade goods dominated Europe in Pope's day. Immediately upon taking power, William had sent his soldiers to fight the first of many battles with France on North American soil: the War of the League of Augsburg, 1689-97. In 17°3 me War of the Spanish Succession began, with England trying to prevent the Spanish Empire from falling into French hands. The Treaty of Utrecht concluded this war on terms highly favourable to the English, who won many commercial rights (including control of the slave trade) as well as acquiring Newfoundland, most of Acadia, and Hudson's Bay. Pope's poem celebrates this treaty. Whereas the opening of Windsor-Forest mourns past humiliations when the French ruled Britain, the poem's conclusion triumphantly proclaims the conquest of much of New France. A few years after Pope, James Thomson reprises the same paradoxical vision of a pastoral-yet-imperial, peaceful-yet-predatory Britain in The Seasons. Thomson concludes his description of a sheepshearing festival as follows: A simple Scene! yet hence BRITANNIA sees Her solid Grandeur rise: hence she commands

27 Canadian Prospects Th' exalted Stores of every brighter Clime, The Treasures of the Sun without his Rage: Hence, fervent all, with Culture, Toil and Arts, Wide glows her Land: her dreadful Thunder hence Rides o'er the Waves sublime, and now, even now, Impending hangs o'er Gallia's humbled Coast, Hence rules the circling Deep, and awes the World. ("Summer," n.423-31)24

Military conquest of "every brighter Clime," resulting in possession of trade goods ("exalted Stores"), is attributed to the temperate character of rural England. Simple pastoral scenes generate the "dreadful Thunder" that awes the world - especially, and as usual, France. In The Seasons, imperialist exploits of other countries are consistently represented as evil while Britain's foreign adventures are always noble. Thomson, the author of "Rule Britannia" (1740), in his proud insistence that Britons never would be slaves, chose to overlook the fact that they were the world's principal slave-traders. Pope displays a similar obtuseness in Windsor-Forest, where "Old Father Thames" prophecies a Pax Britannica when "Slav'ry [shall] be no more" (11.407-12). This vision also has a precedent in Cooper's Hill, wherein the ocean is described as the natural extension of the Thames, whose "fair bosom is the worlds exchange" (Li88) because it "Visits the world, and in his flying towers / Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours" (11.183-4). Thus the prophecy about Britain's future which concludes Windsor-Forest is spoken by "Old Father Thames": the Empire will be founded on maritime commerce.25 The Time shall come, when free as Seas or Wind Unbounded Thames shall flow for all Mankind, Whole Nations enter with each swelling Tyde, And Seas but join the Regions they divide; Earth's distant Ends our Glory shall behold, And the new World launch forth to seek the Old. Then Ships of uncouth Form shall stem the Tyde, And Feather'd People crowd my wealthy Side, And naked Youths and painted Chiefs admire Our Speech, our Colour, and our strange Attire! (11.397-406)

Gary echoes this mood of optimistic patriotism in Abram's Plains, one of the first English poems published in the New World welcomed by Pope. Gary is an historical as well as literary heir of Denham and Pope: the history related by Abram's Plains follows that of Cooper's

28 The Picturesque and the Sublime

Hill and Windsor-Forest. The peace anticipated by Pope had lasted for less than a generation, for after having lost so much territory with the Treaty of Utrecht, France had increased emigration and westward expansion to secure her North American claims. (Gary presents the English view that "threatning Gallia, with incroaching sway, / With frowning forts, dar'd bar th'Ohio's way," Abram's Plains, 11.284-5.) When the English tried to establish settlements in the disputed region, fighting broke out again. Abram's Plains remarks on these skirmishes only incidentally, as a prelude to the historic centrepiece of the poem - the battle of Wolfe and Montcalm. This centrepiece itself is presented not as a panoramic battle tableau but as an intimate moment: as with Benjamin West's contemporary painting "The Death of General Wolfe" (1771), we focus on the dying hero rather than the successful battle, which fades off into the margins. By emphasizing the cost of victory rather than the victory itself, Gary implies his distaste for warfare, and concentrates on the blessings of peace. Like Pope in Windsor-Forest, he repeatedly reminds us that the fertile landscape we see today was once a scene of slaughter. Thus when he prays: "O never more may hostile arms distain, / With human gore, the verdure of the plain!" (11.340-1), we are meant to see the clash of red against green, death against life. The lack of interest in military glory and emphasis on peace as the ideal state for both man and nature is reiterated towards the end of the poem when the Muse enters the citadel of Quebec, and Gary promises that "She comes no foe thy streets with blood to fill, / Her only weapon is a grey-goose quill" (11.458-9). And perhaps it even explains the curious closing lines of Abram's Plains, about fireflies with delusions of grandeur. Each time the heat-lightning flashes, "With brighter glow then shoot the mimic fires, / Each insect, Caesar like, to rival Jove aspires" (11.586-7). A delicate image to focus on as night falls, and one familiar enough from sultry Quebec summers, but the way the insects are presented, as miniature Caesars, has more in common with the Virgilian mock-heroic than with natural description. Gary's model here is probably the War of the Bees in book IV of The Georgics. And, like Virgil when he "compares small things with great," Gary intends for us to draw the analogy with human behaviour. The insects' intoxication with power goes against nature; their rivalry with the gods is at once grand and absurd. Thus they symbolize "Ambition" (the ambivalent nature of which is discussed by Gary earlier at lines 340-55) and, in a comic way, this conclusion reprises the poem's anti-war theme.26 The philosophical centre of Abram's Plains is a meditation on life and death which attempts to transcend local interests, culminating

29 Canadian Prospects

in a comparison of capital punishment to Roman Catholic celibacy as equivalent affronts to "great nature's law" (11.382-97). Gary's digression here is a counterpart to his earlier meditation on the variety of taste (11.162-95): in both cases, he counsels the naturalness of appetite. To be on the side of life, for Gary, is to honour the life of the body, and to question the tyranny of custom. There's also a propagandist motive here: it was obligatory in a poem treating of hostilities between France and England to assert that God was on the British side, and Gary found a novel way to do so. Like other good Tories, he subscribed to the view that England had conquered New France in order to spread true religion and political freedom. Abram's Plains echoes not only Pope's sentiments but also his language when the inhabitants of He D'Orleans are exhorted to Be thankful swains, Britannia's conqu'ring sword, Releas'd you from your ancient sov'reign lord, Beneath whose sway small tyrants held the rod, Each, in conceit, swell'd to some little god. Then the poor pittance of the scanty soil, Hard earn'd became the prowling tyrant's spoil. The tawdry lord lawless the lash proud wields, Lowly his back the peasant patient yields: Such scenes no more disgrace the yielding soil, Safe is the product of the peasant's toil Protecting laws alike to all extend, Not less the poor-man's than the rich-man's friend; Tenant and lord, noble and peasant, all, Within their influence undistinguish'd fall. Hence smiling peace and laughing plenty reign, And gay content, festive delights the plain. Grateful, ye peasants, own your mended state, And bless, beneath a GEORGE, your better fate. (11.434-51)

The last four lines recall Pope's praise of England under Queen Anne: Here Ceres' Gifts in waving Prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful Reaper's Hand, Rich Industry sits smiling on the Plains, And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns. (Windsor-Forest, 11.39-42)

As in Windsor-Forest, French tyranny is exaggerated in order to emphasize the benefits of English rule. Throughout the poem, we are

30 The Picturesque and the Sublime

made to compare "then" and "now/' "here" and "there," and to see in the contrast of past suffering with present prosperity the evolution of the country towards an ideal future. And, as in Cooper's Hill and Windsor-Forest, this vision is presented in heroic couplets whose very form creates unity by setting one thought, phrase, or image against another. Gary even does a plausible imitation of Pope's habitual chiasmus in the following lines, when he exhorts Canadians to: Bid tomahawks to ploughshares yield the sway, And skalping-knives to pruning hooks give way; In Circe's glass bid moderation reign, And moral virtues humanize the plain! (11.60-3)

This rhetorical pattern of opposition is foregrounded when the poet treats themes of harmony or balance (see also lines 572-9, for example). Again like Pope, Gary was writing after a long period of war and revolution: Abram's Plains dates from shortly after the Treaties of Paris and Versailles finalized America's independence from Britain. Thus he opens a poem set on the site where the British conquered the French by praising loyalists who chose to start over again in British North America rather than rebel against the mother country (11.6475). And a concluding image of the poem is the villa of Lord Dorchester, whose career epitomizes the British destiny in North America as Gary sees it, since he not only participated in the capture of Quebec in 1759, but also helped to repel the American invasion in 1775 and assisted in the evacuation of loyalists from New York in 1782-83-27 Gary's choice of Windsor-Forest as a literary model signals his commitment to Quebec not only as his home, but as the logical culmination of Pope's vision of England. For Pope, Albion is the modern Arcadia; for Gary, British North America represents the westward progress of civilization. This vision is by no means an original one: Sir William Vaughan's 1626 allegory about Newfoundland, The Golden Fleece, proclaims the colony to be ordained by "God ... for us Britaines."28 But what Gary does with this longstanding myth is refreshing: he enlists its resonances to emphasize the importance of building for the future rather than glamourizing the past, even the heroic past evoked by his poem's title. He honours history, and eschews nostalgia. Rejecting contemporary critical bias that epic is the highest form of poetry, he insists that warfare is bitterly wasteful and that man's purpose is to create, and procreate. Abram's Plains proclaims the necessity for a new vision in the new world. Perhaps this orientation towards the future was inevitable, given Gary's decision to emigrate. For as Harry Levin notes: "If we reject

31 Canadian Prospects the present, we must choose between an Arcadian retrospect and a Utopian prospect."29 Certainly the vision of the poem is idealistic; it is fair to say that it is generated by rather than actually being seen from the Plains of Abraham. Gary rarely pretends to survey the landscape as Denham does in Cooper's Hill. In fact, he opens the poem telling us that, far from scanning a panorama from an eminence, he likes to sit in the shade to "court the muse" (1.2). And this opening wonderfully conveys the richness Gary sees in his cultural situation: Thy Plains, O Abram! and thy pleasing views, Where, hid in shades, I sit and court the muse, Grateful I sing. For there, from care and noise, Oft have I fled to taste thy silent joys: There, lost in thought, my musing passion fed, Or held blest converse with the learned dead. Else, like a steed, unbroke to bit or rein, Courting fair health, I drive across the plain; The balmy breeze of Zephyrus inhale, Or bare my breast to the bleak northern gale (ll.i-io). This montage of allusions to The Seasons and Windsor-Forest emphasizes Gary's joy in his literary inheritance, the same joy acknowledged by his preface. But, at the same time, far from feeling exiled from the sources of inspiration, he is grateful for his situation in Quebec, where these sources include both the pastoral "Zephyrus" and the invigorating "northern gale." For Gary, the winds that blow across the Plains of Abraham represent a concordia discors of the imagination. Eight years after the publication of Abram's Plains in Quebec, J. Mackay published Quebec Hill; or, Canadian Scenery. A Poem. In Two Parts in London, England. We don't know much about Mackay except what his poem tells us - that "By far the greatest part of the Poem was written in Canada, where the Writer has spent a considerable portion of his time" - but it's quite possible that Quebec Hill was influenced by Abram's Plains.30 On the other hand, local poems in heroic couplets were popular at this time and their conventions well known, so Mackay's vision of the St Lawrence as the "Offspring of lakes that like to seas extend" (Quebec Hill: "Summer," 1.53), and his admiration of "the wealth its fruitful waves enclose" (1.135), mav owe nothing to Gary but rather derive from the same source in Pope's (and ultimately Denham's) Thames. Like Gary, Mackay follows the river eastward, but this is an obvious unifying pattern to derive from the Canadian

32 The Picturesque and the Sublime

landscape.31 And though Mackay too makes the death of General Wolfe the centrepiece of his poem, leading into a meditation like Gary's on the cruelty of war (Quebec Hill: "Summer," 11.177-98), this might seem inevitable to any Englishman writing a poem about Quebec in the eighteenth century. Both poets also focus on the He D'Orleans as exemplifying their view of Quebec. We are reminded of Gary's idealization of the place when Mackay exclaims: Enchanting prospect! fair, delightful isle, Where smiling plenty crowns the peasant's toil; Here, Autumn, in his best attire, appears, And purling streams are music to the ears; Here, the cuckoo his early visit pays, And tuneful nightingales resume their lays: How sweetly varied is the rural scene, Here spreads the lawn, there, bends the golden grain; Nigh each neat cot the well-stock'd garden lies; And waving orchards, not unfruitful, rise. Upon the stream quick beats the noisy mill, And well-fed cattle gambol on the hill; The feather'd coveys haunt each shady grove, Where, charm'd with Nature, I was wont to rove: The maple-trees their liquid treasure pour, And, by imparting, but increase their store; Behind, the oak his ample branches spreads, And stately cedars raise their lofty heads. (Quebec Hill: "Summer," 11.269-86)

As a new Eden, this paradise is characterized by both variety and abundance. Like Spenser's Garden of Adonis, it fuses spring (represented by the cuckoo, and the sugaring-off) and autumn ("golden grain" and "well-stock'd garden"). And the conventionally pastoral presence of the cuckoo and the alien nightingale would seem to imply that, like Gary (who populates the St Lawrence with "Naiades" and its banks with "Dryades"), Mackay wishes to endorse the continuity between the Old World and the New. But Mackay immediately undermines the idyllic view he has created: Yet as the landscape, thus, in part pourtray'd, Admits of light, it will admit of shade: Tho' gay the scene, with varied foliage shows,

33 Canadian Prospects And, view'd from far, in richer verdure glows: More near, is seen, the harvest-choaking tare, And pointed thistles on each hand appear; I see by orchards, crabs for apples borne, And greedy locusts blast the springing corn. Ye, who, thro' life, ambition, still enslave, With groundless hopes, and airy views deceive, Ye know how chang'd your prospects still appear, When you, like me, examine them more near. (11.287-98)

The "enchanting prospect" of this green and pleasant land turns out to be an illusion. The word "prospect," used so often to describe the landscape surveyed in topographical poetry, always has something of a double meaning, since what is "seen" often includes a vision of the country's future. In this manner space becomes time, and looking out becomes looking ahead. The OED gives many definitions for the word as used in the eighteenth century. Those of obvious relevance to landscape poetry include "an extensive or commanding sight or view; the view of the landscape afforded by any position," and "that which is looked at or seen from any place or point of view; a spectacle, a scene; the visible scene or landscape," as well as "a pictorial representation of a scene or the like; a view, a picture, or sketch." At the same time, the word "prospect" may mean "a mental view or survey," or "a scene presented to the mental view," such as those historical tableaux presented by Gary and Mackay. And finally, a "prospect" may consist in "a mental looking forward; consideration or knowledge of, or regard to something future." The quotation given in support of this final definition is from the Letter to Mrs. Thrale, in which Dr Johnson remarks "Our gay prospects have ... ended in melancholy retrospects."32 Gary uses the word "prospect" to mean "expectations," as Dr Johnson does, in suggesting that Benedict Arnold's failed invasion of Quebec embodies a general principle: The statesman thus builds high his golden hope, But finds his schemes end in an ax or rope. Thus too the merchant grasps his fancy'd plumb, But to a whereas lo! his prospects come. (Abram's Plains, 11.526-9)

But while Gary uses the word thus only in one specific context, in Quebec Hill Mackay habitually, even compulsively, sets up a visible

34 The Picturesque and the Sublime

prospect of attractive scenery only to counterbalance it with a mental prospect of misery or violence. First impressions of success give way to settled convictions of disaster; the double meaning of the word "prospect" generates and sustains the dialectic of the poem. This process of correcting the prospect starts at the beginning of Quebec Hill. Mackay opens with an epigraph from Horace, which Bentley translates as "I praise the lovely country's brooks, and its grove and moss grown rocks," but a few lines later the poem itself tells us that in this country, "Ev'ry grove a hidden foe conceals" ("Summer," 1.64). Similarly, lines 11-22 are conventionally picturesque in the way the "mingled sweets" and "varied verdure" of "the rural scene" make up a "pleasing whole," but the footnote to this descriptive passage counters such idealized generalizations with disillusioned facts: "The country around Quebec abounds with prospects in a high degree delightful to such as have a relish for romantic scenery; but the soil is, in general, poor, and unproductive of corn." Mackay not only recommends this romantic scenery to the reader in his preface, he also confesses that a traveller's descriptions of North America enchanted him as a child, and lured him there. "Now to these days faint memory refers, / As realiz'd th' ideal scene appears" (11.29-30). But the scene that is realized is rather different from the ideal he anticipated, and now he can't wait to go home because The novelty of lonely wilds and woods, And desart hills, and wide-expanding floods, Full soon subsides: and then we long again, For gayer scenes, the smiling haunts of men. ("Winter," 11.209-12)

Oliver Goldsmith's restless speaker has a similar experience in The Traveller (1764), confessing himself "Impell'd, with steps unceasing, to pursue / Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view" (11.25-6).33 The poem, subtitled A Prospect of Society, places this figure on an Alpine ridge where he can survey the surrounding countries and consider what they have to offer. Though no country satisfies him, the Traveller prefers England's climate because "Creation's mildest charms are there combin'd / Extremes are only in the master's mind" (11.323-34). Mackay's speaker also prefers the climate and manners of his "Dear isle! where temp'rate years their empire hold, / Free from extremes of ardent heat or cold" (Quebec Hill: "Winter," 11.187-8). The exaggerated depiction of Canadian weather which supports Mackay's preference also shows the influence of The Seasons, in which extremes of climate are linked to exotic locales and contrasted

35 Canadian Prospects

with the more moderate weather of England. For example, "Summer" spans one day in the English countryside during which the poet incites his "Fancy" to "view the wonders of the torrid Zone: / Climes unrelenting! with whose Rage compar'd, / Yon Blaze is feeble, and yon Skies are cool" (11.629-34). Similarly, after surveying the British scene in "Winter," Thomson acknowledges "Our infant Winter sinks, / Divested of his Grandeur, should our Eye / Astonish'd shoot into the Frigid Zone" (11.794-6), and imagines the terrors of faraway places like Russia, Lapland and Greenland. Passages such as these reveal the influence of Lord Shaftesbury's famous work, The Moralists (1709), in which Theocles converts Philocles to the worship of nature by making his imagination travel "from the Frigid to the Torrid zone."34 Mackay too is mostly interested in the sublime seasons of winter and summer, but he isn't committed, like Shaftesbury and Thomson, to redeeming the fierce climates of the earth by praising their contribution to nature's glory. The bipartite organization of Quebec Hill emphasizes not Shaftesburian rapture, but disappointment. Not only is each pleasant prospect in the "Summer" section immediately undermined by a second view, but the second part of the poem, "Winter," undermines the whole first part. One might say that for Mackay, summer is an illusion that seduces the viewer from a distance, while winter is the unfortunate reality he discovers later. The Canadian winter confirms Mackay's worst fears about the deceptiveness of appearances and the inevitable frustration of human effort. He is particularly shocked at the way the rivers freeze and so many months must pass "Ere drooping Commerce rears her languid head" ("Winter," 1.140). By contrast, although Gary too deplores the fact that "For long, too long, here dreary winter reigns, / And bars the liquid way with icy chains" (Abram's Plains, 11.142-3), he finds the weather to provide "Delightful change!" (1.502) in diverse landscapes and occupations. To give a fuller picture of life in the new colony, he even concludes his summertime poem with a survey of winter pleasures such as sledding, skating and snowshoeing. Indeed, this last activity is presented as evidence of the adventurous pleasure this weather provides: The trav'ller dauntless the snows depths disdains, He stalks secure o'er hills, o'er vales and plains; On the spread racket, whilst he safely strides, Tales of Europeans lost in snow derides. Here, (blush ye London fops embox'd in chair, Who fear, tho' mild your clime, to face the air)

36 The Picturesque and the Sublime Scorning to shrink at every breeze that blows, Unaw'd, the fair brave frosts and driving snows. (Abram's Plains, 11.560-7)

Mackay, on the other hand, wwblushingly relates one of those tales of lost Europeans (Quebec Hill: "Winter," 11.109-24). He starts out blaming the traveller for being "heedless" of his "scanty vestments" and "careless" of where he wanders during a snowstorm, implying that anyone so ignorant of Canadian weather deserves his fate. But he is mostly interested in the scientific phenomenon of freezing to death; we're even given a description of the final indignity: the "frozen corse, / That lies, perhaps, unheeded in the snows, / Till weeping thaws the hidden spot disclose" (11.122-4). The literary model for the episode is again The Seasons: in "Winter," Thomson tells the story of a poor "Swain" who, confused by a heavy snowfall, gets lost in his own fields and "Lays him along the Snows, a stiffen'd Corse, / Stretch'd out, and bleaching in the northern Blast" (11.320-1). In Thomson, however, the sensationalism of the man's death is presented in conjunction with a sentimental scene of his wife and children at home, waiting hopefully for his return, and is followed by an appeal for compassion. The lesson we are to learn is "Always be aware of the sufferings of others." Mackay changes the moral to "Don't go walking in snowstorms because Nature is out to get you."35 The dialectic in Quebec Hill between visible and hidden prospects (or summer and winter) can also be seen as between soft and hard pastoral, terms suggested by Paul Alpers to identify two opposing but traditional view of nature. The first gives us idyllic visions of shepherds frolicking in a golden age; the second, harsh weather and primitive peoples. "Soft" pastoral is generally considered escapist, while "hard" pastoral is seen as realistic. But as Alpers goes on to note: "The soft and hard views of pastoral, antithetical though they are, have one thing in common. Neither takes pastoral nature seriously as a home for the human spirit. If in the soft view the true native of Arcadia is a simple swain (with the emphasis on simple), in the hard view the characteristic pastoral figure is a savage."36 Perhaps this is why Mackay's colony, populated by French-Canadian "swains" and Indian "savages," is never taken seriously by the poet as a place his spirit might find comfort. Unlike Cary, he has been unable to see the prospect before him in terms of its natural and historical context; literary sterotypes intervene. Nonetheless, it is clear that the clash of extremes in Mackay's view of Canada is an exaggerated version of how he sees life in general: "In ev'ry region habitable made / Are local comforts still commix'd

37 Canadian Prospects

with shade" ("Winter," 11.217-18). So although he welcomes the chance to return to temperate England, he knows that he won't really be happy there either. He has the authority of Goldsmith's Traveller (who sighs "Vain, very vain, my weary search to find / That bliss which only centers in the mind," 11.423-4), for his closing suggestion that we should "invoke our higher hopes to rise, / Beyond the world, and centre in the skies" (11.229-30). But for Gary, who eagerly embraces the opportunity to start over, man's best prospects reside in the here and now, and "that bliss which only centers in the mind" may best be discovered by opening oneself up to the wonder and variety of life in a new land. The contrasting visions of these two poets, while illustrating how literary conventions can both shape one's vision and, at the same time, provide the terms by which that vision can be presented, also remind us that literature is irreducible to formal considerations of genre and intertextuality. The author himself, in all his idiosyncratic particularity, still refuses to go away.

"After the Beauty of Terror the Beauty of Peace": Notes on the Canadian Sublime

D.M.R. Bentley remarks of Abram's Plains that it "almost goes without saying that Gary's repeated descriptions of the civilized state of Canadian nature and society, like those in the Canadian Goldsmith's Rising Village, can be read as responses to the gloomy prognostications in The Deserted Village."1 In The Traveller, Goldsmith had deplored the greed of English landlords whose tenants, evicted from their farms, were forced to "traverse climes beyond the western main" (1.410) to build a new life.2 His depiction of North American scenery as unrelievedly hostile is calculated to appeal to the sentiments of the reader by increasing the pathos of the emigrant's situation. Thus the Traveller imagines: Even now, perhaps, as there some pilgrim strays Through tangled forests, and through dangerous ways; Where beasts with man divided empire claim, And the brown Indian marks with murderous aim; There, while above the giddy tempest flies, And all around distressful yells arise, The pensive exile, bending with his woe, To stop too fearful, and too faint to go, Casts a long look where England's glories shine, And bids his bosom sympathize with mine. (11.413-22)

The Deserted Village, focusing specifically rather than incidentally on the depopulation of rural England, is both more sentimental and

39 Notes on the Canadian Sublime

more melodramatic than The Traveller. In this poem the exile has no time to bemoan his lot and be "pensive," since he inhabits a place Where at each step the stranger fears to wake The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake; Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey, And savage men more murderous still than they. (11.353-6)3

As we have seen, Mackay too was influenced by Goldsmith. Indeed, he opens his account of the landscape around Quebec citing exactly those details given special emphasis in The Deserted Village: "rattling snakes" and "fiery tygers" (Quebec Hill: "Summer," 11.6578).4 He adds "dread diseases" which "rise from foetid fens" (1.87) to this list, as a prelude to the crowning horror of Niagara Falls, whose waters are so turbulent that "gasping fishes," "savage beasts," and "ev'n birds partake their fate" of drowning in this "chaos" (11-93116). For Mackay, the great cataract, already a touchstone of natureworship in travellers' descriptions of the period, is an object of relentless horror.5 For many years English poetry had presented waterfalls as awesome and indescribable. As early as 1704, John Dennis, in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, includes "torrents" in a list of poetic subjects capable of arousing the passions of admiration and terror. In a series of critical books written between 1696 and 1717, Dennis argues that our highest passions are excited not by direct perception but by prolonged meditation. Terror and admiration are the most powerful of these higher or "enthusiastic" passions, the others being horror, joy, sadness, and desire.6 Enthusiastic passions persuade us of divine presence by impressing upon us both our own vulnerability and the unknowable power of the world - an experience which he calls, in accordance with Longinus, "the sublime." Dennis frequently quotes precepts and examples from Longinus to support his view that "enthusiastic terror contributes extremely to the sublime, and ... it is most produced by religious ideas.."7 And indeed, throughout his essay we can hear echoes of the classical author, who declared: the whole world is not wide enough for the soaring range of human thought, but man's mind often overleaps the very bounds of space ... this is why nature prompts us to admire, not the clearness and usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean; not to turn our wandering eyes from the heavenly fires, though often darkened, to the little flame kindled by human hands, however pure and steady

4O The Picturesque and the Sublime its light; not to think that tiny lamp more wondrous than the caverns of Aetna, from whose raging depths are hurled up stones and whole masses of rock, and torrents sometimes come pouring from earth's centre of pure and living fire ... When a writer uses any other resource he shows himself to be a man; but the Sublime lifts him near to the great spirit of the Deity.8

Longinus's fragmentary study, Peri Hypsous, examines those occasions when both writer and reader (or speaker and listener) are transported by great subjects, and finds that the eloquence that is elicited from the one, and the awe from the other, are both divinely given. Because it is principally concerned with verbal style (Longinus declares that "the Sublime ... consists in a certain loftiness and excellence of language"9), most early translations, like John Hall's 1622 On the Height of Eloquence, presented the work straightforwardly as a manual of rhetoric. It was not until Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux called it Traite du Sublime in 1674 that the implications of Longinus's study for an understanding of literary response were recognized; critics like Dennis then developed these implications into a more comprehensive theory of the sublime.10 Since Dennis, the rhetorical sublime has mostly been seen as the decorous expression of that sublimity inherent in nature; experiences incommensurate with ordinary understanding find their proper expression in a poetry which transgresses ordinary linguistic form. A sublime style at once imitates for the writer and arouses in the reader sublime experience. Or, as John Baillie put it in his essay "On the Sublime" (1747), "the Sublime in writing is not more than a description of the Sublime in Nature, and as it were painting to the imagination what Nature herself offers to the Senses."™ Language therefore serves a mediating function: it attempts to name and contain the sublime, to make sense of it. For Dennis, this is the highest calling of poetry and it is a religious calling. Fifty years after Dennis, the young Edmund Burke wrote An Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Burke too holds that "terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime."12 But he takes Dennis's exploration of the phenomenology of aesthetic experiences in a secular direction, emphasizing psychology rather than metaphysics. He grounds his study on Dennis's reluctant concession that, although true sublimity is always religious, sometimes we may recognize it in non-religious phenomena because of "the care, which nature has inrooted in all, of their own preservation."13 Burke elaborates this idea further:

41 Notes on the Canadian Sublime if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts ... of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility [sic] tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime.14

In other words, the imagination of disaster, if not followed by genuine danger to one's person, takes one out of oneself and thereby "clears the parts." Burke's theory of the sublime closely resembles Aristotle's theory of catharsis: it is homeopathic. Burke's Enquiry attempted to systematize the ferment of ideas about sublimity pervading eighteenth-century culture. As with the picturesque, so with the sublime: aesthetic theory followed artistic practice. For example, James Thomson's apostrophe, "Hail, wintry horrors," in "Winter" (1726) not only predates Burke but was far more influential in popularizing the new conception of terror as a salutary experience. But Thomson, in his turn, was influenced by the increasing interest in and fashion for delightful terror. As Samuel H. Monk notes, over the next twenty years as the cult of the sublime spread, "Thomson filled each successive edition of The Seasons with increasingly long passages which aimed at evoking terror before the vast and destructive forces of nature."15 By 1771, when James Beattie published the first part of The Minstrel, such passages were becoming literary cliches. Stanza ten of this poem alludes to both The Seasons and A Philosophical Enquiry in its description of sublime phenomenology: Hail, awful scenes, that calm the troubled breast And woo the weary to profound repose; Can passion's wildest uproar lay to rest, And whisper comfort to the man of woes.16

One might well then expect Mackay's revelation at Niagara of a power beyond his control to "calm" his "troubled breast" by bringing him in touch with the mystery of things which his everyday mind rejects, and thereby transporting him beyond anxiety into exaltation. However, he describes something closer to revulsion than to transcendence: looking at Niagara Falls does not lift him out of himself but plunges him into the depths of confusion. Mackay experiences the cataract not as proof of a divine order beyond human

42 The Picturesque and the Sublime

understanding but as an image of primal chaos. As evidence of the suspension of natural law at Niagara he notes that, after the water pours down, "the rising mist obscures the face of day" (Quebec Hill: "Summer," 1.105). He wants things to stay in place - what goes down should not come back up - and nothing should be allowed to cloud his vision by diminishing the sun's clarity.17 But the experience of the sublime, typically, is represented as a moment of blurred vision. Martin Price notes of eighteenth-century sublime poetry that it demonstrates "a surpassing of conventions or reasonable limits, an attempt to come to terms with the unimaginable. The moment of the sublime was a transport of spirit, and at such a moment the visible object was eclipsed or dissolved. The dissolution of the image threw the mind back on itself; the failure of the image was expressed in a figure which played upon words that no longer sufficed."18 Price's analysis here draws heavily on Kant's treatment of the sublime in his Critique of Judgement (1790), a work that was to have a profound effect on the development of Romantic poetry. Like Burke, Kant saw beauty and sublimity as contrary aesthetic categories. In this formulation, beauty results from one's recognition of the harmonious relationship of parts in the object perceived; sublimity, by contrast, from the absence of any such recognition of unity. It leads to a breakdown not only of all aesthetic conventions but of all logical categories. "Unlike the beautiful, the sublime is cognate with the experiential structure of alienation ... Alienation also presupposes the bathetic collapse of the signifying relations which make a social order."19 This is what happens to Mackay. He experiences the dissolution of vision and its corollary loss of meaning, both of which contribute to the sublime moment but neither of which constitute its full meaning. But he cannot go beyond this collapse of "signifying relations" to the border of consciousness - to go sub lime - where he might recognize this alienation as the prelude to imaginative freedom.20 Nor does it inspire him to reconnect freshly to the world. But as Kant reminds us, the sublime moment, in revealing the inadequacy of our knowledge of the world, inspires us to make new meanings and thereby recover our sense of self. Shortly after the turn of the century, gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe made a distinction between terror and horror that clarifies Mackay's reaction to Niagara Falls. Radcliffe contends that: "Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and

43 Notes on the Canadian Sublime

nearly annihilates them."21 She says this insight originates with Burke, who describes horror as that state when "the mind is so filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it," although he himself does not differentiate this state from terror. But in his unfinished essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful," Wordsworth makes it clear that such a feeling of being overwhelmed may be either transitional (leading to the "tranquility tinged with terror" that constitutes the Burkean sublime) or terminal (Radcliffe's "horror") depending upon whether or not one is convinced of personal danger. Following Burke closely, Wordsworth says the sublime acts by producing a humiliation or prostration of the mind before some external agency which it presumes not to make an effort to participate, but is absorbed in the contemplation of the might in the external power, &, as far as it has any consciousness of itself, its grandeur subsists in the naked fact of being conscious of external Power at once awful & immeasurable; so that, in both cases, the head & the front of the sensation is intense unity. But if that Power which is exalted above our sympathy impresses the mind with personal fear, so as the sensation becomes more lively than the impression or thought of the exciting cause, then self-consideration & all its accompanying littleness takes place of the sublime, & wholly excludes it.22

Like Dennis and Burke, he grounds the possibility of transcendence in the release from conviction of real danger to the self. But like Radcliffe, he recognizes that if this release doesn't come quickly, the mind may simply be suspended at the point of horror, and no catharsis will take place. The defamiliarizing of the world intrinsic to sublime experience can go too far, and the imagination be rendered unable to accommodate or make meaningful this confrontation with the unknown. Instead of momentary alienation followed by a heightened sense of reality, one experiences something like dementia. Moreover, Wordsworth suggests that typical phenomena which might afflict the spirit in this way include "a precipice, a conflagration, a torrent, or a shipwreck."23 Clearly, this is what happens to Mackay observing Niagara. The sublime eludes him because he is too frightened to relinquish what Wordsworth calls "self-consideration." Ultimately, believing as he does that "ev'ry grove a hidden foe conceals" (Quebec Hill: "Summer," 1.64), Mackay's rejection of Niagara is a synecdoche for his response to Canada as a whole. Here again, Abram's Plains counterpoints Quebec Hill, for Cary, who embraces Canada as his home, also celebrates Niagara Falls:

44 The Picturesque and the Sublime The streams thence rushing with tremendous roar, Down thy dread fall, Niagara, prone pour; Back foaming, in thick hoary mists, they bound, The thund'ring noise deafens the country round, Whilst echo, from her caves, redoubling sends the sound. Twixt awe and pleasure, rapt in wild suspense, Giddy, the gazer yields up ev'ry sense. So have I felt when Handel's heavenly strains, Choral, announce the great Messiah reigns: Caught up by sound, I leave my earthly part, And into something more than mortal start. (Abram's Plains, 11.29-39)

This ecstatic scene borrows heavily from Thomson's description of a cataract in "Summer" (11.590-8). But the association of the thundering waterfall with religious music is Gary's own - as is the playful "redoubling" of the rhyme scheme, and the addition of an extra foot to draw out the measure in line 33. By evoking Handel's Messiah, Gary makes the sublime association between nature and God without stating directly that the waterfall is a symbol of divinity. He also lessens the alienation associated with sublimity. Burke had noted in passing that: "The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and aweful sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music."24 But in comparing his rapture at Niagara to that inspired by hearing sacred harmonies Gary transforms the sublime (with its intimation of chaos) into the beautiful (with its connotation of order), and restores the spiritual dimension to a nature Burke had tried to view materialistically. For Gary, as later for Schiller, "Nature has ... employed a sensuous means of teaching us that we are more than merely sensuous."25 It is important to note at this point that Abram's Plains is dated 1789, ten years before the two-part Prelude. Thus Gary's conversion of the terrifying into the transcendent precedes rather than follows Wordsworth, though the existence of such a pattern in Canadian poetry - when it is acknowledged at all - is usually attributed to Wordsworth's influence. Gary's presentation of the observer caught up "twixt awe and pleasure" (Abram's Plains, 11.34-5) is more typical of the Canadian sublime than is Mackay's vision of being "appalled" by Niagara's "dreadful grandeur" (Quebec Hill: "Summer," 1.96). Many writers, particularly early ones, blend the sublime and picturesque in Gary's manner, emphasizing the landscape's irregular grandeur rather than its solitude, power, or ominousness. But even those who elicit more

45 Notes on the Canadian Sublime

terror from the wilderness than does Gary tend to discover, like Duncan Campbell Scott in "At Gull Lake," that the sublime is a cathartic experience, providing "after the beauty of terror the beauty of peace." And this view of nature as "at once frightening and fascinating: frightening because of its capacity to destroy, fascinating because of the intensity of its challenge" has been called "the distinctive vision of Canadian art."26 The resurgence of interest in sublime theory during the last twenty years demonstrates not only its profound importance in eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry, but its continuing influence on the way we think and write about nature, the supernatural, subjectobject relations, and so on, today. Indeed, Jean-Francois Lyotard has declared that "the sublime is perhaps the only mode of artistic sensibility to characterize the modern."27 Nonetheless, criticism in this country has, until recently, ignored sublimity as both subject and style in English Canadian poetry. There has been a consensus that our poets demonstrate "terror" in their encounters with the wilderness, but little awareness of the prestige of terror as an aesthetic category during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the contrary, terror has been dismissed as a negative response, and associated with colonial timidity, or post-colonial neurosis, as though it were expressive of a uniquely local pathology. Moreover, critics unfamiliar with sublime theory may not recognize that fear of the unknown may be transitional, and the first stage in an imaginative ascent. In such cases fear contributes greatly to one's spiritual and emotional development and may be seen as an ontological imperative. Not to fear what ought to be feared would be an inhibiting, even destructive response. An exception to the historical lack of interest in, or recognition of, the sublime in our literature, was the 1972 statement by Dennis Lee that "Canadian literature has long included an experience which the theologians call mysterium tremendum - the encounter with holy otherness, most commonly approached here through encounter with the land - to which the appropriate response is awe and terror. It is a very different thing from alienation."28 Perhaps we may date the resurgence of interest in sublime theory from this tantalizing remark. But more typical was the conviction that our writers demonstrate a negative response to nature, a conviction originating with Northrop Frye and linked to his influential theory of the "garrison mentality." Frye first arrived at a definition of the garrison mentality in his 1965 "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada", though the components of this formulation had all been articulated in earlier essays about Canadian culture and society. He argues that such a mentality

46 The Picturesque and the Sublime

is "bound to develop [in] small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological 'frontier/ separated from one another and from their American cultural sources ... confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting."29 This definition shares with most of Frye's commentary about the Canadian landscape words like "huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable": he frequently depicts nature in this country as monstrous, and then attributes this evaluation to others. But it's hard to imagine that early settlers in Nova Scotia, Niagara-on-the-Lake, or Montreal Island saw the verdant scenery around them this way; their own writings do not share Frye's vocabulary, or his values. As Victor G. Hopwood remarks: "Later social changes may have led many Canadians, especially in central towns, to see the wilderness as inimical to civilized humanity, but the explorers from Radisson to Hind saw it generally as welcoming, as did most of the immigrant settlers."30 Similarly Carl F. Klinck notes that the theme of "exile or homesickness for the Old Land was not as common in Canadian colonial writing as one has been taught to believe."31 In settlement literature, attitudes towards the new land were varied, and sometimes contradictory: as summarized by Susan Joan Wood they include "an insistence on the uplifting, inspiring effect of 'sublime' rugged scenery ... a desire for the cultivated, garden-like nature of the old world ... acknowledgement of the physical hardships and labour involved in settlement; ... an undercurrent of unease, even fear, of a nature not like 'home'."32 That the apprehension of sublimity is enhanced by the recognition of strangeness is a truism of sublime theory; unfamiliarity can make a landscape at once attractive and disturbing. In Canada, the shock of the new was both sought after and, at the same time, resented. It could hardly be otherwise. What should not be overlooked is that many newcomers, like the refugees from the Highland Clearances described by Alexander McLachlan in The Emigrant (1861), were fleeing poverty and persecution. Though they missed home, home had not been good to them. They were not trying to recreate exactly what they had left behind; they were trying to make something better. And they recognized that it would take hard work. But to experience "the seasons' difference" as "the penalty of Adam," as did Duke Senior in the Forest of Arden, was also to recognize that the winter wind is "not so unkind / As man's ingratitude" (As You Like It, II.i-5-6; II.vii.i75-6).33 McLachlan deliberately evokes Amiens' song when he has his minstrel sing, upon arrival in the bush:

47 Notes on the Canadian Sublime O rather would I pursue The wolf and the grisly bear, Than toil for the thankless few In those seething pits of care; Here Winter's breath is rude, And his fingers cold and wan, But what is his wildest mood To the tyranny of man? To the trackless forest wild, To the loneliest abode, Oh! The heart is reconciled, That has felt oppression's load; The desert place is bright, The wilderness is fair, If Hope but shed her light, If Freedom be but there. (III.2.25-4O)34

For such settlers Canada - including its wolves, bears and winter represented not a wilderness of horrors but a space of opportunity. Even the author of the other poem entitled The Emigrant, Standish O'Grady, concedes that In this drear soil, what thought its deserts vast, Be chill as death, and bleak the wintry blast; Its humble poor more happiness can share, 'Mong scenes like these than in the great man's glare. (H.l8l9-22)35

And this despite the fact that his poem is "almost the only negative estimate of Canada offered by a Canadian verse writer" between 1830 and i850.36 Indeed, the more formidable the natural obstacles might seem, the more heroic was the enterprise of clearing a space for habitation. Thus the first tree McLachlan's crew cuts down is described in a long heroic epithet as a "Caesar/' and the loggers as "patriots" who, bathing in sweat rather than blood, will build a better world by felling the noble giant (IV.y.iff). Similarly Isabella Valancy Crawford's hero Max exults over his "first-slain" tree: "Have I slain a King?" (Malcolm's Katie, Part II, 11.149-64).37 In both poems trees are personified as worthy adversaries; they are respected because of the immense labour they extract from human beings.

48 The Picturesque and the Sublime

This is not a negative attitude. In neither poem is nature shunned as something horrible, nor is it dismissed simply as brute matter. Furthermore, early Canadian poets tend to depict those who live in the wilderness as nature-worshippers. McLachlan's emigrants speak for most when they declare that ... there is a nameless tie, A strange mysterious sympathy, Between us and material things, Which into close communion brings Our spirits with the unseen power, Which looks from every tree and flower (1.4.17-22)

So widespread was this response that Mary Lu MacDonald's survey of pre-Confederation periodical literature concludes that whether they were French or English, whether they were born in Canada or elsewhere, most Canadian writers before 1850 both found the Canadas to be beautiful and accepted the convention of the sublime as the basis for much of their description of the natural world. It is not a question of "realism" as opposed to "romanticism" in descriptive writing. A craggy summit, a tumbling cascade, the view from a vantage point, could each be described either "realistically" or "romantically" according to variations in individual writer's responses, without affecting in any way the designation of the object as sublimely beautiful. "Sublime" as an adjective, noun, or adverb was the most frequently used word in the descriptive vocabulary of the period.38

Certainly the word occurs frequently in the earliest novel written in English Canada, The History of Emily Montague (1769), in which the characters compose enthusiastic letters about the landscape. The first letter the romantic lead, Edward Rivers, sends home from Canada notes that: "The country is a very fine one: you see here not only the beautiful which it has in common with Europe, but the great sublime to an amazing degree."39 Similarly the coquettish Arabella Fermor's first letter exclaims that "bold, picturesque, romantic, nature reigns here in all her wanton luxuriance, adorned by a thousand wild graces which mock the cultivated beauties of Europe" (29). Even Arabella's father William, an altogether less passionate character, concurs with their spontaneous judgements; after spending three seasons (including winter) in Quebec he too contends: Sublimity is the characteristic of this western world; the loftiness of the mountains, the grandeur of the lakes and rivers, the majesty of the rocks shaded with a picturesque variety of beautiful trees and shrubs, and

49 Notes on the Canadian Sublime crowned with the noblest of the offspring of the forest, which forms the banks of the latter, are as much beyond the power of fancy as that of description: a landscape-painter might here expand his imagination, and find ideas which he will seek in vain in our comparatively little world (234-5).

And finally, the author of The History of Emily Montague, Frances Brooke, echoes both father and daughter in her own letter of 21 May 1771, when she declares: "There is no description [in the book] above nature. The lovely luxuriance the wild magnificence of Canada, woud [sic] do honor to the finest genius on earth either in landscape poetry or painting: I never think of the scenes there without feeling my imagination inflamd [sic]."40 An acquaintance of Dr Johnson and a figure in the London salons of her day, Frances Brooke was more inclined than most of her successors to adhere to the language and descriptive practices of eighteenth-century aesthetics in her encounters with the Canadian landscape. So Rivers and his friends use aesthetic terminology very precisely. By comparison, many of their real-life contemporaries and successors mix up beautiful, sublime and picturesque rather freely (as is suggested by Mary Lu MacDonald's summary, above, of the popular verdict on the scenery as "sublimely beautiful"). But even those less conversant with critical controversies demonstrate attitudes to nature infused with sublime theory.41 Delight in Canada's "wild magnificence" and belief that its landscape should provide a wonderful inspiration for painting and poetry both prevailed well into the Confederation period. For example, in his introduction to the first anthology of Canadian poetry, Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), E.H. Dewart argues that, "though poor in historic interest," Canada provides ample inspiration for its poets in its scenery. "In our grand and gloomy forests in our brilliant skies and varied seasons - in our magnificent lakes and rivers - in our hoary mountains and fruitful valleys, external Nature unveils her most majestic forms to exalt and inspire the truly poetic soul"42. The sublime legacy is still strong in later critics like W.D. Lighthall, the subtitle of whose anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, The Settlements and Cities of Canada (1889), gives the land parity with civilization in the expression of national character. Perhaps some trace of this tradition may even be found in the preference of modern anthologists such as Ralph Gustafson for work which expresses the quality of the "north," as expressed in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse.43

50 The Picturesque and the Sublime

In contrast to this view that Canadian landscape provides a positive inspiration for art, Frye declares that this is a country "in which nature makes a direct impression on the artist's mind, an impression of its primeval lawlessness and moral nihilism, its indifference to the supreme value placed on life within human society, its faceless, mindless unconsciousness, which fosters life without benevolence and destroys it without malice."44 Indeed, he is so convinced that his evaluation is accurate that he discounts those to whom nature does not seem nihilistic as insincere or naive. For example, in "Haunted by a Lack of Ghosts," he argues that any early Canadian poetry which doesn't express a "sense of loneliness or alienation" is probably attempting to "suppress, or failing that to outshout" such a sense.45 This is a neat trick: first accuse Canadian writers of having a complex, and then accuse those who don't show signs of such a complex of being repressed! As Diane Bessai notes: "Such remarks are not only conveniently selective, but anachronistic as well - a modern interpretation of the colonial sensibility, a modern mistrust of nineteenth-century social optimism."46 Nonetheless, Frye's influence on the development of Canadian literary criticism was extraordinary; the general public joined the critical establishment in accepting his assessment that "Nature is consistently sinister and menacing in Canadian poetry."47 Perhaps, as Bessai suggests, his own role as "internal colonizer" is the best proof of Frye's thesis that our imagination is colonial - and that colonialism is an inhibiting rather than enabling condition!48 At any rate, the resistance Bessai offers to his comprehensive generalizations is rare; too often even critics who question the accuracy of Frye's pronouncements about Canadian culture don't follow through on the implications of their own enquiries. For example, John Moss initially condemns the idea of a "garrison mentality" as a "facile epithet," but goes on to endorse the term by making it stand for the first of four "metamorphic stages" of Canadian literature whose "common characteristics ... are clustered around the endemic concept of exile." In other words, he never questions the accuracy of Frye's metaphor; he simply extends its range.49 D.G. Jones, on the other hand, claims to be simply "extending" Frye's metaphor when he is actually disproving it by arguing that the rejection of nature Frye sees as particular to garrison culture is a theme common to all Western literatures. Jones writes: The division between culture and nature dramatized in some of the literature goes far beyond any purely Canadian colonialism; it can only be considered to reflect an antagonism towards nature characteristic of western

5i Notes on the Canadian Sublime culture generally. It will not disappear with the disappearance of the colonial mentality in Canada ... In the name of various spiritual or intellectual ideals [western man] has embarked on a kind of holy war against the material world, the world of the flesh and the devil ... It is in this perspective that the hostile wilderness becomes, not just a Canadian wilderness but the whole natural universe.50

Indebted as he is to Frye for his methodology as an archetypal critic, Jones is reluctant to acknowledge that he is rejecting his mentor's premise that Canadian literature cannot be evaluated according to ordinary critical standards, nor in the larger context of western culture. But his very thesis - that Adam is in exile in Canada, and that the New World experience duplicates that of the Old Testament requires him to invoke tradition. Unfortunately, in order to support this thesis he too takes to selective quotation and ignores contradictory evidence. For example, he sees in the protagonist of Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House, Mrs Bentley, "the terror in regard to nature which Northrop Frye sensed in [Canadian] poetry," and quotes the following passage as evidence: The wilderness here makes us uneasy. I felt it first the night I walked alone along the river bank - a queer sense of something cold and fearful, something inanimate, yet aware of us. A Main Street is such a self-sufficient little pocket of existence, so smug, compact, that here we feel abashed somehow before the hills, their passiveness, the unheeding way they sleep. We climb them, but they withstand us, remain as serene and unrevealed as ever. The river slips past, unperturbed by our coming and going, stealthily confident. We shrink from our insignificance. The stillness and solitude - we think a force or a presence into it - even a hostile presence, deliberate, aligned against us - for we dare not admit an indifferent wilderness, where we may have no meaning at all.51

But first of all, what kind of normative voice can Mrs Bentley be? The whole novel is a tour de force establishing her unreliability as an interpreter of the world. We know she is a desperately unhappy and self-deluding woman, one whose garden will not grow. It is revealing, surely, that Jones ignores this characterization, taking her words out of context to support what Frye says about how Canadians in general experience nature. But even if we take her words at face value they do not provide confirmation of Frye's thesis, for Mrs Bentley notes that "we think a force or presence" into nature only because we are unable to "admit an indifferent wilderness." Here is the real link between the fictional character and the critic: like Mrs Bentley, Frye and his followers are

52 The Picturesque and the Sublime

aggrieved at nature's indifference to humanity; they too translate indifference into hostility, and experience nature's otherness as an insult. But whereas Mrs Bentley recognizes the lack of "daring" of this point of view, Frye consistently defends it as fundamental to human survival. For him this is the truth about how mind experiences world, and not one of many possible responses to nature. For example, in his 1977 address to UNESCO, "Culture as Interpenetration," Frye calls Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow "One of the most remarkable works of fiction in our time" before summarizing its theme, approvingly, as "man cannot endure the thought of an environment that was not made primarily for his benefit, or, at any rate, made without reference to his own need to see order in it." He ascribes to Pynchon the belief that "to live without the sense of a need for order ... requires an inhuman detachment that is not possible nor perhaps desirable."52 Frye also attributes this point of view to Canadian writers. His most famous and influential statement in this regard is his observation in the "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada" that he has "long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature ... It is not a terror of the dangers or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror of the soul at something that these things manifest. The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems the unanswerable denial of those values."53 We can hear an echo of Frye in Marcia B. Kline's statement that "Canadians ... exhibit a 'terror of the soul' at the utter indifference of Nature to the values and efforts of puny men ... In their work, this terror manifests itself in the fear - or even the conviction - that the geographic realities of the New World mountains and forests are not symbols of that metaphor for moral goodness, Nature, but symbols instead of Chaos and Indifference."54 In her eagerness to follow Frye, she disregards all literary responses to nature which are not "negative," and wherever she does discover evidence of terror discounts the possibility that such terror might be an appropriate response to the mysteries of nature. Like Frye, she not only attributes hostility to nature but sees it (despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, even in "New World mountains and forests") as unaffected by humanity. She does not consider the possibility that the landscape is seen as "other" because it is other! Nor can.she imagine that recognizing nature as other can elicit any feelings but fear and loathing. But, as we have seen, in the sublime tradition the partner of fear is admiration. To return to the example with which we first began, visitors came to Niagara Falls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

53 Notes on the Canadian Sublime

hoping to be thrillingly terrified; they were prepared before they even set foot on this continent to experience things in a particular way. Some were disappointed, because nothing could live up to their expectations, but most found the falls satisfyingly sublime. Indeed, as late as 1853, Susanna Moodie declared in Life in the Clearings versus the Bush that all her life, "a true daughter of romance, I could not banish from my mind the glorious ideal I had formed of this wonder of the world; but still continued to speculate about the mighty cataract, that sublime 'thunder of waters/ whose very name from childhood had been music to my ears."55 Her long-awaited journey to Niagara is the framework for the book, which culminates in a detailed description of both the American and Canadian falls. According to Kline, however, Canadian response to Niagara is inept. She sneers that "Richardson, Sangster, and their terrified posterity" were "forced to define themselves as polar opposites of Revolution, environment, and America" and had "little emotional security with which to combat an awesome force like Niagara's torrent - little more than the diction of gracefully leaping waterfalls, the knowledge that they were part of the British Empire, and an attitude toward the natural world that looked to the time when the wild and the natural could be overcome and replaced with the domesticated."56 The Niagara descriptions that come to mind do not support such contentions. Moodie, for example, not only bemoans the despoliation of the sublime solitude of the area by "the ugly mills along the shore," but also exclaims against the American intention of harnessing the water to power machinery: "Ye gods! what next will the love of gain suggest to these gold-worshippers? The whole earth should enter into a protest against such an act of sacrilege - such a shameless desecration of one of the noblest works of God" (309). In other words, she not only fails to invoke the British Empire, but clearly rejects "the time when the wild and the natural could be overcome and replaced with the domesticated." Both Kline's assumption that Canadians ought to welcome the subjection of nature, and Moodie's outburst against any such procedure, support Dennis Lee's observation that "we aren't able to identify with the American impulse to simply take over the land (to "master' it) and remake it by technology; and we do feel a deep sense of being claimed by it - which affirmative sense is often hard for us to come to terms with, because the American way of dwelling, that of unreflecting mastery, has taken such possession of our minds."57 Perhaps the most popular work suggesting that Canadian writers reject nature is Margaret Atwood's Survival, published two years

54 The Picturesque and the Sublime

after the studies of Kline and Jones (the first of which she doesn't acknowledge, the second briefly recommended to the reader as a "Book of Criticism You May Want").58 Atwood's treatment of Canadian literature is deliberately provocative, her style informal. Disingenuously underplaying her own academic training, she says of Survival: It is not particularly original. Many of the ideas that inform it have been floating around, diffused in scholarly journals and private conversations, for a number of years ... My book stands in relation to them as a vitamin pill to a gourmet meal; it has the virtue of being cheaper to acquire and faster to swallow, but it misses out on a lot of overtones and refinements. It bypasses, too, many ripe nits that could well be picked; but I leave the plucking of these to others who perhaps find such pursuits more enjoyable.59

This breezy irreverence appealed to the public, who were satisfied to stave off their intellectual hunger with a "pill," given the alternative of digesting such heavy fare as Frye. So Survival became a bestseller, helping generations of high-school teachers serve up their variations on her variations of Frye's theme to impressionable students. However, Atwood's disinclination to "pick nits" was tolerated less well than Frye's had been; Frank Davey was only the first to complain that after apologizing for not trying to make her citation add up to a balanced overview of what's been written in Canada, she went on "to make generalizations about the entire literature."60 The critical tide really began to turn with Davey's second, more influential attack on what he called "thematic criticism," which grouped Frye, Jones, Moss and Atwood together as practitioners. According to Davey - and to the many critics, including Russell Brown, W.J. Keith and Paul Stuewe, who followed his lead - the objections to this style of criticism are twofold. First, it defines literature in sociological rather than aesthetic terms, thereby focusing on semantic meanings to the exclusion of formal structures. Secondly, it is non-evaluative, and in its obsession with pattern-seeking tends to valorize texts which support a pattern, however poor, in preference to those that don't, however fine. Basically, all opponents of thematic criticism complain that it is too schematic a method, requiring its adherents to leave out too much and distort what they leave in.61 Nevertheless, those who reject the thematic method of Frye rarely attempt to discredit his actual themes. Brown, for example, in an essay about alternative critical methodologies which proposes to take us "Beyond Thematics," implicitly endorses Frye's formulae when he suggests that one way of understanding the "cultural code

55 Notes on the Canadian Sublime

we learn as Canadian readers" might be to explore "the deliberate utilization of imagery meant to be recognized as referring to the garrison."62 That the idea of the garrison is central to Canadian literature is simply a given among many critics even now. Such cultural stereotypes are tenacious because they sum up and simplify literature for the benefit of those disinclined to accept complexity and inconsistency among writers. Moreover, phrases like "survival" and "fear of nature" serve as mnemonics to help teachers and students organize the canon, thereby tacitly endorsing the exclusion of texts less amenable to such categorization.63 This is why fifteen years after the backlash against thematic criticism, Frye's vision of a nation of malcontents huddled indoors, cursing the wilderness and dreaming of warmer and more civilized places, remains entrenched in the popular imagination. As we have seen with Mackay's Quebec Hill, or O'Grady's The Emigrant, such malcontents existed then as they do now (and here as they do everywhere else). Horror may indeed be the final response to the unknown rather than being the first stage in one's experience of the sublime. But we have tended to be too quick to assume that any Canadian representation of fear or awe at nature's power is of the terminal rather than the transitional kind. Sometimes, even those who do historical research may approach their materials anachronistically, scanning them for evidence to support not a hypothesis but a firmly held belief in our rejection of the natural world. This is apparent in The Wacousta Syndrome by Gaile McGregor. It is rather odd that, in 1985, a book which sets out to prove the stale thesis that "our national response to the environment has been almost completely negative" should be praised as "highly original."64 What is original about the book is its massive scope, and its provocative comparision of literature to the visual arts. Unfortunately, this laudable ambition necessitates a lot of generalization and some rather selective quotation. For example, McGregor offers as typical of The History of Emily Montague Arabella's peevish complaint about the cold - "I no longer wonder the elegant arts are unknown here; the rigour of the climate suspends the very powers of the understanding" - when almost everything else this or any other character in the book says about the climate and scenery of Canada is positive.65 She then describes as a "straightforward negative response" the following description by Anna Brownwell Jameson, despite its syntactical construction which, by counterpointing the "wild, tangled, untrodden" quality of the scene with things "not pleasant to encounter," implies that the place is both beautiful and frightening. Jameson writes: "Immediately on

56 The Picturesque and the Sublime

the border of the road so-called, was the wild, tangled, untrodden thicket, as impervious to the foot as the road was impassable, rich with vegetation, variegated verdure, and flowers of loveliest dye, but the haunt of the rattlesnake, and all manner of creeping and living things not pleasant to encounter, or even to think of."66 Surely an unbiased reader would think of a post-lapsarian garden of Eden, and recognize the association of the New World with paradise so common among early immigrants. But McGregor ignores the weighing of wild beauty against wild danger, for she is only willing to recognize the danger. Sometimes she allows her negativity to lead her into outright nonsense, as when she states that "the true Crusoe figure literally transforms his environment through his industry and ingenuity while the Canadian settler, whether Traill or Moodie, is incapable of effecting any such change (the wilderness is impervious to his most determined depredations; the forest grows back as fast as he can cut it down)."67 Critics are rarely lumberjacks, even in Canada, but it's hard to imagine anyone being so oblivious to the problem of deforestation. Moreover, even metaphorically, the idea of the wilderness growing back as soon as it is cut down is faithful neither to Moodie nor Traill. Both sisters comment on how denuded settlement land looks after it has been cleared, and both most certainly boast of transforming the wilderness through their industry and ingenuity. Traill, who actually wrote a book called Canadian Crusoes, speaks to both issues at once when, after remarking on how she hates the "odious" stumps everywhere on her property, and emphasizing how long it takes for trees to grow back, consoles herself with imagining how the place will look "Some century hence ... with fertile fields and groves of trees planted by the hand of taste."68 Elsewhere, McGregor argues that the simplistic Shaftesbury-Wordsworthian image of nature which had come to dominate cultural expectations by the time English Canadians were attempting to come to terms with the wilderness experience was inadequate for comprehending the colonial situation. The impact of nature was too frightening to be seen as potentially benevolent and too immediate to be aesthetically distanced. And since the late-eighteenth, early-nineteenthcentury cultural milieu did not offer any appropriate alternative models, the result was that the man/nature relation in Canada became, quite simply, a conceptual impossibility.69

This is, "quite simply," absurd. Shaftesbury was respected by Wordsworth, who possessed a copy of his Characteristic}® of Men, Manners,

57 Notes on the Canadian Sublime

Opinions, Times and considered him "an author at present unjustly depreciated,"70 precisely because he did not have a "simplistic image of nature." McGregor seems to have fallen in with the popular - and inaccurate - perception that Wordsworth's vision of nature was naively sentimental. Moreover, she is misguided when she implies that Shaftesbury and Wordsworth, either individually or collectively, distanced themselves from nature. On the contrary, both authors took it as their mission to advocate unmediated confrontation with physical nature as an antidote to artifice. Indeed, Wallace Jackson credits Shaftesbury with being the first writer to map "the bridge between the aesthetic and the moral on the basis of the immediate effect, which had only to be felt to be acknowledged."71 McGregor disregards the contribution of sublime theory to the "Shaftesbury-Wordsworthian image of nature," and underplays its ubiquity in "the late-eighteenth century, early-nineteenth-century cultural milieu." For as we have seen, the theory of the sublime explains how an experience can be both frightening and potentially benevolent, and therefore may be the "appropriate alternative model" McGregor claims did not exist. Somehow, thematic criticism has managed to be as ahistorical in regard to Canadian literature as did the formalist "New Criticism" it succeeded, and to which it proposed itself as an alternative, nationalist methodology. McGregor's inability to recognize that she calls a "model" illustrates a major problem of literary studies in this country: how to place Canadian literature in a world context while treating it as the product of a specific place. Thematic criticism was, in many ways, an attempt to liberate Canadian literature from foreign standards, despite being dominated by critics like Frye and Jones who invariably reverted to a European frame of reference to explicate their themes. Those who rejected this orientation usually preferred to focus on the individual work as a self-contained artifact. In principle, such a strategy might have freed Canadian literature to be appreciated on its own terms, but in practice it deprived works of their cultural context and deracinated them entirely. Even now one is apt to find isolationist reflexes among the most resolutely contemporary of critics. For example, Robert Kroetsch declares that: "Landscape is a question of appalling weight in Canadian writing, partly because there is in Canada so much landscape, with no accepted tradition, no code, if you will, for its being read."72 However, in the next paragraph, he suggests that "CanLit is the materialization of nature's unreadability." This paradox is, in fact, a perfect definition of the sublime: the "code" according to which so many representations of our landscape have been written.

58 The Picturesque and the Sublime

Postmodern criticism, in rejecting experience as having no philosophical validity, and concentrating on a semantic universe of anarchic signifiers, has too often simply inverted modernist claims to objectivity by doubting whether any writer could ever be said to make any meanings about anything. Thus the current wave of postcolonial theorists find themselves in the awkward position of trying to bridge the gap between cultural history (in which something is presumed to have happened) and post-structuralist theory (in which nothing can be known to take place but words) by approaching the literary work as a site of contradictions. There is a tendency to posit a hegemonic canon and a "dominant discourse," neither of which is ever really defined because neither exists in the simplistic unity assumed for the purposes of argument.73 And there is also a tendency to read Canadian works as having only two options: to be coopted by or to react against this canon and this discourse. The result, for the purposes of the current study, is that while modernists can't "see" the Canadian sublime because they need to believe we are alienated from nature, postmodernists may not see it because they wish to collaborate in Michel Foucault's project of rejecting "a comprehensive view of history and ... [of any] retracing the past as a patient and continuous development."74 A good example of this desire to see Canadian writers as inhabiting the other side of a conclusive cultural rupture is Dorothy Seaton's discussion of the way Kroetsch represents landscape. She declares that in his work: "The sign of the land is conceptualized from the very start as the site of resistance to discursive containment." But she does not acknowledge that Kroetsch is preceded by many others in his decision to embrace "the endless strangeness of both land and discourse, interrogating the very capacity of discourse to constitute the land."75 As we have seen, this is intrinsic to writings in the sublime tradition, beginning with Mackay's confession that his "weak numbers" could not "emulate the clime" (Quebec Hill: "Summer" l.io). Stan Dragland reminds us that as "the critical fashion turns from cataloguing victims and flinching from the terrors of nature, the challenge is going to be to remember and hold on to the element of truth in these partial formulations."76 T.D. MacLulich concurs: "It may yet turn out that Canadian critics do not need to go beyond thematics as much as they need to look at the ideological foundations that lie beneath or behind thematic criticism. It may even turn out that the thematic approach, buttressed by a more sophisticated view of literary, political, social, and even economic history, will remain the most useful method for Canadian critics to use in discussing their own national literature."77

59 Notes on the Canadian Sublime

It need not argue blind allegiance to the past to interpret our literature as developing out of, as well as being metamorphic of, tradition. The way in which the sublime has been expressed in Canada is unique to this country; indeed, because of its profound contribution to the ideology of our first writers, it is one of the formative ideas of Canadian culture.

The Waxing and Waning of Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

Rosemary Sullivan claimed in 1990 that "the wilderness is the enemy. Why? Because the virgin wilderness seems to negate man's perception of his own value. No one has caught this better than Susanna Moodie in her famous Roughing It in the Bush."1 More than any other writer in Canadian literature, Susanna Moodie has come to symbolize the repulsion from nature Canadians are alleged to feel, a repulsion she neither felt herself nor would have countenanced in others. It is odd that this view of Moodie persists despite the fierce scrutiny her memoirs have received from twentieth-century scholarship. What such scrutiny - if unbiased - reveals is that, although she found domestic life in the wilderness difficult, nature was her chief solace in the midst of hunger, isolation, and uncertainty. This is dramatically illustrated early in Roughing It in the Bush when she juxtaposes praise of nature with a feeling of hopeless entrapment after moving to Mrs Joe's cottage: The location was beautiful, and I was greatly consoled by this circumstance. The aspect of Nature ever did, and I hope ever will continue "to shoot marvellous strength into my heart." As long as we remain true to the Divine Mother, so long will she remain faithful to her suffering children. At that period my love for Canada was a feeling very nearly allied to that which the condemned criminal entertains for his cell - the only hope of escape being through the portals of the grave.2

At other times she confesses that nature provides more than simple consolation: it has the capacity to lift her out of herself, and make

61 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

her forget her all-consuming homesickness. One such interlude occurs during a moonlit canoe-ride home after visiting Stony Lake. Remembering it, she remarks that at such times, "I ceased to regret my separation from my native land; and, filled with the love of Nature, my heart forgot for the time the love of home ... Amid these lonely wilds the soul draws nearer to God, and is filled to overflowing by the overwhelming sense of His presence" (340). This is the familiar language of the sublime, and it is found throughout Moodie's writings whenever she finds herself alone with nature. For example, when she first catches sight of Quebec from the river she exclaims: Nature has lavished all her grandest elements to form this astonishing panorama. There frowns the cloud-capped mountain, and below, the cataract foams and thunders; wood, and rock, and river combine to lend their aid in making the picture perfect, and worthy of its Divine Originator ... The shadow of His glory rested visibly on the stupendous objects that composed that magnificent scene; words are perfectly inadequate to describe the impression it made upon my mind - the emotions it produced (37).

She is entirely conventional in her preference for this kind of landscape. In his unfinished essay "The Sublime and the Beautiful," Wordsworth suggested that exactly these components of a scene - a mountain, a waterfall, a mighty river - best convey that "sensation of sublimity" resulting from the interpenetration of "a sense of individual form or forms; a sense of duration; and a sense of power."3 As David Stouck observes, the "Wordsworthian stance was for Mrs. Moodie not just a learned set of attitudes or an affected literary pose, but something integral to her personality - a definition of self fundamental to survival in the backwoods."4 And Susan Joan Wood reminds us that the outlook of early Canadians in general was complex, even contradictory: "Educated British emigrants brought with them a mental baggage of Burkes's sublime, Chateaubriand's romanticism, Rousseau's Noble Savage, Wordsworth's pantheism, and the seductive promises of pamphlets published by Canadian land-speculation companies. Visions of verdant prospects mixed with the desire for freedom and prosperity, and the more prosaic need for food and shelter."5 Such rhapsodies as that at Stony Lake occur more frequently early in Roughing It in the Bush, when the naive heroine is travelling up the St Lawrence, than later when, ill and exhausted, she is struggling to survive off the land. But throughout the book, whenever she finds herself by a lake or river her spirits are lifted. She tells us she became reconciled to Mrs Joe's cottage because of the little brook rolling by

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its window, the sound of which created in her "a feeling of mysterious awe" (134). Later she interrupts her description of a difficult winter journey through the forest to observe that: "The most renowned of our English rivers dwindle into little muddy rills when compared with the sublimity of the Canadian waters. No language can adequately express the solemn grandeur of her lake and river scenery; the glorious islands that float, like visions from fairy land, upon the bosom of these azure mirrors of her cloudless skies" (266). And once the cedar swamp in front of her bush-home is cleared away and she has a view of the lake, her attitude to that place changes too: "By night and day, in sunshine or in storm, water is always the most sublime feature in a landscape, and no view can be truly grand in which it is wanting. From a child, it always had the most powerful effect upon my mind ... Half the solitude of my forest home vanished when the lake unveiled its bright face to the blue heavens, and I saw sun, and moon, and stars, and waving trees reflected there" (306). Her perception of sublimity in a landscape obviously depends on the presence of certain features - generally, bodies of water. Moreover, it is only when she is at leisure to contemplate the scenery that we find such passages. But as apprehension of the sublime is acknowledged to occur in moments of private meditation, and not of intense activity, it is hardly surprising that when she represents herself as hard at work on her farm, we get little or no natural description: the landscape then simply forms the background to labour. A half-starved nursing mother, digging potatoes, has little occasion for transcendent communion with nature!6 But this is just to say that the representation of landscape in Roughing It in the Bush owes as much to literary and social expectations as to Moodie's particular experience - as it always does with writers of every period. However, Marian Fowler argues that "the force of literary convention is ... seen in Susanna's response to Nature. It was not until the twentieth century that writers and painters such as Emily Carr began to realize that 'the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours' and that Canada 'had to be sensed, passed through live minds/" She dismisses "the aesthetic notions of Lord Shaftesbury and Edmund Burke" as transmitted through English Romantic poetry as contributing to a "garrison mentality," because writers like Moodie wax "most eloquent over mountain precipices and gushing waterfalls" and ignore their own backyards.7 It is true that Moodie does not appreciate all aspects of her wilderness environs equally. Like most folk living in Ontario, then as now,

63 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

she prefers open vistas of water and hills to impenetrable barriers of trees or muddy swamps; sunny skies to overcast ones; flowers to mosquitoes. But such rational preferences can hardly account for the patronizing way she has been treated. In fact, the conventional view of Moodie is the more peculiar in that very little of Roughing It in the Bush is about nature at all: her chief preoccupation throughout the book is how her family learned to take care of themselves, and she sketches for us the comical or dangerous people they met, and the various events that overtook them, in the course of their adventures. Most of the difficulties the Moodies encounter result from their own financial and practical ineptitude, or from the mischief or mistakes of neighbours and servants as recounted in chapters like "Uncle Joe and His Family/' "Burning the Fallow" and "The Little Stumpy Man." The least of their "disappointed hopes" in the chapter of that name is that wet weather spoils their wheat crop: their debts result from Mr Moodie's foolish investment of all their money in worthless stock, and their immediate hardship from the cruelty of a "ruffian squatter" who first steals their bull and then drowns all their pigs. During these hard times, far from being their adversary, the wilderness actually provides for them: they live on fish, squirrel, deer and dandelion coffee. But the comfort Moodie consistently derives from nature is ignored by critics like R.D. MacDonald, who describes the movement in the book as "from romantic anticipation to disillusionment, from nature as beautiful and benevolent to nature as a dangerous taskmaster. The story moves from her experience of the sublime to her catalogue of near disasters."8 Surely what the narrative pattern reveals is not that Moodie's feeling for nature changes; rather, preoccupied as she is by all the near disasters caused by incompetent people, she has less time and inclination for "experience of the sublime." Nowhere does she blame nature itself for her situation; on the contrary, she suggests that all the evil to be found around her can be located in the human populace: "The unpeopled wastes of Canada must present the same aspect to the new settler that the world did to our first parents after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden; all the sin which could defile the spot ... is concentrated in their own persons" (268). To Ramsay Cook, Moodie's observation of the lack of superstition in Canada is evidence that: "It was not merely the belief that moral order lay in European civilization, and moral chaos in nature, that prevented Mrs. Moodie and other nineteenth-century Canadian writers from leaving their garrison. It was a conviction that they would

64 The Picturesque and the Sublime

find nothing outside to stimulate their imaginations."9 Once again, Susanna has her wrist slapped for rejecting nature: this time, however, because she is thought to find it at once morally chaotic and imaginatively uninspiring. But Cook's argument is actually quite unusual; most critics accuse her of projecting too much, rather than too little, onto the world around her. They use her admission of "this foolish dread of encountering wild beasts in the woods I never could wholly shake off" (276) to convict her of a pathological fear of nature itself - although this is like arguing that anyone afraid of traffic accidents is implicitly rejecting all of modern technology. The most influential work in this regard is Margaret Atwood's poetic sequence The Journals of Susanna Moodie, wherein the protagonist's phobia represents a fear of her own instinctual side, and the self-knowledge she achieves through wilderness exile is imaged as her gradual transformation into a nature-spirit. The process begins as soon as she arrives in the bush where Atwood has her declare "I need wolf's eyes to see / the truth" ("Further Arrivals," 11.2o-i).10 She then conceives of her husband as a shapeshifter who changes not only himself but may change me also with the fox eye, the owl eye, the eightfold eye of the spider. ("The Wereman," Il.i8-2i)

Atwood's Moodie recognizes that "In time the animals / arrived to inhabit me" ("Departure from the Bush," 11.6-7), but she is unable to open herself entirely to them and finally leaves without having incorporated the knowledge they offer. Nonetheless, years later, she is haunted by the memory of one of her bush-neighbours, and his identification with the forest creatures. In "Dream 2: Brian the StillHunter" Brian declares "every time I aim, I feel / my skin grow fur / my head heavy with antlers" (11.13-15). Finally, in old age she herself admits to longing for the transformation she resisted earlier ("Wish: Metamorphosis to Heraldic Emblem"). So Atwood grants it to her in death, making her become an underground spirit threatening the eventual collapse of civilization back into wilderness in "Alternate Thoughts from Underground" and "Resurrection." Atwood's sequence has both symbolic coherence and dramatic power. But as Stouck remarks, in her own works "Mrs. Moodie never conceives of herself as becoming part of the primal landscape."11 Indeed, as R.P. Bilan suggests: "The values of the real Susanna Moodie, with her pious Christianity, have been reversed completely

65 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

by Atwood. In Life in the Clearings Susanna Moodie remarked: '"Light! give me more light!' were the dying words of Goethe; and this should be the constant prayer of all rational souls to the Father of light." Atwood has none of Moodie's commitment to rationality and to Christianity - to light. Rather, Atwood wants the irrational, the dark side of nature and of the self, given its place."12 Although Bilan underestimates Moodie's respect for the irrational (throughout Roughing It she speculates about such topics as mental telepathy and the power of prayer), Atwood's fascination with darkness is indeed far from anything Moodie herself has to say on the subject, such as the following: The holy and mysterious nature of man is yet hidden from himself; he is still a stranger to the movements of that inner life, and knows little of its capabilities and powers. A purer religion, a higher standard of moral and intellectual training may in time reveal all this. Man still remains a half-reclaimed savage; the leaven of Christianity is slowly and surely working its way, but it has not yet changed the whole lump, or transformed the deformed into the beauteous child of God. Oh, for that glorious day! It is coming. The dark clouds of humanity are already tinged with the golden radiance of the dawn, but the sun of righteousness has not yet arisen upon the world with healing on his wings; the light of truth still struggles in the womb of darkness, and man stumbles on to the fulfilment of his sublime and mysterious destiny. (Roughing It, 469)

Far from yearning for union with nature, Moodie looks forward to half-savage humanity's evolution to a higher spiritual and intellectual plane. Of course some critics are content, like Sherill E. Grace, "not to assess the accuracy of Atwood's interpretation of Moodie but to explore a few aspects of their literary relationship ... we do not need to know the Journals to appreciate Moodie's work, any more than we need to have read Moodie in order to recognize the power of Atwood's poems."13 And if the poems are read in the context of Atwood's oeuvre alone, there can be no possible objection to her creative appropriation of this, or any other, historical material. Indeed, the achievement of The Journals of Susanna Moodie is that it weaves together so irresistibly many of Atwood's dominant themes and obsessions. Perhaps most obvious is the premise that those who invade the wilderness will become possessed by it, familiar from early poems like "Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer" and "Backdrop Addresses Cowboy," both published in The Animals in that Country (1968). But other recurrent Atwood themes, including the split between the rational and irrational minds, the need for individual

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growth and self-discovery, and the lack of understanding between men and women, are also prominent in the Journals. The problem, however, is that Atwood's version of Moodie accords so clearly with Frye's statement that she was a "one-woman garrison," and with her own view of Canadian literature as expressed in Survival, that it is hard not to read the Journals as being criticism as much as poetry.14 And the fact that Moodie is an historical figure gives an air of authority to what is, ultimately, fiction. An alternative - though equally disapproving - image of Moodie is projected by Robertson Davies in At My Heart's Core, a Shavian discussion play in which she stars with two other Otonabee pioneers, her sister Catharine Parr Traill and Frances Stewart. The play is set at the time of the Upper Canada Rebellion and Moodie, whom the stage directions describe as having "a ladylike hint of the drillsergeant in her demeanour," persistently blames the Methodists for stirring up revolution.15 "When you say Methodist, you say Radical. They all think that the world can be improved by rebellion against authority. It can't," she declares. At the same time, she refuses to make the usual nineteenth-century association between revolution and poetry, for when Traill teases her about leaving the Dissenters out of her rousing "Oath of the Canadian Volunteers," she replies stiffly "I do not consider Methodists, even in a time of crisis, to be the stuff of which poetry is made" (599; 600). Once again a contemporary writer is reading Moodie through the lenses of his own preoccupations. We are familiar with the association of Protestant repression with joylessness and stifled creativity throughout Davies' work; in this play, he makes Moodie the ancestral source of small-town Ontario rigidity. At the same time, through the temptation plot, he makes her acknowledge the desire for a more passionate life. Like Atwood, Davies sees the hapless pioneer as a split figure, tormented by what she knows but cannot express about life; like Atwood, he presents her as reluctant to confront her inner demons; like Atwood, he makes her incarnate a problem he believes to be central to modern Canadian life. Born though she was at the turn of the century, Moodie does give little evidence of having been moved by the revolutionary side of the Romantic movement. However, for a brief period just prior to her emigration to Canada, "the stuff of which poetry is made" had in fact been her own rebellion against a genteel Anglican upbringing. The title work of her only independent collection of poetry, Enthusiasm (1831), is a defense of spiritual ardour, and many other poems

67 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm" in the book draw on biblical stories or pious commonplaces for evangelical purposes. The book is nothing if not defiant, and gives us some insight into the sympathy for both Methodists and political rebels expressed in Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings.16 Enthusiasm, never having been reprinted, has been little known to students of Canadian literature.17 Probably Davies was unaware of it when he wrote his play in 1950; nor would he have known about Moodie's brief conversion to Congregationalism, made public only with the publication of her letters in 1985.l8 But the spiritual turmoil revealed by both book and letters reminds us that Davies' portrayal of Moodie, however entertaining, is fictitious. His humourless and self-righteous martinet is no closer to the "real" Moodie than is the terrified creature depicted by Atwood. Both authors take considerable liberty with the material available to them and project an emblematic character as a focus for their satire. It is unlikely, however, that either would have felt so free to exaggerate if the intimate self-revelations of their protagonist's letters had been available to them. These letters, supplemented by the editors' thorough biographical notes, trace Susanna Strickland's increasing interest in and defense of religious non-conformity from about 1828 on, through her conversion in April of 1830, to her return to the established church with her marriage to John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie a year later. On 2 April 1830 she was admitted to a dissenting congregation; a day later, the following note appeared in the Athenaeum: "Shortly will appear, 'Enthusiasm, and other Poems,' by Susanna Strickland, a young lady already favourably known to the public by several compositions of much merit and more promise, in the Annuals, etc."19 On 4 April this young lady took communion for the first time with her new pastor, Andrew Ritchie. Her conversion is movingly described in a letter of 15 April to her confidant James Bird which concludes "I dare not indulge myself dear friend by entering more fully into this subject lest you should think me a mere visionary enthusiast."20 That she should write a poem in defense of religious enthusiasm while fearing to be characterized as an enthusiast herself is indicative not only of self-consciousness but of class consciousness; historically, the educated upper classes had resisted the evangelical movement, disdaining religious fervour as vulgar. Hoxie Neale Fairchild notes that from the mid-eighteenth century on, "with rare exceptions, 'literary' folk will continue to sing of universal harmony and the social glow ... the Gospels will be for the believing lowbrow, the religion of sentiment for the believing highbrow."21 One of those rare exceptions, Moodie elects to stand out from her community by calling her

68 The Picturesque and the Sublime

book Enthusiasm and insisting throughout on the doctrines of sin and redemption. She first confesses her aspiration to write religious poetry in a letter dated 14 January 1829, when she says she is thinking of undertaking a small volume of psalms and hymns; Enthusiasm includes translations of Psalms 40 and 44, and concludes with a "Morning Hymn" and an "Evening Hymn/' so perhaps these were part of the original plan. And even her most delicate nature poems emphasize the illusory joys of this world as compared with the certainty of heavenly bliss. More fiercely eschatological are such poems as "The Deluge/' "The Vision of Dry Bones/' and "The Destruction of Babylon." In this last piece, the prophetic voice not only foretells divine vengeance but insists on its inevitability; in these biblical narratives, human history is repetitive and the past prefigures the future. Moodie's interest in such topics was by no means original; on the contrary, the biblical passages she chooses to paraphrase were typical exercises for Protestant poets wishing to be thought sublime. As early as 1704 John Dennis, in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, ha called for a return to religious themes in literature, complaining that "modern poetry, being for the most part profane, has ... very little spirit."22 It was also Dennis who described passions such as terror, wonder, joy and desire as enthusiastic, because they take us out of ourselves and make us recognize the mystery of things. He clarified the connection between enthusiasm and the sublime as follows: "the sublime is nothing else but a great thought, or great thoughts, moving the soul from its ordinary situation by the enthusiasm which naturally attends them."23 To Dennis, enthusiasm is the agent of sublimity - an emotional activity which makes possible a metaphysical experience. The first three lines of Moodie's poem "Enthusiasm" provides a more etymologically correct definition of enthusiasm as divine presence: "OH for the spirit which inspired of old / The seer's prophetic song - the voice that spake / Through Israel's warrior king." In ancient Greece, enthusiasmos referred to the trance-like state of an oracle possessed by Apollo or Dionysus; the term entered the English language in the seventeenth century to describe Anabaptists and other religious sects whose members claimed to experience personal revelation.24 The word was usually used to imply that this claim was false, or, at best, that its professors were deluded; Robert Burton, in the section of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) dealing with "Religious Melancholy," was only the first in a long line of theoreticians to propose that religious enthusiasm was a form of hysteria, possibly sexual in origin.25 He influenced later writers such as the Cambridge Platonist Henry More whose Enthusiasmus Triumphatus: or, a Brief

69 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm" Discourse of the Nature, Causes, Kinds, and Cure of "Enthusiasm" came out in 1656, a year after a volume by Meric Casaubon, the title of which spells out the "scientific" attitude to religious dissent: A Treatise concerning Enthusiasme as it is an Effect of Nature: but is mistaken by many for either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolicall Possession.26 Casaubon analyses many types of enthusiasm, including the "Divinatory," "Contemplative," "Rhetorical," and "Poetical"; as the last two categories suggest, the classical association between religious transcendence and the muse is also conventional in English thought. Thus Blount's Glossographia of 1656 defines enthusiasm as "an inspiration, a ravishment of the spirit, divine motion, Poetical fury"27; a more generous entry than we find a century later in Dr Johnson's dictionary, where enthusiasm is defined first as "a vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or communication" before also being described as "Heat of imagination" and, finally, as "elevation of fancy."28 The correspondence between religious and poetical enthusiasm, and the relationship of both to sublime theory, became so entrenched that by 1809 Martin Shee, in "The Elements of Art," would complain of the sublime that "those who talk rationally on other subjects, no sooner touch on this, than they go off in a literary delirium; fancy themselves, like Longinus, 'the great sublime they draw/ and rave like methodists, of inward lights, and enthusiastic emotions, which, if you cannot comprehend, you are set down as un-illumined by the grace of criticism, and excluded from the elect of Taste."29 The debate about the nature of enthusiasm engaged many philosophers throughout the eighteenth century. Dr Johnson cites Locke as his authority for the contention that "Enthusiasm is founded neither on reason nor divine revelation, but rises from the conceits of a warmed or overheated braine."30 The topic also preoccupied Locke's pupil, Lord Shaftesbury, in his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1707), and David Hume in his essay Of Superstition and Enthusiasm (1741). Even John Wesley found himself drawn into it; although a tireless advocate of the necessity for faith, he nonetheless cautions his followers, in his Advice to the People called Methodists (1745), that they should "carefully avoid enthusiasm: impute not the dreams of men to the all-wise God."31 Shaftesbury, otherwise Wesley's philosophical opposite in the period, is just as concerned to distinguish between true and false inspiration. Despite his urbane mockery of religious fanaticism in the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, he concedes that ENTHUSIASM is wonderfully powerful and extensive; that it is a matter of nice Judgement, and the hardest thing in the world to know fully and

jo The Picturesque and the Sublime distinctly; since even Atheism is not exempt from it. For, as some have well remark'd, there have been Enthusiastical Atheists. Nor can Divine Inspiration, by its outward Marks, be easily distinguish'd from it. For Inspiration is a real feeling of the Divine Presence, and Enthusiasm a false one.32 But a mere two years later, Shaftesbury rehabilitates enthusiasm, broadening the meaning to include any and all passionate commitments - but most particularly, the ecstatic worship of nature. In The Moralists (1709), when the rhapsodies of Theocles convert him to nature-worship, gentlemanly Philocles is embarrassed, for "all those who are deep in this Romantick way, are look'd upon, you know, as a People either plainly out of their Wits, or over-run with Melancholy and ENTHUSIASM." 33 But he quickly recovers his equilibrium, concluding that "all sound Love and Admiration is ENTHUSIASM: "The Transports of Poets, the Sublime of Orators, the Rapture of Musicians, the high Strains of the Virtuosi; all mere ENTHUSIASM! Even Learning it-self, the Love of Arts and Curiositys, the Spirit of Travellers and Adventurers; Gallantry, War, Heroism; All, all ENTHUSIASM*" - Tis enough: I am content to be this new Enthusiast, in a way unknown to me before."34 This "new enthusiast" - deep in the "Romantick" way, a devotee of the sublime - quickly became a fashionable type in literature and life, celebrated by such poets as the eighteen-year-old Joseph Warton in The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature.35 The 252 blank verse lines of the revised 1748 version make only tangential reference to established religion; God here is primarily the "architect supreme" (1.137) whose works cannot be rivalled by "art's vain pomps" (1.4). As Ernest Lee Tuveson notes, until this period, "Christian theologians had asserted that the 'book of nature' demonstrates divine purpose in the universe, but that it was to be read in the light of the higher book, Revelation. An imperfection in the natural order, resulting from the fall, makes natural philosophy alone quite inadequate as the guide to heaven. In the eighteenth century the emphasis gradually is reversed: the book of Revelation is now to be read by the light of stars and sun."36 The religion of nature transformed social and literary values; not only Warton, but more influential poets like James Thomson spread the new gospel by versifying Shaftesbury. In "Spring" (1728), for example, Thomson writes: By swift Degrees the Love of Nature works, And warms the Bosom; till at last, sublim'd To Rapture, and enthusiastic Heat, We feel the present DEITY, and taste The joy of GOD to see a happy World.37

71 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

By the end of the century, it had become commonplace to observe, as Thomas Gray did of the landscape around the Grande Chartreuse: "Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry."38 In The Prelude, after describing his sister Dorothy as "a young Enthusiast," Wordsworth declares that "God delights / In such a being; for her common thoughts / Are piety, her life is gratitude."39 We are so familiar with this philosophy as transmitted by the Romantics that it is difficult for us to recognize its radical implications. But the unresolved questions inherent in sublime theory since the time of Longinus inform the debate about enthusiasm as well. Are natural phenomena sublime by virtue of reflecting their creator, or do they simply manifest certain objective qualities, such as extension and duration, which have a powerful effect on the mind? If the latter, can the recognition of such incalculables, by reminding one of the limits of one's understanding, constitute a spiritual experience in and of itself - independent of religion? In finding God sufficiently revealed through nature, Shaftesbury and his followers (usually described as "deists") were effectively "setting aside all moral precepts and the doctrine of future reward and punishment."40 This made more orthodox Christians uncomfortable for, although nature-worship was an ally in opposing the spread of scientific materialism, it undermined the traditional role of the Church in mediating for sinners. On the other hand, while evangelical Christians appreciated the deists' emphasis on individual conscience and self-transformation, they strongly objected to any neglect of biblical doctrine. The coincidence of nature worship and evangelicalism in Moodie's poetry illustrates the logically inconsistent but sentimentally compelling reconciliation of these movements by the nineteenth century.41 Coming after the Romantic movement, she takes it for granted that nature is spiritually exalting, and that it provides the best evidence for divine presence in the universe. Indeed, even towards the end of her life she claims to prefer the Belleville of thirty years earlier to the bustling town she now inhabits, writing to her friend Allen Ransome on 17 October, 1871: "Allen, the poetic spirit, the love of dear Mother Nature will never die out of my heart. I am just the same enthusiast I ever was and often forget white hairs and wrinkles when my heart swells and my eyes fill with tears at the beauty of some lovely spot that glows from the hand of the great Master."42 Here she uses the term "enthusiast" as in Warton's poem, to mean one who adores

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nature. But, as we have seen, in her earlier letters the word had a purely religious connotation. The tension between these two meanings is the catalyst for her blank-verse poem "Enthusiasm," in which she seeks to bridge the gap between the sacred and profane uses of the term and thereby reconcile nature worship with evangelical Christianity to her own satisfaction. She begins by defining enthusiasm as an innate passion for meaningful activity, the "Parent of genius" to whose "soul-awakening power we owe / The preacher's eloquence, the painter's skill, / The poet's lay, the patriot's noble zeal" and so on (11.30-4). This allows her to devote most of "Enthusiasm" - from line 70 to line 351 out of a total of 449 lines - to non-religious enthusiasts: the poet, the painter the nature-lover and the warrior. But she has an evangelical agenda: by demonstrating the ultimate dissatisfaction inherent in all earthly pursuits, she intends to prove the superiority of religious enthusiasm to other varieties, and to defend Christianity in particular. The poet is described in terms familiar to Moodie's public from Beattie's The Minstrel, and Shelley's Alastor: ... He walks this earth Like an enfranchised spirit; and the storms, That darken and convulse a guilty world, Come like faint peals of thunder on his ear, Or hoarser murmurs of the mighty deep, Which heard in some dark forest's leafy shade But add a solemn grandeur to the scene. (11.105-11)

But despite his youthful rapture, "penury and dire disease, / Neglect, a broken heart, an early grave!" are all predicted for him, because he has not "tuned his harp to truths divine" (11.118-20). The painter, on the other hand, is reproached for being "unsatisfied with all that Nature gives" and attempting to "portray Omnipotence" (11.135-7), since even the effect of sunlight on leaves "is beyond thy art. / All thy enthusiasm, all thy boasted skill, / But poorly imitates a forest tree (11.173-5).43 Moodie appears to be unaware of the aesthetic contradiction she sets up here: the poet is to be saved by abandoning nature for sacred topics - the painter by the reverse procedure! Or perhaps she is vaguely aware of some philosophical muddiness, for at this point she drops the topic of artistic enthusiasm and starts to examine the nature-lover instead. He is told in his turn that he will be unable to "read" the natural scene around him properly until he explores

73 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

the Bible (11.192-207), but she seems to hold out more hope for his salvation than for the others, perhaps because he is not trying to rival the Creator, but simply to appreciate the creation. At least, this is what is suggested by her statement that "Faith gives a grandeur to created things, / Beyond the poet's lay or painter's art, / Or upward flight of Fancy's eagle wing" (11.222-5). We then move out of the natural setting for the only time in the poem to visit "Glory's intrepid champion" (1.259), who seems to stand for all those with worldly passions, for He too is an enthusiast! - his zeal Impels him onward with resistless force, Severs his heart from nature's kindred ties, And feeds the wild ambition which consumes All that is good and lovely in his path. (11.265-69)

Perhaps because his ambitions are even farther from the true path than those of the poet or painter, twice as much space is devoted to the soldier's portrait: 105 lines to their fifty-three. It is interesting that Moodie was married to a former soldier herself by the time "Enthusiasm" was published, for she becomes absorbed in imagining a fictional childhood for her hypothetical man of war, trying to figure out what would turn an ardent soul towards such a brutal vocation. (One is also reminded that her first publication was an inspirational tale for young readers, Spartacus: A Roman Story, published in 1822; clearly she was drawn towards military heroes in spite of herself.) But despite her sympathy for all the enthusiasts she describes, Moodie argues that their secular interests are just "base and joyless vanities which man / Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!" (11.68-9). In this regard, her poem has close affinities with an earlier poem also called "Enthusiasm," published by John Byrom in 1757. In this work, after reminding the genteel reader who scorns religious fervour that everyone has obsessions, Byrom suggests "That which concerns us therefore is to see / What Species of Enthusiasts we be" (11.25o-i).44 He enumerates several such "species," beginning with classicists, Egyptologists and biblical scholars who, because their erudition is misdirected, are criticized more severely than the frivolous habitues of coffee-houses and ballrooms. All these folk share one attribute however; "in one Absurdity they chime, / To make religious Enthusiasm a Crime" (11.196-7).45 Byrom's complaint is reiterated by Moodie; two generations later, she still bemoans the fact that:

74 The Picturesque and the Sublime The world allows its votaries to feel A glowing ardour, an intense delight, On every subject but the one that lifts The soul above its sensual, vain pursuits, And elevates the mind and thoughts to God! Zeal in a sacred cause alone is deemed An aberration of our mental powers. (11.45-51)

Despite the similarity of Moodie's argument to Byrom's, the two poets have completely different styles, he writing satirical and didactic couplets, she rather Romantic blank verse. His tone is urbane; hers, passionate. Byrom never succumbs to enthusiasm himself, but Moodie is unable to resist it, even when describing enthusiasms she claims to deplore. Moreover, Byrom's main focus in his poem is theology, while Moodie is preoccupied with character and setting. Herein lies the paradoxical failure of her poem. Her strengths as a writer - even in these early years - clearly lie in the dramatic portrayal of character and in vivid description, and not in philosophical analysis.46 These very strengths undermine her stated purpose in "Enthusiasm," where the lengthy and persuasive rendering of the allegedly "joyless vanities" of earthly life is followed by thirty-five lines on the vague but "everlasting bliss" to be anticipated in the New Jerusalem: thirtyfive lines which emphasize, by contrast, the genuine seductiveness of those worldly passions she argues we ought to renounce. To solve this predicament she proposes that experiences which cannot be described by language must be more powerful than anything of which one can speak, an hypothesis which leads her to relinquish the word "enthusiasm" itself as inadequate to convey That deep devotion of the heart which men Miscall enthusiasm! - Zeal alone deserves The name of madness in a worldly cause. Light misdirected ever leads astray; But hope inspired by faith will guide to heaven! (11.411-15)

The ineffability of the sublime had long been acknowledged; one of the chief proofs of sublime experience had always been that it rendered language inadequate. Nonetheless, given that she herself has elected to call such "deep devotion of the heart" enthusiasm in the poem's opening, Moodie's conclusion is somewhat perverse. We are left with a poem framed by rhetorical, and filled with lyrical and dramatic, self-contradiction.

75 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

She even affirms exactly those analogies between religious and worldly enthusiasts which she has just rejected, declaring that "To win the laurel wreath the soldier fights; / To free his native land the patriot bleeds; / And to secure his crown the martyr dies!" (11.41618). Clearly she hasn't overcome her admiration for martial pursuits despite condemning war as an ignoble subject for enthusiasm. Similarly, though she deplores the inadequacy of poetry and painting to represent spiritual truths, she is drawn to artistic expression. She is ambivalent about almost everything she says: she wants to concede, like Byrom, that it is human nature to be enthusiastic, but she also insists that religious enthusiasm is different in kind, not simply in degree. Though passionately moved by nature, she mistrusts this impulse in herself, worrying that exaltation of the sublime as perceived through the creation may undermine appreciation of the Creator.47 And even as she is writing "Enthusiasm," she worries about being considered "a mere visionary enthusiast" by her friends. It has become commonplace to describe Moodie as ambivalent. Indeed, ambivalence and self-contradiction pervade Roughing It in the Bush to such an extent that Atwood describes her behaviour as "paranoid schizophrenia." She came up with this label in her afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie, published in 1970 and full of post-Centennial feeling about the way "we" live in Canada. Atwood makes it very clear that for her Moodie symbolizes a problem in contemporary Canadian identity: "We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here: the country is too big for anyone to inhabit completely, and in the parts unknown to us we move in fear, exiles and invaders. This country is something that must be chosen - it is so easy to leave - and if we do choose it we are still choosing a violent duality" (62). Some critics have continued to interpret Moodie's ambivalent response to life in the bush as representative of some hypothetical national predicament; Gaile McGregor, for example, states solemnly that "the question arises as to what Susanna Moodie's experience implies for Canadian experience as a whole."48 At its most glib and reductive, such analysis sees Susanna not only as sick herself, but symbolic of the sickness that is in others. But, as another poet wrote, a few years after Moodie, "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then .... I contradict myself; / I am large .... I contain multitudes."49 Walt Whitman is exceptional not only in tolerating self-contradiction but in boasting about it; most writers

76 The Picturesque and the Sublime feel the literary imperatives of "unity," "coherence" and "closure" as strongly as their critics; anticipating these critics, they banish discontinuity from their works. Moodie does not, either in an early work like "Enthusiasm" or in her later Canadian memoirs. Her opinions are robustly inconsistent: a sentimentalist, she is a defender of the class system; an advocate of progress, she is nostalgic for primitive simplicity; a Romantic nature-worshipper, she is terrified of wild animals. And not only does she not have a consistent point of view, her writing doesn't appear to conform to the conventions of any given genre! Thus Michael Peterman notes of Roughing It in the Bush, "containing elements of poetry, fiction, travel writing, autobiography, and social analysis, it eludes definition."50 But as many theorists of autobiography have remarked, formal impurity is typical of life-writing in general. It may be inescapable, given the mandate of self-representation: as Sidonie Smith notes, "the generic contract engages the autobiographer in a doubled subjectivity - the autobiographer as protagonist of her story and the autobiographer as narrator. Through that doubled subjectivity she pursues her fictions of selfhood by fits and starts."51 Atwood makes the connection between the character's self-contradictions and the discontinuities of the text when she describes Roughing It as a collection of "disconnected anecdotes" held together only by "the personality of Mrs Moodie."52 But she implies that this is an idiosyncratic failing, rather than normal procedure in a work of this kind. Because Roughing It in the Bush was brought out by Richard Bentley, the pre-eminent publisher of English travel literature of his day, it is usually seen as a memoir of, or guide to, settlement. It was originally called Canadian Sketches, and contained other material later excised by the publisher. Reminding us of the book's publication history, John Thurston states flatly that "Susanna Moodie did not write Roughing It in the Bush. In fact, Roughing It in the Bush was never written. Susanna Moodie and Roughing It in the Bush are interchangeable titles given to a collaborative act of textual production whose origin cannot be limited to one person or one point in time."53 Thurston is only taking to its logical extreme Carl Klinck's argument in the introduction to his 1962 New Canadian Library edition of Roughing It that each generation of readers deserves a new version of the book. Following these principles, Klinck himself cut out not only all of Mr Moodie's contributions and Susanna's poems, but also a great many "reports of pleasant excursions, and others of pathetic experiences."54 What goes unacknowledged, however, is the paradox implicit in the contention that "Care has been taken to maintain the balance of

77 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

the original, and to enhance the unique effect by concentration"55. Klinck's method of enhancing by "concentration" is far from maintaining even the pretence of "balance," since almost all his editorial cuts come from the second volume of Roughing It. The pleasant excursions he deletes are those that show Moodi'e enjoying her surroundings; the pathetic experiences represent her as not only more resourceful herself but better able to assist others. The abridgement emphasizes her early difficulties and underplays her later development; we don't see Moodie learning from experience. She becomes a more static character, locked in her ambivalence, unable to progress. Curiously, she becomes more consistent in her inconsistency! And this Moodie is the one familiar to most readers until the last decade. But the editions of the 19805 have restored the original Roughing It in the Bush; contemporary editors have more patience with Moodie's story, and more respect for her text.56 The tide has turned in literary criticism; we have more tolerance these days for uncategorizable works. Indeed, the greatest praise now goes to those which break conventions and rupture forms. But Moodie is not a literary iconoclast; we must not overcompensate by making her a prophet of post-modernism. Her work, despite its inconsistency indeed, in part because of it - fits nicely with other travel memoirs of the period. Perhaps, then, our problem with Moodie has simply been that of historical perspective. As Laura Groening acutely remarked, "the twentieth century tends to value autobiographies for the psychological truths that they reveal ... Mrs. Moodie, unlike Atwood and the twentieth century in general, had very little use for the unconscious either as the repository for valuable truths about the human personality or as the wellspring of the creative urge. She believed that an autobiography was a document with a social purpose."57 This social purpose is the setting forth of one's life as an example from which others may learn. Certainly Moodie states her own agenda clearly enough: "If these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from sinking their property, and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house, and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain" (489). Many times in her book she insists that the middle classes are not suited to the hard physical labour required to carve out a homestead, and should emigrate only to towns and cities. The Moodies had been given this very advice prior to their own emigration, and therefore settled on a rented farm. And Mr Moodie admits that, had they stayed on this Coburg property and bought the two adjacent,

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they would have become prosperous - but he couldn't resist speculation, buying uncleared land at five shillings an acre (248). On the other hand, the Moodies' frustration with vulgar and thieving neighbours whose unceasing scrutiny made them ashamed of their genteel ineptitude made the prospect of isolation rather appealing. Susanna, in particular, was mortified by her new situation. When she arrived in Canada, she expected to achieve the financial independence suitable to her station in British society by hiring others to work. Her shock at being required to perform physical labour herself was exacerbated by her incompetence at virtually every chore.58 However, the family's backwoods tenure resulted in a gradual but impressive transformation in Susanna's character, one she herself acknowledges with pride. "If we occasionally suffered severe pain, we as often experienced great pleasure, and I have contemplated a well-hoed ridge of potatoes on that bush farm, with as much delight as in years long past I had experienced in examining a fine painting in some well-appointed drawing-room" (353). She became selfreliant, strong and brave to the point where she could be a model to others, rather than a charity case herself. And this other plot surely undercuts the "social purpose" of the story. This, I think, is where the real dissonance, and the real interest, of the text reside. Moodie's practical advice not to emigrate is at cross-purposes with her personal example of spiritual development through adversity. Given what we now know about Moodie's religious background, it is tempting to see these two plots in terms of High Church conventionality versus Evangelical rebellion. Susanna Strickland, dutiful daughter of a good family, is forced to emigrate only to warn others to avoid her sad fate. Susanna Moodie, self-made woman, embraces her suffering as the route to enlightenment. This second plot is also suggested by evocations of the most famous work of Protestant travel literature, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Perhaps the most obvious reference occurs when that absurd dilettante, Tom Wilson, reproduces Crusoe's famous blunder of building a boat too far from water to launch it (81-2). But Moodie too is a kind of Victorian female Crusoe, seeing herself as "shipwrecked"; indeed, she presents herself as even more isolated than she really was, her husband always away, friends and relatives too far to help, children invisible and inaudible, offering no hugs, chatter, or amusing games.59 As a female Crusoe, Moodie is initially blasted by despair but ultimately saved by industry and faith. Reading between the lines, one could argue that she is saved by nothing more than subterfuge and patronage, since it is her desperate (and secret) letter to Sir

79 Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm"

George Arthur that results in her husband's being appointed the sheriff in Belleville. But Moodie is able to read her own actions as divinely inspired; part of a pattern of omnipotent care. She insists that Providence ultimately rewards faith, however mysterious its workings in the interim. Defoe makes clear the pedagogical justification for travel writing on the first page of his preface: "The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them, viz. to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our circumstances, let them happen how they will."60 Such works were often read as religious parables even when the moral was not explicit. For example, William Cowper found inspiration in the same matter-of-fact source as Defoe for his "Verses supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk." Though Selkirk never wrote anything himself about his solitary four-year exile on the island of Juan Fernandez, and though the others who popularized his story emphasized his pragmatism and adaptability, Cowper, like Defoe, saw the sailor's ordeal as a religious trial. Indeed, Martin Priestman notes that for Cowper "the travel-narratives of Cook and of many explorers were almost tantamount to prophetic books, revealing God's intentions for England (or sometimes, as in the incident from Anson described in "The Castaway/ for Cowper himself)."61 At the same time, Cowper felt the need to speak directly of his own life on the confessional model in The Task. Priestman remarks of this verse memoir that "the theoretical justification for such an experiment on such a scale rested on the Evangelical assumption that the private experience of 'religious persons' ought to be opened to the public in the name of morality and religion."62 And we have already noted how profoundly Moodie admired Cowper, particularly during those years when she was most evangelical in her own religious thought (see note 43). It is not surprising then, given her background, that Canadian Sketches should take the form of a spiritual memoir, particularly as travel and agriculture, the organizing activities of Roughing It in the Bush, were of exceptional symbolic significance in the Protestant literature of confession. To keep such a record was a common practice among "enthusiasts" such as she had once been. As G.A. Starr notes, the evangelical sects held that: "Since every man is responsible for the well-being of his own soul, he must mark with care each event or stage in its development ... The need for constant, almost clinical self-analysis was generally recognized ... diary-keeping frequently proved helpful in documenting and compiling one's spiritual case-

8o The Picturesque and the Sublime

history."63 This model of discourse subscribes to an extra-literary notion of unity: it points beyond the text to the author's life for authentication - exactly what Atwood complains of in Roughing It in the Bush. The spiritual memoir does not require unity of mood, or tone, or style, or theme; as an unfinished journey its progress is not always linear, since the author constantly remakes old errors and relearns old lessons. Thus Stephen Prickett notes that the autobiographical form of Wordsworth's Prelude "is in fact the traditional Christian form for describing spiritual crises ... The Confessions of Augustine, as has often been noticed, are not primarily about 'conversion' or 'spiritual crisis' per se; they are about the growth of Augustine's mind."64 The most generous way of reading Roughing It in the Bush, therefore, might be to see it as a record of the growth of Susannna Moodie's mind, a record drawing on both the travel guide and the Christian confession for its miscegenous form. The young woman who tried so hard to explain what she felt to her English family and friends in Enthusiasm continued to interrogate herself once she crossed the Atlantic. That same resistance to over-simplification which pervades her poetry, filling it with self-contradiction, enabled her, a few years later, to become the most complete chronicler of the settlement experience in English Canada. Roughing It in the Bush would seem to be precisely the kind of writing condemned by the authors of The Empire Writes Back: it is "produced by a literary elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power." Indeed, Moodie herself may be seen as typical of the venal "memsahibs" whose memoirs can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor can they be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists in the countries invaded. Despite their detailed reportage of landscape, custom, and language, they inevitably privilege the centre, emphasizing the "home" over the "native", the "metropolitan" over the "provincial" or "colonial", and so forth. At a deeper level their claim to objectivity simply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they are created.65

But I hope my reading has persuaded you that categorical dismissals embodied in language like "never," "in any way," "inevitably," and "simply" are inadequate to the complexity of the work. Moodie is not hiding the imperial discourse - she is wrestling with it.

"The Keen Stars7 Conflicting Message": Wordsworth, Shelley, and Charles G.D. Roberts' Ave

The tendency of literary critics to patronize the work and oversimplify the aesthetics of early Canadian writers diminishes somewhat when we move ahead to the Confederation group of poets. Bliss Carman, Charles G.D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott are solidly established in the Canlit canon, and have received sensitive readings. Nonetheless, they too are frequently dismissed, in James Reaney's phrase, as "dear bad poets" whose work we are obliged to respect but not to like. Few critics today are quite as contemptuous as were the modernists typified by F.R. Scott, who scorned "the milk-and-honey late-Victorian God-and-Maple-Tree romanticism of Bliss Carman."1 But many have felt uncomfortable, as he did, with the fusion of "late-Victorian" and "Romantic" qualities in the poetry of Carman's generation. Indeed, some seem to use such categories prescriptively rather than descriptively, as though writers ought to know which period or school they belong to, and stay there. This censorious tone comes through in evaluations like that of Fred Cogswell, who argues that Maritime poets of the period, imitating English poetry defensively to show that they were just as cultivated as their colleagues across the Atlantic, betrayed a lack of sophistication by using literary forms that were inappropriate to their social circumstances. The heroic couplet, designed to express the sensibilities of an urban elite and demanding a professional polish, came off badly when applied to the frontier

82 The Picturesque and the Sublime by amateur poets ... Romantic forms and techniques had been developed to resolve the tensions of a complex society going through its time of troubles. Maritime poets fitted them to platitudinous and decorative verse on general themes to satisfy a society whose concepts were narrow and homogeneous.2 On the other hand, Gaile McGregor and Margaret Atwood cite the influence of Romantic poetry as evidence of the reactionary character of Canadian writing. That is, they see Romanticism as obsolete, rather than as inexpressive of New World culture. Both sides concur that Canadian poets have no right to evoke the Romantic tradition because they live in the wrong place and/or at the wrong time. But as William C. Spengemann has remarked of nineteenth-century American literature, "Romantic literature is writing of a certain kind. Victorian literature is the work of a particular time. And American literature comes from a certain place. As a result, neither are the three subcategories logically compatible, establishing some necessary relation among Romantic, Victorian and American works, nor are they mutually exclusive, precluding the existence, say, of a Romantic work written in America during the Victorian period."3 One such work, albeit Canadian, is Charles G.D. Roberts' Ave: An Ode for the Centenary of the Birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892). An investigation into the origins of this poem demonstrates a deliberate and confident appropriation of the Romantic ethos and aesthetic. There was nothing nostalgic, amateurish or mechanical in such thievery. Roberts and his contemporaries might well have agreed with Milton Wilson's mischievous comment: "I even wonder whether colonialism may not be, in theory at least, the most desirable poetic state. It gives you a catholic sense of all the things poetry can do without embarrassing you by telling you what at this particular moment it can't."4 This first North American-born generation of anglophone poets were staking their claim to English literature as boldly as the English government had staked its claim to French Canada. What they wrote about English poets in their essays and reviews, and how they imitated them in their own work, tells us a great deal about what they thought poetry ought to be doing in this country. The best place to start our investigation is in the columns of "At the Mermaid Inn," written collectively by William Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott for The Globe in Toronto from 6 February 1892 until i July 1893. Despite the title's tribute to the English Renaissance, "At the Mermaid Inn" was topical in its interests. Thus, on 5 March, Lampman considers a local proposal "that some Canadian publisher should issue a memorial volume

83 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

of contributions by Canadian authors in honour of the Shelley anniversary/' and suggests that "Professor Roberts would certainly have something strong to say of the poet whom he is said to look to as a master. Mr Bliss Carman ... has already written a beautiful and original poem, which might form a chief ornament of any memorial volume."5 That Lampman was familiar with an obscure poem, "Shelley," which Carman had published in a Boston journal while at Harvard, may be taken as evidence of the wide reading done by this generation of poets.6 As far as I know, the poem has never been reprinted, so I give it below. Shelley One heart of all the hearts of men, Tameless nor free, Plunged for a moment in the fire Of old regret and young desire, A meteor rushed through air, and then What eyes can see? O rebel captive, fallen soul, Self-strong and proud, Throbbing to lift against the stars An angel voice - whose frenzy mars And frets the song which thou wouldst roll Aloft aloud! To thee was given half to mould That heart of thine (Knowing all passion and the pain Of man's imperious disdain), Into a song whose splendor told The dawn divine. It held the rapture of the hills Deep in its core; The purple shadows of the ocean Moved it to supreme emotion, The harvest of those barren rills Was in its store. Thine was a love that strives and calls, Outcast from home,

84 The Picturesque and the Sublime Burning to free the soul of man With some new life: how strange, a ban Should set thy sleep beneath the walls Of changeless Rome! More soft, I deem, from spring to spring, Thy sleep would be, Where this far western headland lies Beneath these matchless azure skies, Under thee hearing beat and swing The eternal sea. A bay so beauteous islanded A sea so stilled You well might dream the world were new; And some fair day's Italian blue, Unsoiled of all the ages dead, Should be fulfilled. Where all the livelong day and night A music stirs, The summer wind should find thy home, And fall in lulls and cease to roam: A covert resting, warm and bright, Among the firs. An ageless forest dell, which knows Nor grief nor fear, Across whose green red-berried floor Fresh spring shall come and winter hoar, With keen delight and rapt repose Each year by year. And there the thrushes, calm, supreme, Forever reign, Whose glorious kingly golden throats Hold but a few remembered notes; Yet in their song is blent no dream Or tinge of pain! Frye's Island, N.B., Canada7

Though excessively hyperbolical in its language and rhythms, "Shelley" is a tightly organized poem. The structure is symmetrical: five six-line stanzas describe the hero and five more describe the scenery where the poem was written. Rhyming abccab, the poem is

85 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

in iambic tetrameter except for lines 2 and 6, the "b" rhymes of each stanza, which are in iambic dimeter. It comprises a series of ambiguous statements: Is Shelley the only one out of "all the hearts of men" who is at once "Tameless" (i.e. untamed, in typically Shelleyan diction) but not free? Or is this the condition of all human hearts and the poet of Prometheus Unbound simply the best exponent of this dilemma? Shelley, "self-strong and proud," is frustrated by his inability to sing perfectly; he both overcomes the limitations of human existence and incarnates their inescapability. The description of the New Brunswick landscape is equally paradoxical. More akin to Shelley's restless spirit than the "changeless" city of Rome, its music is the "eternal" music of the sea, and its daylight, like that Shelley described in Adonais, "Italian blue." Similarly, though the timeless quality of the locale is emphasized, its beauty is held to exemplify the revolutionary "dawn divine" Shelley foretold. The correspondence between Shelley's contradictory spirit and that of "this far western headland" is anticipated in the description of his heart as holding both "the rapture of the hills" and "the supreme emotion" of the ocean. This linking of poet and place is by far the most interesting aspect of Carman's lyric. It is also, as Lampman recognized, highly original. Maia Bhojwani notes that Carman is proposing to replace "the decadent European context of Shelley's poetry with the Utopian idea of Canada as the New World, as yet untainted by history."8 The poet suggests that Shelley's conscious political ideals were only "half" his inspiration (11.13-18); "deep in its core" his heart held images of nature which compelled him to desire "some new life" for mankind (11.19-28). However, the scenery is notably devoid of human interest, and what it offers is a healing union with nature that is neither new nor, despite thrushes and firs, particularly Canadian. The landscape is conventionally "beauteous," the summer winds are full of music, the forest is "ageless," and so on. Still, although Carman's poem fails to persuade the reader either that Nature made Shelley a rebel or that Shelley's sleep would be "more soft" in Canada (1.31) - indeed, despite undermining his own conception of Shelley by suggesting that sleeping softly would be an appropriate fate - the juxtaposition of English poet and Canadian landscape lies behind not only his own later poem, The White Gull, but also Roberts' Ave: An Ode for the Centenary of Shelley's Birth. Perhaps Lampman's comments in "At the Mermaid Inn" inspired the events of the following summer, when Roberts invited Carman to come to Kingscroft for a writing holiday "to build ... 'Shelley' ... into an ode to be published with his own.'"9 This ode, The White Gull,

86 The Picturesque and the Sublime

uses the same stanza form as "Shelley" and even incorporates parts of the original poem verbatim. But in transforming an impassioned lyric of ten stanzas into an eight-part meditation of thirty-two, Carman diminishes the character of the original and squanders its energy. The new title alerts us to the change of focus: Shelley is displaced by a bird whose flight is said to be "something ... like [Shelley's] fame" (The White Gull 1.37). Whereas "Shelley" attempts a portrait of compressed power and furious self-contradiction, and Ave offers a minutely detailed account of Shelley's career pervaded by the language and imagery of Shelley's own poetry, The White Gull gives only the sketchiest idea of who Shelley was or what he accomplished. Hence Roberts' final judgement that, although The White Gull is "crowded with passages of poignant and haunting beauty," ultimately it fails to reach the first rank because of "some diffuseness of thought and incoherence of structure."10 Roberts abandoned his initial plan to publish their Shelley tributes together; Ave was printed privately late in December of 1892, with only one stanza of The White Gull - the sole stanza unchanged from "Shelley" - as an epigraph. What Roberts had hoped Carman might accomplish in revising "Shelley" may be discerned from the direction he took in Ave towards both more formality and more self-revelation. Like the classical poems he describes in his 1888 essay on "Pastoral Elegies," Ave is "the expression of a grief which is personal but not too passionately so, and which is permitted to utter itself in panegyric."11 As Tracy Ware notes, it includes the three chief elegiac components: lamentation, praise, and consolation.12 But Roberts dispenses with most classical machinery in Ave, evoking no nymphs, muses, or powers of Nature except in his exhortation to the waters of Lerici to mourn for the poet they have drowned (11.2ii-2o)13. And he emphasizes his distance from the pastoral model by calling the poem an ode. Moreover, while the stylistic formality of the poem reminds us of its relationship to elegiac tradition, autobiographical references insist on its relevance to contemporary Canadian readers. The result is quite moving: Roberts turns Carman's passionate but inarticulate assertion of relationship between poet and place into a persuasive testimonial. Where Carman simply states that Shelley's spirit would feel both "keen delight and rapt repose" ("Shelley," 1.54) in the variety of New Brunswick's scenery and seasons, Roberts gives us a reason to believe this: he explains how the ever-changing character of that landscape, which shaped him as a boy, prepared him to understand Shelley.

87 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

In his equation, the river with its "endless and controlless ebb and flow" (Ave, 1.86), represents Shelley's heart, while the "tranquil marshes" in their "vast / Serenity of vision and of dream" (11.8i-2) stand for his art. To quote directly: Like yours, O marshes, his compassionate breast, Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace, Was tortured with perpetual unrest. Now loud with flood, now languid with release, Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife Of tides from the salt sea of human pain That hiss along the perilous coasts of life Beat in his eager brain; But all about the tumult of his heart Stretched the great calm of his celestial art. (11.91-100)

In Roberts' language we recognize an allusion to Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty/' wherein "the awful shadow of some unseen Power ... visiting / This various world with as inconstant wing" (11.1-3) is requested to descend upon the poet and supply its "calm" to his life (ll.yS-Si).14 What is being invoked here is the sublime, at once "awful" and cathartic, resulting in the "great calm" of transcendent art. Thus Roberts goes even farther than Carman in transplanting the European Romantic movement to Canada. Where Carman boasted that New Brunswick offers "keen delight and rapt repose" ("Shelley," 1.53), he asserts that the paradoxical New Brunswick landscape incarnates something far greater: sublimity. More particularly, however, since Roberts has earlier declared that his "kindred heart" had been shaped by these "strange unquiet waters" (11.46-7), he is effectively claiming kinship with Shelley through a common third term: the Tantramar. This sort of tribute to a river, linking it to poetic vocation as inspired in childhood, originates with James Thomson's invocation in The Seasons of "the Tweed (pure parent-stream, / Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed, / With, silvan Jed, thy tributary brook)" ("Autumn," 11.889-o,i).15 Since Thomson, "scores of topographical and Georgic poets had repeated and amplified their debts to rivers, to early memories, and their apprenticeship to verse."16 Here we have the river of "perpetual unrest" whose tides stand for the "human pain" of daily life, and the "great calm" of the marshes which stand for an ideal realm beyond mortal suffering. The river traverses the marshes the way an individual life passes through eternity "with joy impetuous and pain supreme"

88 The Picturesque and the Sublime

(Ave, 11.84-6). As a "vagrant on the hills of Time" (1.6o), one may catch sight of the "still world of ecstasy" (l.ioz), but "that unroutable profound of peace, / Beyond experience of pulse and breath, / Beyond the last release / Of longing" can only be attained permanently in death (11.246-9). This last experience is attributed to Shelley, who in life was "urged ever by the soul's divine unrest" (1.144), but in death attained that union with the sublime he had glimpsed only fitfully through his poetry. So the Tantramar landscape, as emblematic of Shelley's journey, is also made to stand as a kind of paysage interieur representing the aesthetic of Roberts himself. As WJ. Keith notes, this choice of setting has profound cultural implications. "Surely we must rethink our glib assumptions about literary colonialism when we come upon a Canadian who, setting out to offer a poetic tribute to an English poet whom he had always admired, a poet who had died in the tempting world of classical antiquity, automatically (so it seems) begins in his own backyard."17 Roberts had already paid homage to this backyard in his most famous poem, "The Tantramar Revisited," which, in its depiction of New Brunswick landscape, clearly anticipates Ave. A brooding longlined meditation on mutability set amidst the scenery of childhood memory, "The Tantramar Revisited" is infused with more melancholy than is Ave, despite the latter's explicit mourning of someone really dead. Whereas Ave celebrates the mystery of origins and the power of nature to inspire creativity, "The Tantramar Revisited" brings the poet back to a much-loved place, only to find that its ability to excite him has faded with time. All he can do is remember: "Ah, the old-time stir, how once it stung me with rapture, - / Oldtime sweetness, the winds freighted with honey and salt!" (11.59-60) The title acknowledges that the poem is modeled on Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798" [my emphasis].18 Roberts' poem, although nearly a hundred lines shorter, is also in five sections, and presents a similar meditation on the sadness the passage of time brings to people. It also proposes a similar solution: self-renovation through contact with nature, especially in a place suffused with memories of happier days. But "The Tantramar Revisited" is much less philosophical and sweeping than Wordsworth's reverie; the solitary speaker remains focused on the natural scene, trying to bring his memories of the past into alignment with what he sees in the present. The emphasis, therefore, is quite different than in "Tintern Abbey": while Wordsworth reflects that landscape provides "a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused" (11.95-6)

89 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

which provides release for the spirit, Roberts is preoccupied with whether one can find any image of permanence against which the changes of one's life can be measured.19 He seems to feel that unless he can be sure that there is "in these green hills, aslant to the sea, no change!" (1.8) he will lose his grip on everything. Hence he scrutinizes the scenery minutely. In its pictorial detail, "The Tantramar Revisited" is closer to Wordsworth's early picturesque poems like An Evening Walk than to "Tintern Abbey." Both poems isolate the speaker above the prospect he surveys, and both direct the eye between foreground, middle ground and background.20 As well, "the banks / Of this fair river" ("Tintern Abbey," 11.114-15), "these steep woods and lofty cliffs, / And this green pastoral landscape" (11.157-8) are all generalized in Wordsworth. By contrast, the imagery is more vivid in Roberts' poem; for example, those famous "sea-spoiling fathoms of drift-net / Myriad-meshed, uploomed sombrely over the land" ("The Tantramar Revisited," 11.49-50). On the other hand, this last image is reconstructed from memory; it is what Wordsworth calls a "picture of the mind." After having insisted that everything is as he anticipated, the speaker has discovered a gap between the images his memory offers and those he sees around him. Memory displaces vision as we move from an opening assertion of the region's immutability to the recognition that time reigns here too. The poem breaks off with the speaker acknowledging that the Tantramar impervious to change is a "darling illusion" (1.63).21 This concession too reminds us of Wordsworth, for whom it may be "but a vain belief" ("Tintern Abbey," 1.50) that his memories allow him "to see into the life of things" (1.49). But he still cherishes the possibility, and when in the midst of "sad perplexity, / The picture of the mind revives again" (11.6i-2), it provides a resurgence of power which leads to the willed optimism with which he concludes the poem. Similarly, in An Evening Walk "Hope" - undaunted by the gathering darkness and "the weary hills, impervious" - throws "on darling spots remote her tempting smile" (1.412; my emphasis). But Roberts, whose experience of nature in "The Tantramar Revisited" stays firmly on the naturalistic level, cannot transcend his own logical ambivalence in pursuit of the sublime. Thus his poem ends uneasily, the landscape no longer bright and sunny but, like the houses scattered across it, "stained with time" (1.12). One reason for Roberts' inconsolability in "The Tantramar Revisited" may be simply that he has the example of Wordsworth before him, and therefore returns home self-consciously to claim solace as his birthright. Wordsworth discovers the healing effect of memory

90 The Picturesque and the Sublime

through experience; Roberts discovers it through Wordsworth. And like most readers of his generation, he underplays the genuine anxiety and ambivalence in Wordsworth, choosing to read "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her" out of its larger context of uncertainty (Tintern Abbey," 11.123-4). His contemporaries held Wordsworth to be the poet of light, not darkness; of "natural piety," never doubt. So Roberts recommends "Tintern Abbey" to the readers of his 1897 anthology of nature poetry as offering "to a restless age, troubled with small cares seen in too close perspective, the large, contemplative wisdom which seemed to Wordsworth the message of the scene which moved him" as though there were no disquietude in the poem at all.22 Similarly, in his introduction to Wetherell's Poems of Wordsworth five years earlier, he says that "the distinctive excellence of Wordsworth's poetry" is that it "conveys the secret of repose."23 "Repose" is scarcely that which is sought by the poet who writes in the 1814 preface to The Excursion that ... Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man My haunt, and the main region of my song. (11.35-41)

But Roberts doesn't acknowledge The Excursion or The Prelude in his introduction, and the selection which follows is based on that of Matthew Arnold, who was himself inclined to underestimate the ambivalence in Wordsworth's thought. As his choice of Arnold as mentor reminds us, Roberts was not alone in overlooking the way the sublime operates in Wordsworth's poetry. In a curious way, the more sceptical late-Victorian poets were about "the power of the self to generate compensation by regenerating itself," the more insistent they became that Wordsworth had been able to do this sunnily, peacefully and - always - successfully.24 Indeed, J. Hillis Miller goes so far as to suggest that a writer "betrays himself as a man of the Victorian age by his inability to experience a Wordsworthian presence in nature."25 We have to be cautious when it comes to interpreting the adjective "Wordsworthian." It has been used so often to describe a warm and fuzzy feeling in response to daffodils and rainbows that we can't

91 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

always be sure an author is referring to any particular quality in Wordsworth's writing when appropriating the poet's name. In other words, "Wordsworthian" frequently implies a sentimental trust in nature that we would be hard put to find in Wordsworth's own poetry. For example, Gaile McGregor, whose comments about the "simplistic Shaftesbury-Wordsworthian image of nature" we have already noted, also argues that "Wordsworthian diction, with its implications of a beautiful, benevolent nature, could only emphasize by contrast the harsh and threatening aspects of Canada. The more exquisitely enamelled the face of the wilderness is made to appear, the more conscious one becomes of the possibility that violence lurks just below the surface."26 And many other Canadian critics also dismiss Wordsworth as a pernicious influence upon poetry because of what D.G. Jones calls "an excessively benevolent conception of nature and an excessively passive conception of man's relationship to her."27 Atwood, for example, caricatures "Wordsworthian Romanticism" as requiring one "to feel that Nature was a kind Mother or Nurse who would guide man if he would only listen to her."28 And Les McLeod, while acknowledging that "Romanticism is the primary concept with which the theorist of the poetry of Canada's late nineteenth century must struggle," nonetheless rejects the term "Romantic" as inappropriate to describe Confederation poetry because "it posits a beneficial, harmonious and ideal interaction between man and nature" which he doesn't find in the work of less starry-eyed poets like Roberts.29 Oddly, despite the profound influence of Wordsworth everywhere in his own work, Roberts would have concurred with McLeod's evaluation. He too tended to see himself as more sophisticated than Wordsworth; for example, he boasts to Lome Pierce that, in The Book of the Native, he "aimed to carry the Wordsworthian nature worship beyond the point of Wordsworth, to make it more transcendental and more mystical."30 Roberts' introduction to Wetherell's Wordsworth, published the same year as Ave, gives us a clue as to why he was so condescending. He blames Matthew Arnold for being too enthusiastic an editor, arguing that Arnold was brought up in the camp of militant Wordsworthianism ... Hence it was inevitable that Arnold should tend to an overestimate of Wordsworth, as that he should fall into a depreciation of Shelley ... Had Arnold belonged a generation later, or had he looked with the eyes of continental criticism, we can hardly doubt that he would have placed Wordsworth amid, rather

92 The Picturesque and the Sublime than above, the little band of great singers who made the youth of this century magnificent.31

Responding in "At the Mermaid Inn" of 17 September 1892, Duncan Campbell Scott quotes Roberts on Wordsworth as a guide to "the soul's health" for "this breathless age," and then states: "To me it seems an evident contradiction to write so, and then to make the subject of the criticism equal with Byron and Shelley. For this ... is surely for us among the very greatest of powers." But it is clear that Roberts feels he must undercut Arnold's praise of Wordsworth if he is to reject his disparagement of Shelley. The two balance each other; as the value of one is increased, the value of the other declines. The polarization of Shelley and Wordsworth in Roberts' works of 1892 did not originate with him. It is implicit in much Victorian criticism. Thus Swinburne, also arguing against Arnold, asserts that "it is ... certain that of all forms or kinds of poetry the two highest are the lyric and the dramatic, and that as clearly as the first place in the one rank is held by Shakespeare, the first place in the other is held and will never be resigned by Shelley."32 By ignoring epic, which had traditionally shared the highest honours with drama, Swinburne is able to equivocate about Milton and leave Wordsworth out of consideration altogether. Wilfred Campbell embraces this strategy in "At the Mermaid Inn" when on 30 July 1892 he attempts to prove that Wordsworth's "Michael" is not poetry but prose, and a month later on 20 August concludes his panegyric on Shelley by proclaiming him "without doubt, the greatest lyric poet in the language." On the other hand, in his 10 December column he remarks that "so soon as a man is wild on the subject of Wordsworth, he becomes unjust to Shelley or Byron, and vice versa," and on 4 February 1893: "It is not the original Wordsworth that the Wordsworthians worship, but Arnold's Wordsworth. They don't even allow the poor old poet to give his own idea of himself or of his work, but say he was too much of a simpleton to see his own greatness. It is the same with the Shelleyites." Although Lampman doesn't actively take sides, he writes on 5 March 1892 that he finds himself repelled in Shelley "by the absence of something, which for lack of a nearer term I would call 'the human.'" Thus the terms of the debate are quite clear: If Shelley is sublime, Wordsworth must be picturesque; if Shelley writes lyrics, Wordsworth must write prose. Or, alternatively, if Wordsworth is wise, Shelley is foolish; if Wordsworth is humane, Shelley is cold. Roberts wanted to be thought sublime, and therefore felt compelled to belittle Wordsworth. But he couldn't help acknowledging his debt

93 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

in other ways. For example, the book he published the next year takes its title, Songs of the Common Day, straight from Wordsworth and, as if to balance Ave, contains a topographical sonnet sequence reminiscent of The River Duddon. And even in Ave itself Wordsworth is, as L.R. Early puts it, "the unacknowledged presence which pervades the poem, and which radically qualifies the speaker's relation to Shelley."33 The Wordsworthian influence in Ave is particularly obvious in the first eight stanzas, which describe the growth of the poet's mind during his childhood in the Tantramar. If, like Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, "The Tantramar Revisited" seems to ask "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" (11.56-7), Ave supplies an answer: it has become part of who the poet is. It is his permanent legacy; indeed, his inspiration. And therefore even if he can no longer feel the "rapture" of the "old-time stir," he can recreate it in poetry. Thus Roberts echoes his own earlier poem through his language and imagery, as though re-entering the landscape not only through the prism of memory but also through the medium of poetry. Once again, we find ourselves in a landscape where tranquil meadows balance turbulent waters. The descriptions of these waters are similar: "... the turbid / Surge and flow of the tides vexing the Westmoreland shores ("The Tantramar Revisited," 11.17-18), and "The sharp fierce tides that chafe the shores of earth" (Ave, 1.85). But the scenery is presented from different perspectives: in "The Tantramar Revisited" the prospect is surveyed from above and the speaker keeps his emotional distance, while in Ave he inhabits the scene from within and is ebulliently engaged. Ave infuses the depleted world of "The Tantramar Revisited" with the plenitude depicted in a later poem in elegiac metre, "The Pipes of Pan." This is a fantasy about the origin of poetry set by an idealized Tantramar, the river Peneus, where the god Pan cuts reeds for his pipes. The worn-out pipes he discards are picked up and played upon by mortals who thereby "Gather a magical gleam of the secret of life, and the god's voice / Calls to them, not from afar, teaching them wonderful things" (11.45-6, my emphasis). Similarly, in Ave Roberts declares that it is "no far flight" from the Tantramar to Shelley (11.101-3), since it was there that his "young and wondering eyes" (1.29) had been initiated, and there that he had received "the breath of inspiration" (1.34). In Ave, deities like Pan are no longer needed as intermediaries since, in good Wordsworthian terms, the child himself is now seen as "Nature's Priest" who "by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended" ("Intimations" Ode, 11.73-6). This initiation by the natural sublime combines the tremulously erotic mysticism of Shelley with

94 The Picturesque and the Sublime

a glad surrender of the unknown for an epiphany of everyday flowers in the manner of Wordsworth. Then the flower epiphany is succeeded by an observation of birds, continuing into the following stanza, far more accurate and naturalistic than is typical of either Romantic poet. So in the fourth stanza of Ave, we slide imperceptibly from Shelley's voice, to Wordsworth's, to Roberts' own. Purged with high thoughts and infinite desire I entered fearless the most holy place, Received between my lips the secret fire, The breath of inspiration on my face. But not for long these rare illumined hours, The deep surprise and rapture not for long. Again I saw the commmon, kindly flowers, Again I heard the song Of the glad bobolink, whose lyric throat Pealed like a tangle of small bells afloat. (11-31-40)

The "secret fire" reminds us both of Isaiah's coal and Shelley's, the "fading" one which symbolizes "the mind in creation ... which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness," and signals "the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own."34 There are also echoes of these lines from Shelley's Alastor: ... though ne'er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. (11.37-49)35

In abandoning his own voice and imagery halfway through the passage for the language and rhythms of "Tintern Abbey," Shelley

95 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

provides a model for Roberts. But typically, Roberts disparages the Wordsworthian prototype; he says of the opening movement of Alastor that it "shows something of the influence of Wordsworth. [But] Its diction has a majesty and a magic hardly attained by Wordsworth save in some few passages in the lines on Tintern Abbey."36 One might argue that the Wordsworthian presence in Ave is second-hand: the ghost of Wordsworth's influence on Shelley. Scenes of a solitary child's ecstatic tutelage by nature are prominent in Alastor and The Revolt of Islam, so Roberts' affinity for this theme might owe something to his reading of Shelley. Certainly he knew Alastor well, alluding to it frequently in Ave and, ten years later, editing it for publication with his edition of Adonais. It may be worth noting that neither in his notes on Alastor nor in the way he adapts the poem in the first part of Ave does Roberts acknowledge that it is a tragedy. The name Alastor means an evil spirit, and the poem tells of a talented poet who, blind to real human affection, dies prematurely in pursuit of a vision which proves to be nothing but a projection of his own narcissism. Such a plot challenges Wordsworth's credo that love of nature must lead to love of mankind, although Roberts ignores these implications.37 But then, Shelley himself seems to be ambivalent about his protagonist. His introduction warns us to disapprove of the poet's behaviour while the characterization which follows makes Alastor a Romantic hero. Moreover, although Shelley tells us that the poet's blood "ever beat in mystic sympathy / With nature's ebb and flow" (11.652-3), he sends him out to die in the desert as a cautionary example of what happens to idealists. At the very least, this is inconsistent; we are asked to admire someone whom we are warned not to emulate. This uneasy co-existence of two mutually exclusive points of view occurs in many of Shelley's works besides Alastor, most notably, perhaps, in "A Defence of Poetry" where the disjunction between platonic and realist poetics suggests some uncertainty as to the relationship between poetry and the world. His defense of the moral purpose of poetry is wonderfully calculated to persuade the most hardened pragmatist: poetry cultivates love by strengthening the imagination through exercise ("a going out of our own nature"). But he goes on to define the object of that imaginative love in purely abstract terms as "the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own," thereby rejecting most of reality as unworthy of either artistic representation or imaginative identification. How the artist is to discern the beautiful is not addressed; he simply lifts "the veil from the hidden beauty of the world."38

96 The Picturesque and the Sublime

Nor is the relationship of beauty to truth adequately treated, though he declares that poetry is "the image of life expressed in its eternal truth". Good classicist that he is, Shelley perpetuates the classical dilemma about mimesis. He says: "In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects" but doesn't acknowledge the gap between this view of art as imitation of what is, and the view expressed through most of his essay that art imitates what ought to be.39 Perhaps this is a moot point, since it is impossible for any artist, in any medium, to represent "what is" without, through the selection and arrangement of those elements represented, implying a belief as to "what ought to be." Nor do I wish to pursue these issues farther than is necessary to suggest the complexity and range of Shelley's thinking and its strenuous self-contradiction. Shelley is not inclined to resolve these contradictions; he simply returns again and again to the same problems to see if a new attack leads to a new solution. But Roberts ignores the ambivalence in Shelley just as he ignores the ambivalence in Wordsworth. As Wordsworth's poetry seems to him chiefly to promise "repose," so he declares that "tranquillity" characterizes Shelley's style in Alastor, and concludes that "the mood of this poem is one of rapt intensity, and there is always present that uplift and expansion of the spirit which comes of unbounded horizons."40 Unbounded horizons are emblematic of sublimity. But Roberts consistently glosses over the loss of control such horizons symbolize. The breakdown of normal consciousness in such moments, at the very least bewildering and, more typically, terrifying, is presented as inherently peaceful, rather than as leading painfully to a spiritual resolution. And he describes Adonais in similar terms, as producing "hopefulness ... consolation ... exalted thought ... uplifting emotion."41 This reading leaves out the poem's conclusion. Shelley laments the premature death of Keats in the conventional terms of pastoral elegy for the first thirty-seven stanzas, but then rejects those terms, according to which physical death is the end of human life, and continues in the terms of the "Defence." So he declares that, far from being extinguished, ... the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same (Adonais, 11.338-41)

97 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave Thus far Shelley follows Christian poets like Milton in adapting elegiac consolation to a belief in an afterworld.42 And thus far Roberts follows him - and no farther. The speaker who in "The Tantramar Revisited" mourned that "Hands of chance and change have marred, or moulded, or broken, / Busy with spirit or flesh, all I most have adored" (11-5-6) finds exalting the belief that "spirit," at least, is impervious to "change." In his introduction to Shelley's Adonais and Alastor Roberts tells us that Adonais supports the doctrine of personal immortality, citing as evidence stanzas 44 to 46, in which the spirits of other poets greet Adonais.43 He likes this idea so much he copies it in Ave, substituting more reputable "lords / Of Thought" (11.249-50) for Shelley's "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" (Adonais, 1.397). And he follows Shelley's narrative rhythm too, returning from this celestial welcoming committee to the unhappy mourners on earth. But here Roberts rests, himself chief mourner, performing the eulogy and translating the song from lamentation to rejoicing. Such complacent consolation is not the final movement in Adonais. True, Shelley rejoices that Adonais "has awakened from the dream of life" (1.344). But he also grieves that we others continue to "decay / Like corpses in a enamel" (11.348-9) while "cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay" (1.351). Nothing of this revulsion against corporeal life is carried over into Ave. Nor does Roberts acknowledge the final step in Shelley's syllogism: Adonais is not dead: it is we who in our dream of life are dead: let us then die into the higher life of Adonais. Shelley, in following his own argument to its logical conclusion, is bound to ask whether we ought not simply to welcome death as a release but rather to seek it actively as the fulfillment of our divine nature. Adonais concludes ineluctably with the speaker invoking his own death, albeit "darkly, fearfully" (1.492). This is where Shelley departs from elegiac precedent; however much Spenser and Milton might have wondered whether the dead have it easier than the living, they never felt it necessary to reject life itself in order to be consoled for the loss of their friends. Roberts anticipates later critics of Shelley in arguing that "the summit of attainment in the 'Adonais' is not reached until the poet's passion has carried him clear of his models."44 However, he contends that Shelley's originality consists in doing just what his models did, only better - not in doing something quite different. For him, the poem

98 The Picturesque and the Sublime

excels as consolation; Roberts does not concede that in invoking death for himself Shelley not only makes consolation redundant, he actually deconstructs the basis of his own poem as an act of mourning.45 Roberts ignores the radical discontinuities of Shelley's poem in his notes, commenting there, as in Ave, that once his spirit was liberated Shelley saw "face to face ... the living God," only then discovering that God's "healing name" was "Death" (Ave, 11.241-5). In this manner Roberts reconciles Shelley's nihilistic equation of life and death with conventional piety. As Tracy Ware notes: "By introducing Christian elements into an elegy for Shelley, and by remaining faithful to a Wordsworthian view of nature, Roberts mitigates the sharp dualism of Adonais, in which the phenomenal world is called "the dream of life."46 Although he attributes what is naive in nature-worship to Wordsworth and what is inspiring to Shelley, at a deeper level he reads them in the same way. He resists that which Shelley finds so seductive - riding the wave of the sublime away from everyday life - and substitutes a Wordsworthian acceptance of the quotidian as a relief from the alienation of transcendence. This pattern of experience, the conversion of apocalypse into "akedah" or a "binding down" to the earth, has been explored at length by Geoffrey Hartman.47 In fact, Roberts' Shelley closely resembles Hartman's Wordsworth. What we have therefore is a kind of hybrid Romantic, a "Shellworth" or a "Wordsley," not untypical of the age, perhaps, but nonetheless highly revealing. In later poems like "The Skater" and, particularly, "The Iceberg," Roberts acknowledges the otherness of nature and the disorienting experience of sublimity with a directness more common to his animal stories than his poetry. Nonetheless, sublime terror is allowed into Ave in the very last stanza, as though he recognizes that the poem would not be true to Shelley without it. Roberts notes that Shelley's conclusion is "most impressive in the solemn majesty wherewith it brings the poem to a close," so he may have been trying to reproduce something of this same rhythm in Ave.4S In its calculated magniloquence, his final stanza may also be an attempt to achieve some of that "Greek objectivity" Roberts admires in the conclusion of Lycidas by similar means: abandoning the personal voice.49 Roberts' conclusion comprises one long heroic simile, unrelated to anything else in Ave except the immediately preceding stanza. After re-enacting the cremation of Shelley and apostrophizing the poet as the "heart of fire, that fire might not consume" (1.281), Roberts thanks him for being the "poignant voice of the desire of life" (1.285) which has inspired him and roused his spirits "to a nobler strife" (1.287).

99 Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

Then he turns back to the marshes to take his leave also of them, and finds the Tantramar, appropriately enough, at full tide. The transition which follows from ecstatic completion to surrender is reminiscent of the initiation scene earlier in the poem; for a moment the Miltonic "wizard flood" Ponders, possessor of the utmost good, With no more left to seek; But the hour wanes and passes; and once more Resounds the ebb with destiny in its roar. (11.296-300)

The rupture of the serene mood is signalled by a dash, breaking off the poetic line; the "But" which follows the dash remains linked syntactically with the foregoing clause. Therefore, the idea introduced by the conjunction is forced to stand as the logical completion of what has preceded it, rather than as a new departure requiring a new sentence. So the structure of these four lines imitates the tides, being, paradoxically, both continuous and contrasting. The first two lines build up to a moment of completion and stasis; the dash acts as a fulcrum around which the tides turn; the last two lines ebb away, reversing both the meaning and the action of the first two. In this fashion Roberts prepares his transition to the unexpectedly military concluding simile, which also moves according to the rhythm of the tides. So might some lord of men, whom force and fate And his great heart's unvanquishable power Have thrust with storm to his supreme estate, Ascend by night his solitary tower High o'er the city's lights and cries uplift. Silent he ponders the scrolled heaven to read And the keen stars' conflicting message sift, Till the slow signs recede, And ominously scarlet dawns afar The day he leads his legions forth to war. (11.301-10)

Behind this image is the "roar" of "destiny" which concluded the previous stanza. We also hear resonances of metaphors such as "the tides of life" and "the tides of battle," conventionally associated with the sea as a symbol of human mortality. Nonetheless something odd is going on here, something, as Roberts says, "ominous." The tenor of

ioo The Picturesque and the Sublime

the metaphor doesn't quite conform to expectations: the ebb and flow of the tidal river is not actually compared to the ebb and flow of human life or to the waves of a battle. Rather, the full tide is like a "lord of men" in his solitary tower, reading the stars, and it is his arcane and isolated study which impels him out to battle as the tide ebbs. In part, this scholar-warrior evokes the Shelleyan idea of the poet as hero: in Adonais the great poets are "kings of thought / Who waged contention with their time's decay" (11.430-1), and in "A Defence of Poetry" they are "trumpets which sing to battle"50. Roberts' simile also evokes the beginning of Bliss Carman's "Shelley," especially as expanded to fill the entire third section of The White Gull. O captain of the rebel host, Lead forth and far! Thy toiling troopers of the night Press on the unavailing fight; The sombre field is not yet lost, With thee for star. (The White Gull, 11.6i-6)

Of course, the image of Shelley as "leader of the rebel host" was rather a cliche by the time Carman used it. Shelley may have given currency to the idea in his own description of Dante as "the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world"51. Arnold inverted this image in his notorious characterization of Shelley as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain"; Swinburne reprised it when he declared that, on the contrary, "Shelley was born a son and a soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's work."52 So Roberts' formal purpose here is clear enough: he is aiming for a final, recognizably Shelleyan image, that will pull together all the themes with which he has dealt in the poem. That stars are implicit in the idea of a fallen angel may also owe something to George Meredith's most famous sonnet, "Lucifer in Starlight," the imagery of which has much in common with Roberts' conclusion. An added impetus was doubtless the centrality of star imagery in Adonais.53 In Adonais, the star is Keats's spirit; it "beacons from the abode where the Eternal are" an invitation to Shelley to renounce life and follow (11.494-5). But Roberts' stars send a "conflicting" message: not, as we might have expected, conflicting messages, such as "life is truth; life is an illusion," but a message in conflict with itself or a message which leads him to be in conflict

ioi Wordsworth, Shelley, and Roberts' Ave

with himself. In other words, the stars (plural) send a single message which is nonetheless contradictory. Such a contradiction is implicit in the figure of the poet Roberts has projected as his model and spiritual guide - this "Shellworth" who is at once a transcendent spirit "on an endless quest / Of unimagined loveliness ... Urged ever by the soul's divine unrest" (Ave, 11.142-4), and a child of nature, whose dead body the waves are reluctant to relinquish, and whose spirit is incarnate in the Tantramar marshes. For this figure, the stars' message must always be susceptible of two interpretations, since they are at once representative of the beauty and beneficence of nature and, in their mysterious distance from this world, symbols of transcendence. How to "read" them is a problem in aesthetics as well as semiotics, for the reader has to decide whether they represent the real or the ideal. If they represent what is, their message must be acceptance of the world; but if they represent what ought to be they counsel renunciation. That the stargazer girds his loins for battle implies that Roberts wishes to reconcile the two readings. To do so he rejects both the pessimism of Alastor and the scepticism of Adonais; the hero learns that his proper field of action is this world. Such stoicism savours of Victorian notions of duty; as in Tennyson and Arnold, we hear the defensive rhetoric of the poet who does not want to be thought a mere solipsistic dreamer. But at the same time, the word "conflicting" suggests that Roberts is not altogether comfortable with this posture. Like Shelley, he can only resolve the old debate about the relative merits of the contemplative versus the active life by poetic hyperbole; we are impressed by his concluding simile, but no more persuaded by it than we are by the delightful notion that poets are really "unacknowledged legislators." Moreover, any impression of heroism we might be left with is undercut by the pervasive feeling of disaster in this last stanza. It displaces the mood of exaltation Roberts has so beautifully maintained in Ave, much as Shelley's conclusion in Adonais undermines the consolation offered by that poem. Roberts' recapitulation of the pattern of ecstasy and loss from what I have called the initiation scene makes the turning of the tide represent the waning of vision, and implies that action is, in fact, inferior to contemplation. So the Lord of Men arms himself in doubt, not faith. Just like Roberts as a boy, the mighty soldier cannot hold on to his cosmic meditation: his "hour wanes and passes" (1.299) as did "the rare illumined hours" of the speaker's New Brunswick childhood (1-35).54 Here too, as at the beginning of Ave, Roberts constructs a Shelleyan image, but uses it to present a Wordsworthian point of view. The

io2 The Picturesque and the Sublime

poem ends emphasizing the tragedy of lost vision, the same theme explored in Roberts' first elegy, "The Tantramar Revisited." The emotional centre of the concluding simile is the stargazer's grief at the ebbing of vision and his dread of the coming dawn. As a critique of human existence, this moment has a tang of the nihilism of Adonais. But unlike the speaker in Shelley's poem, the stargazer does not heed the beacon of death; he opts, however reluctantly, for life. As with his interpretation of the last movement of Adonais then, Roberts again "corrects" Shelley, without acknowledging that he does so. A psychoanalytically-oriented reader might observe that, like Arnold, who so often uses epic similes for exactly the same purpose, Roberts suppresses his own scepticism by tacking on a heroic conclusion. A post-modernist might enjoy the ambivalence, arguing that the tension between what he says and how he says it, the "conflicting message," is, in fact, the point of the poem. A postcolonial reading can accept the poem's lack of resolution as the price Roberts pays for following convention past the point of articulating his own situation - although a Canadianist might argue that irresolution is the Canadian situation! One thing is certain: try as Roberts the Critic might to argue that Romantic sublimity consists of tranquillity and repose, Roberts the Poet knows better.

New Provinces? or, In Acadia, No Ego

In 1893 Ave was published in a volume called Songs of the Common Day after a sequence of sonnets which served to balance the elegy both in length (thirty-seven sonnets to the elegy's thirty-one sections) and in style (restrained rather than grandiose, or, in the terms of this study, picturesque rather than sublime).1 We remember from stanza IV of Ave that "the deep surprise and rapture" of the sublime cannot endure for long (1.36) - the poet always finds himself back on earth with "the common, kindly flowers" (1-37)- The solace of the familiar is intimated in that odd but beautifully apt adjective "kindly"; the same spirit of tenderness pervades Roberts' sonnets, elevating what might otherwise seem merely virtuoso description into psalm-like meditation. Throughout the sequence the poet finds, if not rapture, then profound satisfaction in contemplation of the quotidian. At the same time, he does remind us, especially in the winter sonnets, that hidden in the ordinary is always a "cordial essence" ("The Mowing," l.n) or "germ of ecstasy" ("The Winter Fields," 1.12), however "unwittingly divine" ("The Sower," 1.7). Taken as a whole, the Songs of the Common Day propose a different ethos than the Romantic one of Ave, a more strenuous, agrarian moral, explicated here in the sestet of "The Cow Pasture." Not in perfection dwells the subtler power To pierce our mean content, but rather works Through incompletion, and the need that irks, Not in the flower, but effort toward the flower.

104 The Picturesque and the Sublime When the want stirs, when the soul's cravings urge, The strong earth strengthens, and the clean heavens purge.

A good example of how Roberts' absolute confidence in the sonnet form helps him illuminate an otherwise banal subject is "The PeaFields/' wherein the yearnings of a herd of cows stand for the aspirations of the spirit for beauty just beyond its reach. It is more than a little audacious for a poet whose most ambitious work has Shelley represent this hunger to turn his attention to browsing cattle. But I believe he carries it off. The Pea-Fields These are the fields of light, and laughing air, And yellow butterflies, and foraging bees, And whitish, wayward blossoms winged as these, And pale green tangles like a seamaid's hair. Pale, pale the blue, but pure beyond compare, And pale the sparkle of the far-off seas, A-shimmer like these fluttering slopes of peas, And pale the open landscape everywhere. From fence to fence a perfumed breath exhales O'er the bright pallor of the well-loved fields, My fields of Tantramar in summer-time; And, scorning the poor feed their pasture yields, Up from the busy lots the cattle climb, To gaze with longing through the grey, mossed rails.

One of the great pleasures of this poem is its sensuality: a sensuality not clumsily bovine, but, on the contrary, delicate and whimsical, and found as much in the rich interplay of consonance and assonance as in the impressionist discrimination of colour and light. The paratactic structure of the octave, with its breathless "and ... and ... and" construction, persuasively recreates the act of looking, as does the careful description with its simultaneous repetition and differentiation of shades of "pale." The speaker steps into the frame in a more analytic mode in the sestet, claiming the view ("well-loved fields," "my fields of Tantramar") and commenting upon it. Inevitably one makes the association between the speaker and the cattle gazing "with longing," but this analogy does no disservice to either, because the movement and gaiety of the scene draws us in too. By the end of the poem, it's not just the air that's "laughing."

1O5 New Provinces?

As with his reinterpretation of classical elegy in Ave, Roberts' use of the sonnet is radical in two senses: as a return to roots, and a gesture of independence. Having accomplished so much with the elegy, it is perhaps not surprising that he should wish to test himself within the confines of another great poetic form. What is surprising, however, is his use of the sonnet to present the Maritime landscape. Indeed, a glance through a contemporary anthology like William Sharp's Sonnets of this Century (1887) reveals surprisingly few poems dealing directly with nature. In the nineteenth-century English sonnet, "Nature as a revelation of spiritual truth, nature however beautiful, is increasingly seen as disjoined from, and indifferent to, man; and increasingly the emphasis is on man's plight in an alien universe: 'I, a stranger and afraid, / In a world I never made'"2 Moreover, as W.J. Keith has observed, "the descriptive sonnet, a poem that uses the fourteen-line form not so much to say anything of importance as to isolate and evoke the particular mood of a particular landscape, is rare in the history of the sonnet in English."3 And although sonnets themselves had undergone a revival with the Romantics, sequences were rare until Elizabeth Barrett Browning's bestselling Sonnets from the Portuguese (1847). Following her success, and in the tradition of the Elizabethans, later sequences such as George Meredith's Modern Love (1862) were "almost exclusively preoccupied with a novelistic delineation of amatory relations."4 The only real model available to Roberts for a nature sequence such as Songs of the Common Day was actually Canadian: Charles Sangster's Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods (i859)5. Rather than expressing alienation, Sangster's sonnets suggest that "Our life is like a forest" (VII, l.i), evoke the "Blest Spirit of Calm that dwellest in these woods" (V, l.i) and, meditating on "eternal change" in nature, note that "Man is awed, / But triumphs in his littleness" (VIII, 11.9-10). Sangster's twenty-two sonnets, proem and epilogue do tell the story of a summer romance, in the context of a past thwarting of love, but details of the relationship are extremely vague. (We must rely on biography to inform us that the poet's wife had died the previous year, only eighteen months after their marriage.) But rather than amatory relations themselves, what interests Sangster is the way in which a retreat to nature helps a young man possessed by tumultuous feelings regain some perspective on his life. Indeed, every forest creature has a familiar lesson for him: in sonnet IV, the ant and the bee; in VIII, fossils; in X, the snail, "Christian-like" in patience and resignation. As the animal analogies suggest, Sangster generally does not turn to nature to be transported, but to be instructed on how to improve

106 The Picturesque and the Sublime

himself. He evokes the picturesque rather than the sublime, another quality Roberts generally shares with him in this form. Indeed, Roberts' repertoire of images in his sequence includes picturesque touchstones such as winding roads, cattle, plough horses, "a little brown old homestead, bowered in trees" ("The Oat Threshing," l.i) and "stumps, and harsh rocks, and prostrate trunks all charred" ("The Clearing," l.i). But Roberts claims he "did not consider Sangster seriously at all," being solely influenced by "the best work in Europe."6 Certainly Roberts' sonnets, with their elegance of form and language, control of mood, and variety of description, go far beyond anything accomplished by Sangster, so it is perhaps no wonder he would wish to dissociate himself from his Canadian predecessor and evoke only Wordsworth by calling his sequence Songs of the Common Day. This title alludes to the poetic goals articulated in the preface to the 1814 edition of The Excursion. After the rhetorical inquiry why "Paradise, and groves / Elysian, Fortunate Fields" should be "A history only of departed things, / Or a mere fiction of what never was" the rhapsody unfolds: For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. - I, long before the blissful hour arrives, Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation: and, by words Which speak of nothing more than what we are, Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted: - and how exquisitely, too Theme this but little heard of among men The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish: - this is our high argument. (11.47-7iF

Wordsworth goes on to invoke the "prophetic Spirit" of inspiration, and to pray for "a gift of genuine insight" for his "Song" (11.83-8).

107 New Provinces?

Roberts too opens his sequence with a prayer the portent of which is identical to Wordsworth's: Make thou my vision sane and clear, That I may see what beauty clings In common forms, and find the soul Of unregarded things! (Prologue, 11.9-12)

In pursuit of this goal, Roberts avoids metaphor, preferring the occasional simile, or literal description leading to moralizing reflection. There are few hidden symbols in his work; rather, symbols are explicated as they might be to the thoughtful observer, who wonders to himself why certain sights and sounds interest him so much. Here again Roberts follows Wordsworth, who declares in his first sonnet that "Duddon, long-loved Duddon, is my theme" (1.14). Even when not addressed directly, the river remains the standard against which human accomplishments are to be measured. He professes to discover everything he needs to know about life from the exploration of his native landscape. Therefore, The River Duddon may be seen as a more ample version of An Evening Walk, or perhaps Wordsworth's revision of Descriptive Sketches, transferring the expedition from the exotic Alps to the familiar Lake District. Sangster precedes Roberts in locating a sequence very specifically in a Canadian setting, describing the local flora and fauna, but both Canadian poets incarnate the Wordsworthian sense of one's native habitat as inexhaustible.8 And just as Wordsworth resolves to "with the thing / Contemplated, describe the Mind and Man / Contemplating; and who, and what he was" (11.93-9), Roberts includes in his original sequence a fair number of poems which aspire to "philosophy." Most of these, however, form a separate group at the end of the sonnet sequence they have no seasonal identity, and are at once less concrete imagistically and more overtly emotional than the other pieces. Thus, as Don Precosky notes, the sequence really consists of two parts. The first twenty-six poems are ordered upon a temporal or causal principle; they do not merely belong together: they belong together in a specific order ... Together they tell the story of a year in nature in New Brunswick ... The remaining eleven poems, beginning with "In the Wide Awe and Wisdom of the Night", constitute not a sequence, but a group. Their sequential ordering is not as important as the fact of their being deliberately put in close proximity to each other. In these sonnets, Roberts usually omits specific details of setting and deals directly with ideas.9

In fact, only one of these final sonnets, "The Herring Weir," was included in the sequence as reprinted in Roberts' 1901 Poems. The

io8 The Picturesque and the Sublime

others were all moved out of Songs of the Common Day into a section entitled "Miscellaneous Sonnets." The "Prefatory Note" to this volume remarks: "Of all my verse written before the end of 1898 this collection contains everything that I care to preserve."10 Evidently, Roberts did not dislike these sonnets; he simply felt they were not integral to a sequence whose goal was described as to "find the soul / Of unregarded things" (Prologue). A comparison of Songs of the Common Day as it first appeared with successive versions in 1901 and 1936 shows a continuous process of simplification and clarification (see table). In "The Poetry of Nature," published in the American journal Forum in 1897, Roberts declares that the power in nature "which moves us by suggestion ... may reside not less in a bleak pasture-lot than in a paradisal close of bloom and verdure, not less in a roadside thistlepatch than in a peak that soars into the sunset. It works through sheer beauty or sheer sublimity; but it may work with equal effect through austerity or reticence or limitation or change."11 Given that he himself wrote poems such as "The Cow Pasture" and "The Autumn Thistles" - and that sonnets such as these are among his most widely admired works - it is not surprising that many critics have considered the paragraph above to be Roberts' most telling ars poetica. And the gradual pruning of Songs of the Common Day in the direction of austerity supports this interpretation.12 As we have already seen, debate about what constitutes legitimate poetic material had become fiercer with the rise of landscape poetry, and the enlargement of aesthetic categories beyond those Roberts calls "sheer beauty or sheer sublimity" had brought new perplexities. Mimesis was no longer just a neo-classical conundrum; whether poetry represents objective reality or subjective impressions, and if it does so through denotative language or, instead, by the feelings it evokes, were issues of immediate concern. This concern runs throughout the columns written by Roberts' contemporaries William Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott in "At the Mermaid Inn." The on-going argument over the respective merits of "realistic" and "romantic" approaches to nature accelerated in the final weeks of the column and perhaps contributed to its demise. On 17 June 1893, Campbell declares that "Wordsworth, who has been called the greatest nature poet, has never divorced nature from humanity in any of his work, and it is really, after all, man with whom he deals. The true greatness of Wordsworth lies in his simple, grand emotion, his power of entering into the humanities of the scene about him. He is not and never

109 New Provinces? The Evolution of Roberts' Sonnets Songs of the Common Day1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1i 12

Poems2

Prologue The Furrow The Sower (DT) The Waking Earth To Fredericton in May-Time (DT) When Milking Time is Done The Cow Pasture When Milking Time is Done The Frogs The Frogs The Salt Flats The Herring Weir The Fir Woods The Salt Flats The Pea Fields The Fir Woods The Mowing The Pea Fields Burnt Lands The Mowing The Clearing

Prologue The Furrow The Sower (DT) The Waking Earth The Cow Pasture

13 The Summer Pool

Where the Cattle Come to Drink (DT) Burnt Lands The Clearing The Summer Pool Buckwheat The Cicada in the Firs In September (DT) A Vesper Sonnet The Potato Harvest (DT) The Oat-Threshing The Autumn Thistles Indian Summer The Pumpkins in the Corn The Winter Fields In an Old Barn

14 Buckwheat 15 The Cicada in the Firs 16 In September (DT) 17 A Vesper Sonnet 18 The Potato Harvest (DT) 19 The Oat-Threshing 20 The Autumn Thistles 21 Indian Summer 22 The Pumpkins in the Corn 23 The Winter Fields 24 In an Old Barn 25 Midwinter Thaw 26 The Flight of the Geese 27 In the Wide Awe and Wisdom of the Night The Stillness of the Frost (BN) 28 The Herring Weir Midwinter Thaw 29 Blomidon The Flight of the Geese 30 The Night Sky 31 Tides (DT) 32 The Deserted City 33 Dark (DT) 34 Rain(DT) 35 Mist(oT) 36 Moonlight 37 O Solitary of the Austere Sky

Selected Poems3 Prologue The Flight of the Geese The Sower (DT) The Waking Earth When Milking Time is Done The Frogs The Cow Pasture The Herring Weir The Salt Flats The Fir Woods The Pea Fields The Mowing Where the Cattle Come to Drink (DT) Burnt Lands The Clearing The Summer Pool Buckwheat The Cicada in the Firs The Potato Harvest (DT) The Oat-Threshing The Autumn Thistles The Pumpkins in the Corn The Winter Fields In an Old Barn The Stillness of the Frost (BN)

NOTE: Those sonnets first published in In Divers Tones (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1887) are noted as (DT), those from The Book of the Native (Boston: Lamson, Wolfe, 1896) are noted as (BN), and a title in italics entered the sequence with the 1901 revision. 1 Songs of the Common Day (Toronto: William Briggs, 1893) 2 Poems (New York: Silver, Burdett, 1901) 3 Selected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1936)

no

The Picturesque and the Sublime

could be a minute scenic artist, such as the descriptive sonnet writers we have today."13 Then in the very next column, Lampman praises Herbin's The Marshlands, quoting as an example of his excellence exactly the kind of sonnet Campbell depreciates. Scott picks up the discussion about Wordsworth in the penultimate column, before Campbell ends all possible dialogue rudely, if humorously, with the following raspberry, published on the first of July: At Even I sit me moanless in the sombre fields, The cows come with large udders down the dusk, One cudless, the other chewing of a husk, Her eye askance, for that athwart her heels, Flea-haunted and rib-cavernous, there steals The yelping farmer-dog. An old hen sits And blinks her eyes. (Now I must rack my wits To find a rhyme, while all this landscape reels.) Yes! I forgot the sky. The stars are out, There being no clouds; and then the pensive maid! Of course she comes with tin-pail up the lane. Mosquitoes hum and June bugs are about. (That line hath 'quality' of loftiest grade.) And I have eased my soul of its sweet pain. (John Pensive Bangs, in The Great Too-Too Magazine for July)

As Pope showed us blithely in Peri Bathous: or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), failure of the sublime results in bathos. What Campbell demonstrates here, equally well, is that failure of the picturesque gives us kitsch.14 Because publication of "At the Mermaid Inn" was suspended after this column, some critics have taken Campbell's parody to be an attack on his colleague, Archibald Lampman. He certainly was attacking Lampman's point of view in their on-going discussion, but the style of the parody is quite unlike that of Lampman. It is much closer, in fact, to a parody sonnet Lampman himself had published in a "Mermaid Inn" column thirteen months earlier, on 2 June 1892, and attributed to his "friend the sonneteer." This mysterious personage argues that "The best way to impress your subject on the reader is to cast it in a totally unsuitable form. It's the contrast that does it, you know." Then he demonstrates his point by reading the following: Reality I stand at noon upon the heated flags At the bleached crossing of two streets, and dream,

in New Provinces? With brain scarce conscious, now the hurrying stream Of noonday passengers is done. Two hags Stand at an open doorway piled with bags And jabber hideously. Just at their feet A small, half-naked child screams in the street. A blind man yonder, a mere hunch of rags, Keeps the scant shadow of the eaves, and scowls, Counting his coppers. Through the open glare Thunders an empty waggon, from whose trail A lean dog shoots into the startled square, Wildly revolves and soothes his hapless tail, Piercing the noon with intermittent howls.

The ensuing dialogue is also recorded: "Certainly you have outdone yourself this time," I cried. "You have violated every law of moral dignity and literary decency. I prefer not to hear any more of your so-called sonnets." My friend instead of answering me broke out into a roar of coarse and offensive laughter. He crushed up his papers into a couple of pellets, and, filliping them into my face, strode rudely out of the room. The poor fellow has talent if he would only apply it in a serious and sensible way.

As F.W. Watt has commented, "it is obvious that Lampman was not so scandalized by his friend the sonneteer, his alter ego, his Satanic spirit, or whoever he was, as a literal reading of the scene would suggest; he perhaps regretted that decorum would not allow longer and more fruitful visits."15 At this time, the only book Lampman had published was Among the Millet; the only sonnet in it which resembles "Reality" in its confrontation with the more sordid aspects of urban life is "The Railway Station." By contrast, most of the other sonnets are subjective and emotional, with titles like "Perfect Love," "Despondency," "Music," "Solitude" and so on. Their language and imagery is conventional; they would scandalize no one. Others are given a natural context, such as "A Night of Storm" or "Winter Thought," but as the title of "An Old Lesson from the Fields" indicates, they do exactly what Campbell recommends: interpret nature as it relates to human endeavours. The isolated figure of the meditative poet appears in virtually every piece, to remind us who is putting together the scene and why it is important. Only a very few sonnets are primarily descriptive: "In November," "Solitude," "Autumn Maples," "The Dog," and "March." And even in these, the use of figurative language and point-of-view insists that we understand nature to be the

112 The Picturesque and the Sublime

context for the speaker's personal reflections rather than the locus of an exercise in aesthetic representation. Moreover, Campbell himself seems to have valued Lampman's work for its idealism rather than seeing it as woodenly realistic. His "Bereavement of the Fields/' an elegy for Lampman written shortly after the poet's death in February 1899, mourns that he will "No more, with eyes adream and soul aloft, / In those high moods where love and beauty reign / Greet his familiar fields, his skies without a stain" (11. 5-7).l6 He imagines that, having been "enfranchised," Lampman now moves among "Wordsworth, Arnold, Keats, high masters of his song" (11.44-9). Given Campbell's view of Wordsworth as the ideal nature poet, placing Lampman among this company suggests admiration rather than disdain for his work. Nonetheless, the modern editor of the "At the Mermaid Inn" anthology, Barrie Davies, comments that "At Even" bears "a cruel resemblance to Lampman's [poetry]," especially as it is followed by "tongue-in-cheek criticism, which refers to such poetry as 'millet-like in its terse realism.'"17 But in fact, the text reads "Millet-like," so while Campbell may have been taking a dig at Lampman's volume Among the Millet, he was more likely targetting Roberts, whose sonnet "The Sower" alludes to Millet's most famous painting. Moreover, the "poet" of "At Even," John Pensive Bangs, is clearly a reference to "the American versifier John Kendrick Bangs [whose ditties] appeared regularly in important magazines such as The Century."18 Not only were Roberts' sonnets in Songs of the Common Day more realistic than those of Lampman, but he was both more prolific and more frequently published in important American journals - and thus more likely to be lampooned by comparison with someone like Bangs. And Songs of the Common Day had just come out to great praise at the time of Campbell's column. Whether or not Roberts was the intentional and Lampman the incidental target of Campbell's ire, we can be sure of one thing: he intended his comments to embarrass all those who persisted in writing nature lyrics once he had decided his own emphasis on description in Lake Lyrics and Other Poems (1889) had been misguided.19 He was not alone in his disdain for the direction poetry was taking: Roberts himself was to write several articles deploring the vulgarity of modern poetry and applauding Canadian poets for resisting the excesses of imagist technique and socialist ideology. As late as 1931 he exclaimed that "Cubism, imagism, futurism, have had their fantastic way with the people, who, ashamed to acknowledge their bewilderment, have

113 New Provinces?

hastened to acclaim them lest they be thought conventional."20 Nonetheless, as Campbell's parody makes clear, Roberts too was becoming increasingly "modern" - that is, terse and objective. Roberts' 1901 revision of Songs of the Common Day is earlier than the date usually given for the beginning of Canadian modernism: the publication of Arthur Stringer's collection of free verse, Open Water, in 1914. But the movement towards restrained diction and concrete imagery in Roberts' sonnets can certainly be seen as going in a modernist direction, even if he had yet to dispense with closed form. By contrast, the tired sentiments and grandiose imagery of Stringer's poems are not up-to-date just because he doesn't rhyme. Stringer's famous foreword argues passionately against "necrophilic regard for ... established conventions"; he declares that modern poetry "is remote and insincere, not because the modern spirit is incapable of feeling, but because what the singer of today has felt has not been directly and openly expressed. His apparel has remained mediaeval. He must still don mail to face Mausers, and wear chain-armour against machine-guns."21 And there are a few poems in this collection, particularly those which use anaphora for a paratactic structure reminiscent of Walt Whitman, which seem to be authentically enabled by their form. These include "Milkweed," "The Steel Workers," "At Charing-Cross," and the following: One Night in the North West When they flagged our train because of a broken rail, I stepped down out of the crowded car, With its clamour and dust and heat and babel of broken talk. I stepped out into the cool, the velvet cool, of the night, And felt the balm of the prairie-wind on my face, And somewhere I heard the running of water, I felt the breathing of grass, And I knew, as I saw the great white stars, That the world was made for good!

But this poem works as much because of patterned repetition in language and metre (especially in lines i and 3, as against 2 and 4) as because of unexpected liberations from form. Moreover, this kind of epiphanic moment is repeated so often, and sometimes so trivially in the book, and is so clearly counterpoised to "black hours" (in which "Blind fate has bludgeoned my bent head, / And on my brow the iron crown / Of sorrow has been crushed"), that both lose their persuasiveness and read as established conventions themselves. It is hard to see what is modern about such poems as "Black Hours,"

ii4 The Picturesque and the Sublime

"Some Day, O Seeker of Dreams," "Before Renewal/' "The House of Life," or "Life-Drunk." In other words, Stringer's work rarely lives up to the expectations engendered by his foreword. It would be more accurate to say that most of the poems in Open Water escape tedium only because they are in free verse; open form, rather than allowing the poet to express new ideas, enables him to express conventional ones in a slightly new way. It may be objected that prosody is the only aspect of poetry that can be made new. But the modernist thesis was - and remains - that the world underwent cataclysmic change during and after World War i, and that the old forms carried implicit values to which no one could (or ought to) subscribe anymore. According to this argument, all formal constraints, whether of rhyme and metre or of larger units like stanza or verse form (sonnet, sestina, and so on) are, by definition, reactionary. Louis Dudek, for example, while conceding that Lampman's sonnets are the best work of the period, argues that they are ultimately meretricious because they subscribe to an obsolete form. On the other hand, he describes Stringer's foreword to Open Water as "an early document of the struggle to free Canadian poetry from the trammels of end-rhyme."22 He even discusses P.O. Call's preface to Acanthus and Wild Grape in identical terms, despite the fact that Call argues for increased poetic freedom rather than simply in favour of open over closed forms - and demonstrates the versatility he's after by offering works in both styles in the two halves of his collection.23 As R. Alex Kizuk notes, "Call pursues the same unities of concept and feeling in both parts of the book ... in the two title poems "Acanthus" and "Wild Grape," content is sublimely unaffected by form ... Both announce that beauty is eternal."24 Two other themes - love, and courage in the face of war - also unify the two halves of the book. Nonetheless, Munro Beattie asserts that the acanthus poems "illustrate conventional modes, and manage to be as inane and hackneyed as most other Canadian poems of the period. The wild grape poems are intended, on the other hand, to demonstrate the superiority of free verse."25 But neither Call's foreword nor his poems "demonstrate" such a thesis. Nor can one imagine a writer publishing half a book of deliberately terrible poems without making it clear they were intended as parody! This is especially unlikely in Call's case, given that thirteen of these thirty-two "inane and hackneyed" poems are reprinted from his British chapbook In a Belgian Garden (1917). Far from being in the vanguard of modernism, Call did not continue his experiments in vers libre for long; his next book, Blue

ii5 New Provinces? Homespun, consists of forty-three sonnets in three sequences. The first and longest of these, from which the collection takes its title, consists of twenty-three impressions of French Canada and its inhabitants. Unlike Roberts' views of the Maritimes, Call's sonnets are frankly emotional. They make no pretense to cool aestheticism in form or feeling. The other two sequences, "From a Walled Garden" and "Simples" are even more subjective, exploring the individual's relationship to nature in a familiar Romantic idiom.26 Another writer frequently described as the first modern poet in Canada is W.W.E. Ross. He too wrote sonnets that have been disregarded by critics anxious to argue that free verse is the only authentic modern prosody. Indeed, the introduction to Shapes & Sounds: Poems of W.W.E. Ross, in which Barry Callaghan makes the claim for Ross's pioneering status, misrepresents the poet in order to support this claim. First, Callaghan asserts that "Imagism, the kind of poetry Eustace wrote, is at the base of all modern verse," although in this very collection of 122 poems, only seventy-one can fairly be described as imagist.27 The others include twenty-two free verse poems on abstract subjects like love, death, and art; six of Ross's own prose poems and eight translations of those of Max Jacob; eleven rhyming poems and one rhymed translation; and three sonnets. Second, the editors of Shapes & Sounds, say they "like to think that if W.W.E. Ross had lived to compile a collection of his own poems these are the ones he would have wished to preserve" - implying thereby that Ross would have conceded to their virtual rejection of his entire volume of sonnets, one of only three books published in his lifetime.28 This would seem to go against what Ross himself has to say on the subject: On Art Art makes from time to time some form unseen Before and fills it with a content true, So that it stands triumphant in the view, High beauty with no intervening screen; We seek the mystery that lies between The execution and the impulse new The starting, - and the exact method too Whereby the hands of art their triumphs glean; But all in vain. The secret is not told Even into the ears of wisest men, Who stand perplexed before such mystery. Art takes new forms and yet retains the old, Efficient as at the very moment when They were engendered in such secrecy.

n6 The Picturesque and the Sublime

As well as arguing for the continued efficacy of old forms, this sonnet is one of a group described as "Sometimes Quite Imitative," and echoing poets like Shakespeare and Shelley. Other pieces in the book on subjects like the persistence of classical mythology or the power of beauty support its argument. However, by the time Shapes & Sounds was put together, Ross had recognized that his reputation as an early modernist was what had revived interest in his work, and was content to let his sonnets be overlooked. In effect, he became complicit in rewriting his own poetic history. For example, the three sonnets included in the book are all dated 1932, the date of publication, not of composition, and placed in the second section of the collection as though they were written later than the "laconics." This misrepresentation no doubt contributed to statements like that of George Woodcock that "Ross found his inspiration drying up around 1930 [and] turned unsuccessfully to the very traditional forms (sonnets and rhymed quatrains)."29 But in his own foreword to Sonnets (1932), Ross notes that they were written from 1923-30; that is, contemporaneously with the free verse published in Laconics (i93o)3°. He stated his goals for the sonnets as follows: "The general idea was to employ the 'clean' language of free verse without the lack of rhythm or pattern which offended me in [modern poets] except some of Pound etc. As regards Sonnets I had the notion that longer lines were needed to express ideas adequately and the sonnet form seemed suited to this purpose. I was ditched by my inability to carry over into them - the prestige of the models being so great - the aforesaid 'cleanness'."31 In other words, Sonnets and Laconics balance each other; together they constitute his version of Acanthus and Wild Grape. It may be worth noting that Ross's sonnets are more regularly Petrarchan than those of any of his Canadian predecessors, including Sangster. And, on the other hand, most of his free verse wants to be dactyllic hexameters; frequently it gives in to almost complete regularity, whether in early poems like "Wild Rose," "Death Hearing" and "Pacific," or late ones like "Sounds" (1940) and "Autumn Maples" (1958). Ross's imagination was clearly possessed by formal conventions, as he seems to acknowledge in a letter to Ralph Gustafson of 23 September 1956 "The laconics form was developed in 1925 in an attempt to find one that would be 'native' and yet not 'free verse,' one that would be unrhymed and yet definitely a 'form.'"32 Thus the free verse foreword of Shapes & Sounds argues for: These pieces in a style more "North American,"

ii7 New Provinces? perhaps, or in a manner more "Canadian" than the most of what has been put down in verse in Canada, are not asserted to be so; But it is hoped that they will seemingly contain something of what quality may mark us off from older Europe, something "North American" and something of the sharper tang of Canada.

Unfortunately, to my ear, this unrhymed statement of poetic intention is as clumsy, trite, and prosaic, as his sonnet on the sonnet. Granted, most of Ross's free verse poems are not as bad as this, but many are sufficiently banal that the huge claims made for his accomplishment become intriguing. In general, an obsession with novelty of technique has been the most unfortunate legacy of the modernist movement. But the reverence with which Ross is regarded today indicates something more particular: the extraordinary pressure the critical establishment in Canada has felt to derive a genealogy of local modernism. When he revised Songs of the Common Day yet again for the 1936 Selected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Roberts followed the 1901 order very closely. However, he abandoned the presentation of the poems as a sequence, calling them simply "Sonnets of the Canadian Scene." This is a further stage in the elimination of the subject: without the structural continuity implicit in the idea of a sequence, the inference of coherence and point-of-view of a single speaker's ongoing experience of the scene cannot be made. In effect, he removes himself from the picture. A tendency towards impersonality can be seen from Roberts' earliest work, which relies on Greek mythology, through his animal stories, to a late achievement like "The Iceberg." In Ave, however, we saw something quite different: an exuberant, even defiant, appropriation of what M.H. Abrams has called "The Greater Romantic Ode" to describe a New Brunswick childhood as sufficient cause for the poetic vocation.

n8 The Picturesque and the Sublime

Ave celebrates the individual, but it was hard for Roberts' generation to convince themselves or their readers of the legitimacy of this response at the end of the nineteenth century; self-consciousness about what Keats had called the "egotistical sublime" led to a withdrawal from such confident assertions of the mutuality of person and place, and an insistence on "objective" description as a chastening discipline. The dialectic enacted in Roberts' 1892 volume between the sublime (Ave) and the picturesque (Songs of the Common Day) is paradigmatic. Still, virtually every poet drawn towards the sublime has been, at the same time, disturbed by the implications of valuing one's imaginative transformation of reality over reality itself. What Keats tried to do with his doctrine of negative capability was to resolve the dilemma by escaping subjectivity: the poet was to be receptive to sublimity, but to stay focused on its source outside rather than on its effect upon himself. He wanted "a life of sensations rather than thought." Indeed, Arthur Henry Hallam considered that Keats and Shelley should be described as "picturesque" because they were "poets of sensation." This was meant as praise, for he held that "this powerful tendency of imagination to a life of immediate sympathy with the external universe, is not nearly so liable to false views of art as the opposite disposition of purely intellectual contemplation."33 This observation, from Hallam's 1831 essay "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry," anticipates a central tenet of what we call "modern poetry," usually summed up by the Imagist motto No Ideas But In Things. But the theory was already implicit in the Romantics and explicit in the writings of many of Hallam's contemporaries. As Carol T. Christ has noted, the Victorians' "concern with what they feel are the dangers of Romantic subjectivity explains their various attempts to construct an epistemology which derives the feeling with which we respond to objects from the qualities of the objects themselves. 'To see the object as in itself it really is' is the business of the critical power, Arnold tells us."34 In other words, valorization of the image as the central feature of poetry derives from a conviction of the unreliability of the subject. This ethos led initially to Wordsworth's use of "spots of time": in order to anchor an instant of intensely personal feeling in the world of shared material experience, the poet tries to recreate the physical circumstances which provoked - or at the very least provided a context for - the private revelation. Walter Pater describes this procedure for the aesthetic movement as art's search for the "exquisite moment." And James Joyce borrows from the language of the Church to redefine it for the modernists as "epiphany."

H9 New Provinces?

At the same time as they strove for objectivity in the representation of images, the Victorians also experimented with different poetic forms to find some way to lessen the dominance of the lyric subject. Browning donned the masks of dramatic monologue, Tennyson moved from confession to narrative, and Arnold from private to public utterance. All three explored the theme of the isolated spirit and its longing for release from the burden of consciousness; all three deplored the perils of solipsism. And they took the reading public with them: when the most comprehensive anatomy of the Romantic sublime, The Prelude, was finally published in 1850, Victorian retreat from its epistemology was already established. Tennyson's In Memoriam, appearing the same year, was a bestseller; Wordsworth's posthumous work was not. According to C.K. Stead, the driving force of modern poetry since the Georgians has been away from discourse towards the image. This is the "new poetic" he describes in his book of that name35. It was not that earlier writers neglected imagery; it was that they blathered on before, around, and after its appearance. Thus Ezra Pound describes Wordsworth as "a silly old sheep with a genius, an unquestionable genius, for imagisme, for a presentation of natural detail." John T. Gage, who quotes this comment, notes that Pound's "reluctance to say the same for the poetry of the Victorians was not due to any fundamental disagreement about the ends of poetry as perception of an exquisite moment, but to the ostentatiousness ... of their versification."36 Josephine Miles has traced the history of poetry from the Augustan sublime, full of high sentiment, through Wordsworthian directness of both observation and discursive statement, to the rejection of such directness as manifesting presumption - first in the Victorian movement towards implication and symbol, and later in imagism and a general preference for unmediated description.37 Ultimately, modernists reverse Wordsworth's emphasis, preferring to trust the "eye" over the "I." The retreat from the Romantic sublime leads to a revival of the picturesque, in its modern, free-verse incarnation: imagism. Imagism, though a short-lived and rather disorganized movement in and of itself, has had a profound and lasting impact upon the way the natural world is represented in modern poetry. While the picturesque fashion had encouraged accuracy of description, it also perpetuated the medieval habit of "divine analogy": that is, all phenomena were seen to be part of a moral tableau the explication of which awaited the discernment of the poet. The physical world was

12O The Picturesque and the Sublime

of interest for what it could teach one about the metaphysical. But the imagists insisted on creating a mood in the reader through the exclusive use of imagery. No rhetorical flourish, no editorial comment, was to disturb the absolute pictorialism of method. As A.J.M. Smith put in it, "the purpose of an imagist poem is to perceive and to present perception."38 Graham Hough observes that: "We know well enough what the Imagists are tired of. They are tired of Arnold's 'Dover Beach' ... the melancholy nineteenth-century automatism by which no natural object can appear without trailing its inglorious little cloud of moralizing behind it."39 Though they had already become uncomfortable with the position of the Romantic subject, Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, and their contemporaries did not have the twentieth-century prejudice against abstract or conceptual language (or against eloquence). Interested as they were in description, they did not expect it to carry the entire rhetorical burden of a poem. However, during the reign of what Eliot called the "objective correlative," the resources of poetry became increasingly limited to whatever could be portrayed as out there, in the world. But ironically, as Carol T. Christ has noted: "The dream that objects without interpreting discourse can carry their own meaning not merely for a single consciousness but for the whole mind of Europe commits Eliot to a poetry that contains a far greater amount of ambiguity than more Romantically based theories of poetic composition do."4° In his own comments on the rise of modernism, Roberts maintains that "the pervading sanity and balance of the Canadian temperament, its obstinate antagonism to extremes, saved us from the grotesque excesses indulged in by some of our English and American contemporaries. Modernism, so called, came without violence to Canada. It was with us not revolution but evolution."41 Many recent critics have come to the same conclusion, and ascribed it to a similar reading of the Canadian character - although where Roberts sees "sanity and balance" they find fault. John Metcalf speaks for this camp when he declares: "Insularity, creaking conservatism, and ignorance delayed the impact of the 'modern' in Canada by some forty years."42 Canadian literature only became a subject of concerted scholarly inquiry in the second half of this century; Northrop Frye was a leader in this regard. But neither he nor his followers were frank about the strong modernist bias with which they approached works of earlier periods. At the same time, they were all too cognisant of their cultural insecurity. The result was that the only explanation they could imagine for the slowness of the modernist movement to catch on in

121 New Provinces?

Canada was that our writers were second-rate. The corollary to this assumption was that any writer who exhibited the correct (modernist) allegiance must be superior. Hence the apotheosis of Ross. Louis Dudek provides an analysis of early nineteenth-century Canadian literature according to the modernist credo: "Bourgeois culture was languishing in an emotionless and decently smothered poetry of cosmic abstractions and abstract Christian virtues, at best of nature references which were unexperienced and unvisualized. Then came Imagism, Chinese poetry (as analyzed in a famous forgotten essay by Fenollosa), and finally even modern psychology, to tell us that this was death, not life. The real image is the live thing."43 Besides the dismissive tone, and the speciousness of describing nature references in pre-Imagist verse as "unexperienced and unvisualized," we also find intellectual elitism via the reference to the Fenellosa essay (which, far from being forgotten, is constantly referred to and quoted from by Pound scholars). Unfortunately, Dudek is not the only writer to take this tone. Margaret Coulby Whitridge is another: "It is scarcely surprising to find Lampman moving away from the influences of Keats and Arnold, Wordsworth and Tennyson, to which he and most other Victorian poets originally succumbed. Lotus-land was left far behind when the poet faced reality with a sense of impending terror and tried to depict the coming age."44 The propensity of critics speaking from prejudice to make errors is well-known. An obvious example occurs in Jean Mallinson's essay on Roberts, when she recapitulates the syllogism that i) a new country provides new experiences which 2) can only be expressed in a new language, so therefore 3) colonial poetry, availing itself of existing conventions, must inevitably be false. To let her speak in her own words: The weakness of colonial style is ... its often timid reliance on traditional models which belong to the poet linguistically but which are not appropriate to the novelty of experience in a new setting. It is perhaps particularly unfortunate that Roberts and others in his time had or thought they had, not only a style but a philosophy of nature which was hard to evade. Had he been writing from eighteenth century models it might have been more apparent that pastoral poetry as it was then written in England was absurdly inappropriate as a model for writing about his experience in the Canadian bush, and he might have invented something new.45

She gets so carried away that she fails to notice that Roberts was not writing about "his experience in the Canadian bush," but about life on well-established Maritime farms. Among other caveats, Mallinson's

122 The Picturesque and the Sublime

lapse is a salutary reminder of how prevalent the "bush-garden" myth has become. Finally, in Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists, Brian Trehearne says that he hopes to establish "the profound continuity of Modernism with the prior literary traditions it appeared at first to have routed." Nonetheless, he too states that "the Canadian Modernists are set keenly apart from the poetasters of their time by virtue of their recent Aesthetic rather than late Romantic poetic derivation."46 So, according to Dudek, Canadian poets in the first quarter of this century wrote abstractly Christian poetry with ineffectual imagery; to Whitridge, their work was unrealistic and socially irresponsible; to Mallinson, it was hollowly derivative; to Trehearne, formally inept. All of these charges, and more, may be found in the manifestos and reviews of A.J.M. Smith ("Wanted: Canadian Criticism," The Canadian Forum, April 1928), Leo Kennedy ("The Future of Canadian Literature," The Canadian Mercury, December 1928), and F.R. Scott ("New Poems for Old," The Canadian Forum, 1931). Perhaps the most famous - and certainly the best-known - site of this criticism is Scott's poem "The Canadian Authors Meet." First published in the McGill fortnightly Review in 1927 (the year after Roberts became the president of the Toronto branch of the Canadian Authors Association), it has had an extraordinarily wide and continuous dissemination. Scott reprinted it (minus the self-mocking conclusion) in the first anthology he published with Smith, New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (1936), and included it again in their next joint effort, The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective, and Disrespectful Verse Chiefly by Canadian Writers (1957). Even today the poem is anthologized as though it were credible as literary criticism, or even, as Desmond Pacey calls it, "a complex condemnation of a whole set of values, of a whole way of life."47 Chester Duncan is a rare dissenting voice, arguing that the poem "in its adolescence and unkindness, gets worse and worse with the years."48 Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the poem is its characterization of the female members of the association as "virgins of sixty who still write of passion" by a callow observer whose remarks reveal him as equally ignorant of women, older people, and passion itself. But as Bentley notes of the poem, "its central satirical and critical tenets - that to be cosmopolitan, objective, high Modern and male is to be good and to be patriotic, subjective, Romantic and female is to be bad - have been enshrined by the high Modernist Munro Beattie in no less influential a place than the Literary History of Canada."'49

123 New Provinces?

On the other hand, it is precisely because of its "adolescence" that the poem can get away with such unkindness. As Dudek reminds us, "Scott's poetry ... is an example in our literature of the turning away of one generation from another, in this case the son departing from the ways of the father."50 Similarly, in the special Canadian issue of Poetry he edited in 1941, E.K. Brown remarked on the "bitter vengefulness" with which nineteenth-century writers were pursued by the generation of their grandchildren. In addition to the usual complaints that the older poets were too formal and only wrote about nature, he adds the observation that "much of what the younger generation deplored arose from a cause of which they still seem strangely unaware: the silence and sterility of the generation between."51 It is certainly true that Carman and Roberts got extra mileage out of the fact that there were no powerful young poets to challenge their pre-eminence during the first quarter of the century. On the other hand, the blandly uplifting rhetoric that passed for literary criticism on their part did not inspire any confidence that the old guard was as seriously committed to art as it fancied. Carman's silly lectures, Roberts' suave generalizations, and Duncan Campbell Scott's fixation on "beauty" were recognized by younger writers for what they were: attempts to smooth over any challenge to poetry in general and to their own work in particular. Indeed, the scorn heaped on his predecessors by Smith in his original preface to New Provinces seems to respond as much to the public statements of the older generation about poetry as to their poetry itself. He declares complacently that: "The bulk of Canadian verse is romantic in conception and conventional in form. Its two great themes are nature and love - nature humanized, endowed with feeling, and made sentimental; love idealized, sanctified, and inflated. Its characteristic type is the lyric. Its rhythms are definite, mechanically correct, and obvious; its rhymes are commonplace."52 But if we actually peruse the anthologies he singles out for blame - The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse and Garvin's Canadian Poets - we find a great many strenuous ballads and narratives based on aboriginal or folk materials, some satire, some elegy, and many works that simply do not fit his general descriptions. And in his 1976 "Confessions of a Compulsive Anthologist," Smith admits that "despite the tone of rather youthful arrogance" to be found in this preface, at the time he "knew practically nothing about the historical development of a genuine Canadian poetry."53 This is exactly why his preface was suppressed - E.J. Pratt, Robert Finch, and the publisher Hugh Eayrs disliked "the tone of it and the

124 The Picturesque and the Sublime

general impression which will be left on the public mind that Canadian literature had to wait for us to get its first historical success."54 By contrast, the preface substituted by Scott makes only the most timid claim to "a development of new techniques and a widening of poetic interest beyond the narrow range of the late Romantic and early Georgian poets," and even admits that the "search for new content was less successful than had been the search for new techniques."55 Perhaps Scott was feeling beaten down by the two-year process of getting the anthology out, and he had warned Smith early on that "You will have to be careful not to make claims for a greater radicalism than this volume will show."56 At any rate, his modesty proved prophetic of the book's lack of impact on the literary scene; of the eighty-two copies sold in the first ten months, ten were purchased by Scott himself, and reviews were equally sparse. As with the canonization of Ross, it is extraordinary how reverent literary history has been with respect to New Provinces. John Ferns is a typical advocate in arguing that, although this odd anthology didn't come out until 1936, and although it was "little bought and read when it appeared," it somehow "helped to establish, albeit belatedly, a modern poetry movement in Canada."57 Surely it would be more accurate to say that it has established, retroactively, a turning-point in Canadian culture: a point when a talented new generation of poets publicly dissociated themselves from the post-Romantic aesthetic. Although they had been preceded by Stringer and Ross, Smith and Scott have had far more impact through their long and active literary careers than had the earlier modernists. This is really why New Provinces has become so important: it portended the imminent triumph of modernist theory (and, to a lesser extent, practice) in Canadian literary life. The book itself hardly lives up to the claims of its authors. As noted above, Smith objected to "the bulk of Canadian verse" for being lyrics with correct rhythms and commonplace rhymes. Yet almost every poem in the anthology rhymes, and many are in regular iambic pentameter. Moreover, the most daring moment is not to be found in the few unrhymed pieces like Finch's "The Hunt," or Scott's flat-footed cut-up prose in "Efficiency," but rather A.M. Klein's disguised sonnet in section V of the most ambitious piece in the collection, "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens." In his rejected preface Smith had also complained that: "The most popular experience is to be pained, hurt, stabbed or seared by beauty - preferably by the yellow flame of a crocus in the spring or the red

125 New Provinces?

flame of a maple leaf in autumn."58 Similarly, in his essay "Direction for Canadian Poets," published the same year as New Provinces itself, Leo Kennedy condemns his colleagues for producing "Jingo utterances from mental vacua; stereotyped descriptions of loons, lakes, pine trees, prairies and other natural Canadian phenomena," etcetera.59 So we should not expect to find their anthology opening with the almost purely formal exercises of a Robert Finch. Nor should we expect any nature poetry, especially that deliberately evocative of the Canadian landscape. But what of Scott's "Trees in Ice" or "March Field," Pratt's "Seagulls," Kennedy's "Shore," or Smith's own "Creek"? Indeed, Mr Cosmopolitan Smith himself employs most of Kennedy's detested stereotypes (substituting ducks for loons, it is true), in what is perhaps the best-known poem in the book, "The Lonely Land." Desmond Pacey made available the three successive versions of this piece, from its first appearance in The McGill Fortnightly Review of 9 January 1926, the subsequent revision published in The Canadian Forum of July 1917, and the final version of New Provinces. He suggests that: "All these changes, with one possible exception, effect an improvement in the poem: they tighten it, make it more concrete and exact. The one exception is the addition of the final four lines, which seem to me merely to make explicit and abstract what was implicit and concrete."60 It is hard to disagree with his approval of Smith's revisions when one compares the pseudo-Yeatsian form of the original stanzas with those we know now: Hark to the wild ducks' cry And the lapping of water on stones Pushing some monstrous plaint against the sky While a tree creaks and groans When the wind sweeps high. It is good to come to this land Of desolate splendour and grey grief, And on a loud, stony strand Find for a tired heart relief In a wild duck's bitter cry, In grey rock, black pine, shrill wind And cloud-piled sky.61

However, the original poem is actually shorter, at twenty lines, than the final version, at thirty-eight. And the original is absolutely direct, both in its emotional presentation and in its physical details. So what

126 The Picturesque and the Sublime

happens in revision cannot be a matter of "tightening" or becoming more "concrete." The revision is really a matter of rhetorical emphasis: the old Romantic self-presentation, the tired heart seeking relief among the scenes of nature, is no longer persuasive to readers like Pacey. It's acceptable for the speaker to attribute bitterness to the spray, and passion to the cries of the wild duck - to animate the landscape with his feelings - but not to acknowledge them himself. Modern readers are uncomfortable with the explicit editorializing of the closing quatrain, but not with the first occurence of this evaluative voice in the penultimate stanza, because there it is accompanied with lots of imagery. And in general, the imagery has improved: the language is fresher, more interesting, sharper. In fact, what we see Smith doing here is exactly what we saw Roberts do before him: emphasizing description and, at the same time, trying to limit and control the reader's experience of the speaking subject so as not to evoke, too clearly, the tradition of Romantic sublimity implicit in any scene of an individual's colloquy with nature.62 Smith goes much farther prosodically than Roberts does, creating the typographical illusion of free verse by breaking up a rhyming poem into short lines. But, oddly (in spite of himself?) he also evokes a memory of nature-sonnets like those of Roberts by dividing his poem into three equivalent stanzas (eleven lines, eleven lines, twelve lines) followed by a short rhetorical conclusion, not unlike the three quatrains and concluding couplet of the English sonnet. "The Lonely Land" even has the traditional "volta" or turn after the first two sections, where it moves from description to reflection upon the meaning of the scene. In its bones, it remembers sonnet form very well. So despite the novelty of its layout in 1936, there is a good deal that is conventional about "The Lonely Land." Moreover, as George Woodcock remarks: "The familiar cedar and firs and wild ducks' calls in a poem like 'The Lonely Land' lead us into a landscape in its feeling as mythological as any painted by Poussin for the encounters of Gods and mortals."63 Similar scenes can be found in many of F.R. Scott's poems, with a slightly different emphasis: the land is still inarticulate because, as he puts it in "Laurentian Shield" (1946), it has not yet been "written on by history," but eventually it will be transformed by "the full culture of occupation." Curiously, though he speaks of "occupation," Scott, like Smith and other proponents of this nationalist vision, doesn't recognize that the land is empty neither of people nor of history. As Gary Boire notes, "from the midst of these declarations of a decolonized aesthetic, paens for an indigenous art, Canada's indigenous peoples are conspicuously absent. In the process of centring himself, the self-styled

127 New Provinces?

pioneering artist either marginalizes native people or renders them altogether invisible."64 Scott's recourse to Greek mythology to summon new Canadian legends is, in this regard, particularly telling. To make the land less lonely, he and his modernist confreres summon the same Mediterranean zephyrs that whispered to Gary on the Plains of Abraham. To imagine a Canadian future, they evoke a European past. In this regard, as in so many others, the modernist project is not nearly as new as its advocates like to believe. As D.G. Jones reminds us: "Except that it looks north rather than west, 'Laurentian Shield' recapitulates in miniature the nineteenth-century long poem: its pioneering theme, its basic figure whereby the land becomes articulate in a material syntax which will yet be a civil sentence in the pastoral mode."65 Despite their belief that they were finally discovering an authentically Canadian poetic, Smith, Scott and their associates were actually rephrasing a traditional vision in the language of the day. Ignorant of their poetic forbears as they might have been, avid as they were to denounce them, they inherited an ideology in spite of themselves. This is certainly one reason for the phenomenon Sandra Djwa notes: "The resonant image of the Twenties was The Solemn Land/ 'The Lonely Land,' the northern land, but not The Waste Land. Critical comments that Canadians did not produce poems analogous to Trufrock' or 'Mauberly' and hence a version of English and American modernism, do little to illuminate modern poetry in Canada. The cultivated disillusionment that characterizes such poems is simply not representative of the Canadian culture of the Twenties."66 For as Thomas Weiskel remarks, "the wasteland motif of Romantic and Modernist literature presents an abridgment of the sublime moment so that we ... await futilely the restorative reaction which never comes, except ironically."67 Djwa's "cultivated disillusionment" is equivalent to Weiskel's "irony"; neither can coexist with the evocation of the sublime. And the sublime still had a powerful hold on the Canadian psyche, despite critical insistence on impersonality and objectivity. In fact, this impulse towards the sublime may add another dimension to Robert Kroetsch's famous witticism that Canadian literature "evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern ... the country that invented Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye did so by not ever being Modern."68

Song to the Rising Sun

His rejected preface to New Provinces demonstrated A.J.M. Smith's dislike of the "maple leaf school" of Canadian poetry, and his belief in the necessity for an internationalist style. This division of Canadian literature, an abiding theme in his critical writings for many years to come, was made explicit when Smith assigned his contemporaries to either "native" or "cosmopolitan" traditions, and then showed his clear preference for the latter, in the first edition of The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology.1 Oddly, in the light of most other Canadian criticism, he categorized writers like Roberts and Carman (who not only used traditional forms but lived and published abroad) as "native" rather than "cosmopolitan." He reserved the latter distinction for poets he genuinely admired. As Don Precosky notes: "The kind of poetry he was praising was the kind he had been writing and promoting in critical essays almost twenty years earlier in Montreal."2 Smith felt the age demanded a poetry of formal complexity, intellect, and metaphysical wit - classical virtues, though, like T.S. Eliot, he promoted them as stringently modem. He read for these qualities, elevating them above whatever else a poem might have to offer or a poet espouse, and consequently alienated many of his contemporaries. Though no one cared much what he felt about earlier Canadian literature, those who subscribed to the American style of modernism (formally open and experimental, socially engaged, linguistically demotic rather than arcane) objected to his British take on it, and a storm of controversy followed.

129 Song to the Rising Sun

Dorothy Livesay wrote a piece for The Canadian Forum agreeing with his division of poets, but rejecting "the mannerisms of Montreal" for the social commitment of the native tradition.3 Patrick Anderson, one of Smith's favourites, then accused her of "a 'colonial' fear of cosmopolitanism,"4 to which she replied: "If I betray 'a "colonial" fear of cosmopolitanism/ how is it that while those of Mr. Anderson's generation were attending English public schools, I was observing at first hand the rise of fascism in France and Germany; and while they were being psychoanalyzed, I was doing everything possible, through organization and through written poetry, to aid in the liberation of Spain?"5 In the same issue of the Forum in which this bit of righteous selfpromotion appeared, W.W.E. Ross published a deftly ironic attack on the idea that there really were native and cosmopolitan traditions, arguing that all good poetry must necessarily be local, or at most regional.6 But his common sense did not have much effect; Ross was too detached from the literary life of the country to serve as a moderating voice in this debate. The party most aggrieved by Smith, and most determined to demolish his arguments, was John Sutherland, editor of the Montreal journal First Statement. Since most of the poets praised by Smith had appeared in a rival publication, Preview, and the two magazines were seen as representing the two schools of modernism, Sutherland inevitably experienced Smith's introduction as something of a personal affront.7 He retaliated in editorials and essays through several issues of First Statement. The first volley was "Literary Colonialism," in which Sutherland criticizes Smith's introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry for failing "to understand that a poet preaching politics in the guise of Auden may be just as colonial as a member of the C.A.A. praising Britain in the metres of Tennyson." He argues that Smith's cosmopolitans are as colonial as his natives: they simply choose more recent foreign models to emulate.8 Sutherland takes up this theme again in his editorial to First Statement of April 1944, entitled "Cosmopolitanism and Our Literary Provincialism," and engages Smith more directly in a review of The Book of Canadian Poetry published in the same issue. According to Sutherland: "Not only is the distinction, as he has made it, a vague one, but it is hardly possible to imagine a Canadian Literature of the future that lacks either native qualities or cosmopolitanism of outlook. The editor's thesis is not convincing because it does not notice a blending of the two traditions already taking place in Pratt and in Livesay, and in a group of younger

130 The Picturesque and the Sublime

writers who have recently appeared in Canada/'9 He then attempted to substantiate the point with his own anthology, Other Canadians, in 1949-10 The introductory materials in the book represent Sutherland's most sustained attack on Smith's view of Canadian literary history. For example, "Mr. Smith and the Tradition/" the preface to Part i, declares that: At the back of Mr. Smith's mind there is no doubt that the "cosmopolitan" is the only tradition of Canadian poetry: that it is the direction in which the future is tending as well as the established fact of the past ... [but] The traditional bias of Mr. Smith's criticism means that his allegiance to the Good - i.e. the cosmopolitan - is fixed and irrevocable but it also means that a Bad must be invented over which the Good can duly triumph. If cosmopolitan Good is to be victorious in the accepted manner, then a devil - i.e. the native tradition - must be conjured up to challenge it."

Unfortunately, he goes on to trumpet his own nonsense: that no Canadian literary tradition at all can be said to exist because "We could only use the word tradition if we believed that the poetry was so blended with the life of the country that it was able to reach into the present and influence its course." Despite Shelley's definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators," it is hard to think of many examples of poetry having such power (or to imagine a future occasion when it might). As bp Nichol observes ruefully, "They think we have power - all we have is the power to bend spoons."12 At the same time, inconsistently for someone so opposed to foreign influence, Sutherland is optimistic about a future dedicated to "'schools' and 'movements' whose origin will be American," declaring that "such a period is the inevitable half-way house from which Canadian poetry will pass towards an identity of its own."13 The implication, of course, is that no such identity exists as yet. Such an admission gravely undermines his attack on Smith. Nonetheless, Sutherland's arguments affected Smith seriously enough that he modified the format of The Book of Canadian Poetry in its later editions. In his preface to the second edition in 1948, Smith notes his "abandonment of the division of modern poetry into a 'Native Tradition' and a 'Cosmopolitan Tradition/" but nonetheless contends: "Such a division exists - indeed, has existed from the beginning - but it is neither so fundamental nor so wide as the breakup of the material into two parts was taken to imply."14 As well, the second edition devotes a lot more space to the question that preoccupied Sutherland, like so many of his predecessors and successors: what constitutes the "Canadian-ness" of our poetry?

131 Song to the Rising Sun

Whereas in his original introduction Smith felt it was self-evident to insist that our poets ought to be "Canadian," his revision adds two pages of discussion as to the inhibiting effects of colonialism, defining it as "a spirit that gratefully accepts a place of subordination, that looks elsewhere for its standards of excellence and is content to imitate."15 With these words, he makes clear his common ground with Sutherland: both critics see Canadian writing of the past as crippled by inauthenticity, and detect in their contemporaries the seeds of a genuine literature. They simply differ as to who these harbingers might be. By his third revision to the anthology in 1957, Smith underplays their opposition even further, collecting many more poets from the First Statement group, and including a tribute to the late Sutherland associating him with Preview. Meanwhile, Sutherland's 1951 article, "The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry," confesses that the socialist movement he had prophesied in Other Canadians had proved to have "very shallow roots" and argues that, by contrast, Smith's emphasis on the religious orientation of modern poets had been "substantially right."16 Sutherland himself had become a Roman Catholic convert, somewhat ironically in the light of his original disparagement of "Bishop" Smith. However, despite this resolution, the original terms of the Smith/ Sutherland debate remained clear, and reverberated for years. As Malcom Ross notes: "In his attack on Smith [Sutherland] is, in the main, a Canadian continentalist resisting British influence ... twenty years after Sutherland's "Other Canadians," Robert McDougall, in his impassioned essay "The Dodo and the Cruising Auk: Class in Canadian Literature," is urging Canadian writers to abandon the cosmopolitan and urban tradition of educated culture."17 Similarly, in 1968 Julian Symons argues that we should stop looking to British and American models, declaring that there are no universal aesthetics and that indigenous ways of writing will only come into being if we reject tradition/8 whereas ten years later, David Solway echoes Smith: "Our poets are most truly Canadian not when they are Canadian but when they are eclectic."19 As David Staines concludes, our critical history "has been the history of finding a balance ... first between the authoritarian standards of the imperial powers at the centre and the seemingly non-authoritative standards of the provinces, then between the critical debunking of the cosmopolites and the unquestioning enthusiasms of the provincials."20 The most interesting variation on the what is Canadian identity and where can I get some theme is the extraordinary hostility aroused by

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the Vancouver poetry magazine, Tish, among many Canadian academics, and the equally exaggerated claims made by its advocates for the journal's revolutionary character. Although the journal was only published from September 1961 until mid-1969, few "literary quarrels in this country have been so rancorous or so long-standing" as that over the value of Tish.2'1 The leading spokesman for nationalist opposition to the journal has been Robin Matthews; others, like Keith Richardson, have simply gone on to elaborate his particular lines of argument.22 To Matthews, the existence of a Canadian poetic tradition is axiomatic. Therefore, what modernists from the McGill group to the editors of Tish propose is nothing less than a hostile take-over of Canadian letters. Or to quote directly, "the McGill movement eventuated in Sousterian colonial-mindedness, and it, in turn, was followed by the Black Mountain Imitation School, theories of 'North American' poetic sensibility and publications like Boundary 2 and Cross Country, both of which serve to 'continentalize' poetic imagination. The result is not to bring two poetic imaginations into fruitful dialogue. It is to assimilate Canadian poetic production into the U.S. tradition."23 His most telling criticism of the Tish group and their mentors is that, unlike Sutherland, they were grossly ignorant of Canadian literature. His least convincing line of argument is that the Black Mountain group of writers was both homogeneous in style and imperialist in its aspirations, and, moreover, that post-modern poetics are implicitly - and exclusively - American. Like Matthews, Ken Norris sees Tish as a logical outgrowth of the McGill group's modernism. And he too sees this modernist aesthetic as resulting in a complete break with earlier poetics. But whereas Matthews wishes to revitalize what he believes to be a genuine, if lost, tradition, Norris argues that "there is no intelligent continuation after the Confederation poets."24 Throughout this era of controversy, the major preoccupation has been to determine what makes poetry "Canadian." In the early years of our literary history, the answer generally was the land. Canadian poetry inhabits the Canadian landscape; it describes nature, and explores human responses to and interactions with natural phenomena. It is unique not by virtue of its language, or use of formal conventions, but because of the physical world it evokes. Hereness constitutes whatness. Even after the First World War this faith was still strong among some. Lionel Stevenson declared in 1924: "In Canada the primordial forces are still dominant. So Canadian art is almost entirely devoted to landscape, Canadian poetry to the presentation of nature ... The

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poetic mind, placed in the midst of natural grandeur, can scarcely avoid mysticism. It is not the sectarian mysticism of the Old World, steeped in religion and philosophy, but an instinctive pantheism, recognizing a spiritual meaning in nature and its identity with the soul of man."25 Eli Mandel called this the "environmental" slant of Canadian literary criticism. Surveying its pervasiveness, he reminds us that "not only 'national character' but the 'wilderness' itself is a conceptual framework, and that far from being a determinism, an environment may be a human creation."26 Mandel's observation is particularly useful in the light of the great shift in cultural values which took place during the modernist period. Suddenly, nature seemed insufficient as subject - or even as context - and we find influential critics like E.K. Brown declaring, in 1943, that "Canadian writing has been in the main a supplementary kind of writing, in which the substance of most great literature was not employed."27 Similarly, A.J.M. Smith dismisses the Confederation group's claim to be truly national because they wrote too much about nature and too little about society.28 That nature poetry never fell out of popularity with the public or the conservative establishment is suggested by P.K. Page's contemporaneous complaint that prizes still go to poets who write of "the first trillium on the hills," and her advice to defiant novices to "Hitch-hike to the towns."29 Hugh Kenner sounds the same note of exasperation ten years later: The surest way to the hearts of a Canadian audience is to inform them that their souls are to be identified with rocks, rapids, wilderness, and virgin (but exploitable) forest. This pathological craving for identification with the subhuman may be illustrated in every department of Canadian culture ... The primary critical question in Canada today is whether it is yet safe to cut the umbilical cord to the wilderness: whether it is time to conduct a new raid on the inarticulate.30

As younger writers and critics became increasingly preoccupied with formal questions, their disdain for the genre increased, and their frustrations with the inhibitions of literary conventions grew. In 1947, Sutherland dismisses "the Roberts entourage" thus: "What is significant about the nature poets is their isolation in the midst of an alien environment, and their inability to express the environment except with borrowed instruments and from a colonial point of view."31 But, as we have seen, the nature poets do not find their environment alien, and are as adequate to the task of expressing it as other writers of the period. Moreover, their point of view, far from

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being obsequiously colonial, requires that they not simply "borrow" instruments, but reforge them to fit the job at hand. They are far more sophisticated than Sutherland allows, and would have been amazed - indeed, outraged - to find themselves so belittled and misunderstood within two generations. Still, forty years after Sutherland, John Moss reprises the attack against such writing as inescapably false, declaring that "the inherent weakness of colonial poetry is not so much a question of poets who, removed from their informing culture, are inadequate to the resources of the language, but rather the reverse. No amount of talent can domesticate alien words which, through a colonial set of mind, are not even recognized as alien." He goes on to declare that "English in Canada was, and to an extent continues to be, merely an historically expedient lingua franca."32 But surely this is how all language always is. One of the most interesting areas of investigation in post-colonial criticism concerns the resistance of indigenes and/or colonists to the language of Empire and the gradual splitting off of "englishes" from English. But we must be careful to put these explorations in context. The axiom that colonial literature must be inauthentic because it speaks a foreign tongue presumes some prelapsarian world where word and object are in perfect apposition, and where speaker and hearer are in perpetual accord. In so doing, it attributes to the "dominant discourse" a unitary character that it cannot ever possess. Robert Kroetsch almost makes this point when he describes his own predicament as a writer: "he works with a language, within a literature, that appears to be authentically his own, and not a borrowing. But just as there was in the Latin word a concealed Greek experience, so there is in the Canadian word a concealed other experience, sometimes British, sometimes American."33 The British word presumably conceals recent Scots, Welsh and Irish, as well as English experience, not to speak of Pict, Angle, Saxon, Jute, Danish, Norman and Latin resonances. After all, England has itself been a colony, and there are those in Britain who still feel colonized. Alternatively, as Susan Rudy Dorscht asks, can Koetsch's linguistic displacement as a white Canadian man be measured on the same scale as that of a Black lesbian immigrant poet like Dionne Brand?34 Such comparisons are obviously perilous. We have to remember that language is always convention, always compromise, always a function of skilled speakers/writers refining meaning to the point where listeners/readers of good will and equal capability can more or less understand. It is "always already" inadequate to the task of conveying accurately how things are. Poets know this every day,

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with every word they write. The problem of language in a colony is one of degree - and not of kind. The most interesting exploration of this issue has been Dennis Lee's "Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space." The spiritual urgency of his quest to discover language sufficient to the embodiment of what he calls "cadence" - that tremor of reality we recognize in the world around us - is what gives Lee's essay its fine seriousness. And this seriousness transcends the topicality of the piece as a document - like Atwood's Survival - that is very much of its time (1973) and place (Ontario). For example, he concedes: "I am certain that the silence I go into is more than civil, and that men in many countries enter it on their proper terms," before continuing "to write in colonial space is to have that civil silence laid irrefutably upon you."35 Isn't this as much as to say that being a colonial writer simply makes one more aware of the problems that any writer must face? Lee acknowledges the ultimate insufficiency of language, but constantly dances away from it, preoccupied with more glamorous partners like Empire, America and Identity. Thus, he argues strenuously that words like "language", "home", "here", - have no native charge; they convey only meanings in whose face we have been unable to find ourselves since the eighteenth century ... the texture, weight and connotation of almost every word we use comes from abroad. For a person whose medium is words, who wants to use words to recreate our being human here - and where else do we live? - the fact creates an absolute problem ... If you are Canadian, home is a place that is not home to you.36

And he seems to blame the language itself for his predicament, suggesting that had it been adequate to or expressive of Canadian experience, he might have developed a local imagination sooner or more easily. It is indubitably true that English comes bearing some pretty hefty freight, not all of it a gift, and that it can be a challenge for a writer to chuck out everything extra and not come up empty-handed. But this is not a problem exclusive to English, not even to Canadian English. Why does he exempt American language and literary culture from the problems he sees inherent in Canada, when America is just as much a colony of England, in this regard, as we are? What Lee says of the philosopher George Grant is also true of himself: "he withdraws from the contemporary world, and judges it with passionate lucidity, by standing on a 'fixed point' which he then reveals to be no longer there."37

136 The Picturesque and the Sublime In fact, looking back at this essay from the current perspective, what is most interesting is the way that the alienation the author feels from his own culture is complemented by (and in part attributable to) a profound identification with American life throughout the fifties and sixties. Lee claims that this intoxication with Americana was general, and some opponents (and perhaps advocates) of Tish might agree with him. That such a good and thoughtful poet could be so susceptible may be explained, in part, by his lack of affiliation with his own literary inheritance. For, as late as 1985, in his introduction to The New Canadian Poets 1970-1985, he says, "I can remember the sense of blank futility I got around 1960, as an apprentice poet, reading Lampman and D.C. Scott and Pratt and realizing there was nothing there for me beyond the examples of personal artistic courage." Accordingly, he argues that "the only thing a self-respecting new generation" of poets can do is to ignore "the hard-earned wisdom of its elders, and [find] its own way ahead."38 It is doubtful many writers before the fin de siecle would have agreed with this statement. But rejection of one's poetic ancestors is, in fact, typical of the moderns - as we have seen with, for example, Roberts in regard to Sangster, Smith's preface to New Provinces, or the Tish group's idolatry of all things American. As Milton Wilson notes, "You can hardly expect any real continuity from a poetic history which consists of one half-baked phoenix after another."39 Modernist revisionism can also be seen in the attribution of complacency to our early writers, who left home to sail across the Atlantic, who cleared their own land and built their own houses and started new enterprises, and the corollary attribution of daring and experimentation to their comfortable critics. A good example of this tactic is Eldon Garnet's introduction to his 1974 update of Sutherland's anthology, W]HERE? THE OTHER CANADIAN POETRY. He begins with a rehash of Frye's garrison thesis, but then contends that the rebellion of the Montreal modernists resulted in "the adoption of a new garrison of contemporary British poetic rationalism" and that It was not until the late i94o's & the early i95o's that the hold of the English Classical tradition began to be broken in Canada. Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster & Irving Layton, the Contact Press poets, began the first vigorous step toward opening the gates of the garrison. Our poetry at last began to go mad & move whole-heartedly into the wilderness ... By 1960, the conservative "colonial mentality" was being energetically attacked by a concern for experimentation & freedom, by the wilderness mentality.40

137

This extraordinary document shows the continuity between modernist and post-modern critiques of the Canadian tradition. We have had fifty years of insistent - and contradictory - symbolization of the wilderness. Both sides of the paradox are expressed by Garnet: the wilderness is "blankly indifferent" to human endeavour; at the same time "it is a metaphor for irrationality, spontaneity and freedom."41 These contradictions may well be inherent in Frye's own writing. For, although his aesthetics are explicitly modernist in their insistence on literature as a self-contained universe, his practice, especially in his Canadian criticism, often relies on social and historical analogies contrary to his stated philosophy. This tension has allowed some critics to claim him as a post-modernist. Perhaps the grounding of Frye's theories in his study of Blake is the real clue to his ability to be both a new critic and a post-structuralist. For as V.A. de Luca observes, "the imagery of the Romantic Sublime lives again in the deconstructionists' vocabulary of voids, chasms, labyrinths, abysses, and infinite regress."42 Another writer who spans the modernist/post-modern divide and also seems to embrace both sides of the wilderness equation is Earle Birney. The first really considerable poet from Canada's West Coast, and denizen of some of the country's most spectacular scenery, his early roles were the kind that make good jacket copy: rancher, mountain guide, fossil hunter, surveyor. This background gave him the confidence to disregard the preference for urban imagery which dominated poetry when he began to write in the thirties and forties. As Sutherland remarked in his 1943 review of David, "of all our young modernist poets, he is the only one who has made consistent use of a Canadian landscape."43 Birney's first book, David and Other Poems, won the Governor General's Award and was widely and favourably reviewed. Indeed, E.J. Pratt opined: "The hearty acceptance of this volume by literary critics and general readers is not only a deserved tribute to the author but a reflection of the growing good taste on the part of the public."44 Perhaps the most influential reading of the poem was that of Desmond Pacey, who declared: "The main theme of David remains the main theme of all his poetry. He sees the natural universe as vast, incomprehensible, and indifferent or hostile to man's aspirations; society, on the other hand, is in a state of chaotic disintegration, and offers man no safe refuge from the powers of nature."45 But, although Birney himself said the work was "an imagined story shaped around the theme of the duality of human experience as symbolized ... by mountain-climbing - the hair's breadth between, on the

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one hand, beauty and the exhilaration of being alive, and on the other fear and nightmare and death and the static dumb hostility of the non-human world," nature is not depicted as "vast, incomprehensible, and indifferent or hostile" in the other poems in the collection.46 Moreover, it is clear even in "David" itself that whatever hostility we are made to experience in nature is a projection of the feelings of the narrator, Bob. There is no malevolence in the mountains themselves; they simply are. As Richard Robillard notes, "the denouement runs counter to the theme of the poem."47 The tragedy that overtakes the climbers is of their own making, which David acknowledges in taking responsibility for his fall. Bob, on the other hand, knowing that his inattention had jeopardized his friend, blames the mountain rather than facing guilt. And so we have the transformation of nature from "Wordsworthian idyll ... into a Canadian deathtrap." Peter Aichinger, who notes this transformation, remarks: "The fact that this vision of nature is a projection of the human mind is seen more clearly in a poem like 'Bushed/ which is ostensibly about a man who goes mad and becomes 'bushed,' living alone in the mountains, but which in fact deals with the impossiblity of the average human mind to comprehend the awesome indifference of nature or to exist for long in its presence."48 We have met this formulation, "the impossibility of the average human mind to comprehend the awesome indifference of nature," many times before; in earlier centuries, it was recognized as the sublime. But now critics like D.G. Jones take it as axiomatic that "in Birney's poem 'Bushed' the isolated man is finally destroyed by an increasingly alien and hostile nature," despite the fact that there is no "finality" to this poem, and we do not see the man "destroyed."49 Bushed He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain so big his mind slowed when he looked at it Yet he built a shack on the shore learned to roast porcupine belly and wore the quills on his hatband At first he was out with the dawn whether it yellowed bright as wood-columbine or was only a fuzzed moth in a flannel of storm But he found the mountain was clearly alive sent messages whizzing down every hot morning

139 Song to the Rising Sun boomed proclamations at noon and spread out a white guard of goat before falling asleep on its feet at sundown When he tried his eyes on the lake ospreys would fall like valkyries choosing the cut-throat He took then to waiting till the night smoke rose from the boil of the sunset But the moon carved unknown totems out of the lakeshore owls in the beardusky woods derided him moosehorned cedars circled his swamps and tossed their antlers up to the stars then he knew though the mountain slept the winds were shaping its peak to an arrowhead poised And now he could only bar himself in and wait for the great flint to come singing into his heart50

The first stanza sets up the phenomenology of the sublime, according to which human arrogance is "shattered" by the greater power of nature; the mind forcibly "slowed" by recognition of the vastness surrounding it. We have previously noted that an impression of infinitude is one of the prime inspirations of sublimity. As Friedrich von Schiller put it: "The sight of unlimited distances, and heights lost to view, the vast ocean at his feet and the vaster ocean above him, pluck his spirit out of the narrow sphere of the actual and out of the oppressive bondage of physical life."51 Recovering from this shock, the wilderness-dweller tries to limit himself to Schiller's "narrow sphere of the actual," not only building a shelter and shooting and cooking game, but also indulging in the purely decorative art of embroidering his hatband. But he is no Robinson Crusoe; all his busyness proves insufficient defense against perception of the excessiveness of nature. First he stops venturing out in daylight, in order to protect himself from the sense that everything is alive and watching him; then night becomes equally perilous. The poem concludes with him barricading himself in his shack, waiting for what was first perceived as "messages" and "proclamations," then as "unknown totems," to enter him as a "singing" arrowhead.

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Given the poem's imagistic insistence that the threat apprehended from the mountain is really a form of communication, it is hard to credit Jones's reading that nature is "increasingly hostile and alien." Far from becoming alien, nature becomes increasingly anthropomorphic in its actions and images - especially the hostile ones. One might even say that the more hostile the man fears nature is becoming, the less alien it seems to him! For example, the mountain, besides booming proclamations, installs a guard of goats before falling asleep, like some kind of human despot. The most "hostile" image, that of the ospreys swooping down on the trout, is made so by the comparison with mythical valkyries. And the moon is an artist, the owls critics, and so on. In other words, everything speaks to the lonely man in human terms. He translates the unknown into the familiar. The conclusion of the poem, then, in which he waits for "the great flint to come singing into his heart" may be seen as the man's recognition that, do what he can to keep nature outside his physical and imaginative shelter, ultimately it will penetrate him with its own voice - and he will just have to listen. He may well be shattered. But the possibility remains that he may actually be redeemed by this "otherness" he fears. Because the mountain stays other, the poem provides an alternative to contemporary psychoanalytic readings of the sublime as necessarily involving a struggle during which the other must be subdued and incorporated into the observer's ego. Patricia Yeager gives such a reading of Shelley's "Mont Blanc": while what is being repressed, disguised and re-figured is an initial wish for inundation - a primordial desire to bond or fuse with the other - the poetego schooled in defending male ego boundaries reacts to this wish for inundation with ambivalence and fear. And this fear can only be mastered through a reaction formation that takes the form of oedipal aggression. This aggression, in turn, arouses anxiety, for the writer responds to his own aggressive desire to appropriate with a surge of guilt, and a feeling that is quickly followed by a gesture of reparation. This reparation is not directed toward the pre-oedipal other - who has already been disguised and denied - but to the oedipalized self/other dyad who wears the father's imago and cries out to be incorporated and internalized. In "Mont Blanc" this fatherimago, this man-mountain, is absorbed into the ego as an assurance (rather than a disruption) of the incorporative self's ego-boundaries.52

By contrast, and as the title suggests, "Bushed" is about the disruption of ego-boundaries, rather than the self-aggrandisement that may be consequent upon having passed through such an experience

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relatively unscathed. This is why we are left waiting with the protagonist at the end of the poem; Birney is not interested in what happens after, he is exploring sublime terror as it happens. Margaret Atwood's reworking of "Bushed" as "The Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer" is a more schematic and therefore less compelling poem. Her pioneer "proclaims" himself "the centre/' "imposes" himself with shovels, "asserts" his identity, resists obstinately, and so on. She even states didactically that his eyes were "made ragged by his / effort, the tension / between subject and object."53 This vision of the sublime is palpably the "egotistical" variety of contemporary theorists. However, the explicitness of everything in Atwood's version suggests that, at some level, she recognizes that her reading of "Bushed" as a parable of the incompatibility of nature and man is not the only way of seeing Birney's poem. In fact, while Atwood's protagonist is the male counterpart to the heroine of The Journals of Susanna Moodie and another illustration of her thesis in Survival, Birney's is an unusual rather than a typical inhabitant of his ceuvre. Generally, in Birney's poems, personification suggests a reciprocity between figures and the scenery they inhabit. This equivalence is clear in the early "Maritime Faces," as in the later "State of Sonora," where the "thin country with the bright hard / hide" (11.1-2) is expressive of the life and character of the locals. Similarly, in "Holiday in the Foothills," all nature participates in the visitor's "trance," (1.17) and in "Creston Valley Fall" "ducks are southminded, / sun too and banker's wife" (ll.io-ii); a later work, "On the Night Jet," looks down upon "the stars / of the farms / lonely as the others / like reflections above" (11.7-10). In other works, analogy serves to suggest the superiority of nature to civilization. This is especially clear in war-time poems like "Hands" or "Dusk on English Bay," but continues right through many of the travel poems, such as "Sinaloa," where poverty inspires a gross disregard of natural beauty and a corresponding avarice for the commodities made available by industrial progress. Longer meditations like "November Walk Near False Creek Mouth" and "The Mammoth Corridors" suggest that honourable achievement in this continent has been rare; that both our aspirations and our accomplishments have made a mockery of nature, but will wear out before the "uncontrollable cliffs" and "unstillable winds" do. In "The Mammoth Corridors," from which the descriptions above are taken, Birney acknowledges that nature is vulnerable not only to human depredation but to entropy itself. All things wear out eventually, whether we help them along or not. In most of his other

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poems, however, the poet doesn't take the cosmic view; his anger and contempt are confined to the wreck people have made of the landscapes they inhabit. In only a very few poems do the similarities implied between the civilized and natural worlds evoke a fatalistic dread of the destructive energy in both. For example, "Atlantic Door" opens with "the deathless feud / of the cobra sea and the mongoose wind" and concludes reminding us that below all endeavours "lie the bleak and forever capacious tombs of the sea." But these anomalous poems have often been seen as most expressive of their author's philosophy. Thus, Jones declares that: "When Birney looks at nature he is struck by 'the cobra sea and the mongoose wind/ and by the great flint of the mountain which comes singing into the heart. The human situation is imaged in 'Mappemounde' as that of a man voyaging in a frail ark through a hostile sea, a sea hardly distinguishable from the devouring Leviathan who swims there."54 Among his peers, more influential than Birney's pessimistic humanism or his keen eye for natural detail has been the way in which these qualities, themselves frequently seen as archetypically Canadian, come into play in his travel poems. As George Woodcock notes, the importance in Birney's work of "the constant interplay between Canada and abroad ... is clearly emphasized in the arrangement of Collected Poems on explicitly geographical lines."55 Sections are divided by inclusive dates, and titled after the geographical region they describe: South Pacific, USA, Europe, Asia, Mexico, Canada. Volume one comprises six sections; the first and fifth are named "Canada." Of the seven sections of volume two, the third and last bring us home. Paul West remarks, rather astringently, of these peregrinations: "Here is a man who has gone abroad and shot scores of zebras, impala and elephant because, it seems, his guns cannot touch moose."56 What West seems to recognize (and resent) is that Birney has sidestepped the whole native/cosmopolitan debate by leaving town. If you write from abroad, you must, by definition, be writing as a Canadian. This may be one reason Birney's example was followed so avidly by poets of the next twenty, even thirty years, including Al Purdy, John Newlove, Patrick Lane, and Gary Geddes among many many others. Recently more women have been free to write of their confrontations with other cultures, so we have P.K. Page in Brazil and Mexico, Mia Anderson in France, Dionne Brand writing about Grenada, Jan Conn from Central and South America, and so on. It may be, as Milton Wilson remarks, that "the nomadic culture of contemporary North America makes the wandering poet the norm."57

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But something more profound than job relocation is surely operating here. The Canadian poet travels to find some cultural distance. But the model for this wandering is much older than Earle Birney. It is the ethos of Goldsmith's The Traveller, and of so many other eighteenth and nineteenth-century poems. And in Canada, until very recently, we find the traditional speaker: a white, male, Christian vagabond; the sensitive soul, interpreter of nature and human destiny. As Donald Davie notes, "we are all, like it or not, post-Romantic people; ... the historical developments which we label 'Romanticism' were not a series of aberrations which we can and should disown, but rather a sort of landslide which permanently transformed the landscape of the 2Oth century we inhabit, however reluctantly."58 For this reason, I think D.M.R. Bentley goes too far in indulging the selfjustifications of contemporary writers when they distinguish themselves from earlier poets on the basis of persona: ... when the hinterland-oriented poets of the 'sixties and 'seventies advocated the breakup of the social self (and, with a consistent atavism and anarchy, affirmed the perspectives of the outlaw, the primitive, the untutored child, the wonder merchant), they were attacking the notion, still current among those loyal to the baseland orientation, that the poet is an egotistically sublime philosopher and sage. Although he or she might have advocated self-effacement as a means to any number of ends (especially mystical insight of one sort or another), the poet of the baseland orientation was and is a figure of authority who speaks of privileged insights, in rationally coherent poems, to a relatively unenlightened audience.59

Surely the alternative roles proposed - "the outlaw, the primitive, the untutored child, the wonder merchant" - are just as central to the Romantic tradition as that of the sage? Moreover, as we know from many of Birney's poems, among others, the outlaw can be just as self-righteous as any conventional authority figure. But Bentley's implicit definition of the "egotistical sublime" limits it to the overtly paternalistic philosopher. Moreover his subsequent definition of baseland poets as "unashamedly engaged with the prevailing culture," with "a commitment to order rather than anarchy" shifts the emphasis to their "egotism" rather than any resulting "sublimity." On the other hand, as Frances Ferguson reminds us, "while for modern criticism, the sublime is the arena in which an isolated self can achieve a heroism of subjectivity, the sublime was important [originally] less for rampant individualism and self-scrutiny than for the possibility of one's becoming representative."60 One can see

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Birney trying, particularly in his later poems, to slough off the mantle of authority and become representative, but he rarely achieves this goal. Even in a poem like "What's so big about GREEN?" where he uses the first person plural to emphasize the speaker's complicity with others, he manages to undercut the effectiveness of this device by capitalizing the pronouns "Us" and "We" throughout, so that his tone becomes hectoring. He resembles a preacher, elevated above the masses despite his claims of solidarity. A more sophisticated awareness of the poet's role, and a more persuasive presentation of solidarity, even from the specialized position of vagabondage, is conveyed by the work of Paulette Jiles. She too has a tendency to romanticize herself, but she recognizes it - as the title poem in her first collection, Waterloo Express, makes clear: ... Who do you think I am? I bet you think I'm running away from home or a man who never done me wrong. I bet you think I'm twenty, with the fragile soul of a wild fawn. Well, I used to think so too, but the job didn't pay much and anyhow I never liked the taste of wages. (11.7-12)6'

Her most important work in this regard is Song to the Rising Sun. A ten-part elegy for inner and outer darkness, staged during the long arctic winter, this work constantly interrelates the pursuit of love and power at both personal and political levels. The interplay of pronouns enforces this recognition: after opening with a communal "we," apparently referring to all those living up north, the poem modulates to the more intimate group of an "I" and a "you" in part two, moves to straight personal reminiscence in part three, and then flows effortlessly between the first and second persons, singular and plural in part four. By part five it is clear that in addressing "you" the reader, the speaker also addresses herself: You were promised something. You were promised that the sun would come back out of the long Arctic night. You were promised clear air, clean water. It was promised that you would be loved and they owe you, remember that.

145 Song to the Rising Sun

Like the eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers cited by Ferguson, Jiles aspires to be "a metonymy of [her] culture/' and in much the same fashion - by alluding to classical epic.62 She states her method explicitly: "Song to the Rising Sun" uses very old devices; repetition of an initial phrase combining with variant tags, use of different sorts of sentences (interrogative, as well as declarative), those long series of driving imperatives, a fallback into the softer, intimate "feelings" lyric, the direct address to the audience and doubled, chorused or massed voices. In university I used to hear professors expound on The Odyssey, and the techniques the poet used, and how very brilliant they were, and I could never figure out why poets weren't using them now.63

In fact, the devices she mentions - particularly anaphora, refrain, questions and commands - are essentially rhetorical. Being characteristic of oral poetry, as their origins in classical epic make clear, they have therefore become uncommon in text-based literature. Jiles implicitly answers her own question by choosing to write for radio, recognizing that: "Poetry recited aloud happens in a certain amount of time that is controlled by the speaker. It asks for a suspension of will on the part of the audience. You can't put it down like a book and come back later, flip back and re-read a line, makes notes in the margins or underline words."64 It is precisely because the listener cannot go back to what has already been said that there is so much redundancy in oral compositions. In his essay on pastoral elegy, Charles G.D. Roberts notes the preponderance of repetition and refrain in early works like the Lament for Bion, and the gradual formalizing and limiting of this tendency in the later tradition. Rhetorical elements persist, however: even in his own Ave there is apostrophe, including imperatives directed at Nature to lament for the death of Shelley. Other characteristics of the elegy Roberts considers are specificity of nature imagery, a strong autobiographical element, and a philosophical dimension.65 These characteristics govern the structure of Jiles's Song to the Rising Sun, a contemporary revisioning of pastoral elegy as a lament that: "We are losing things. / There is a black hole in the ionosphere / out of which lost things are going" (11.82-4).66 Superficially, Roberts' and Jiles' poems could not be more different: Ave consists of thirtyone ten-line stanzas in regular rhyming metre, full of flowery language and literary allusions; Song of 274 lines deposed in unequal, unrhymed verse paragraphs, in colloquial speech. But both works

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take us on an autobiographical journey through a highly particularized Canadian landscape, including local flora and fauna, into a ritual lament for human destructiveness and ignorance illustrated with elemental imagery of sun and stars, earth and water, before concluding during the darkness before the dawn. And both poems are inhabited by angels. The covering cherub in Ave is straightforwardly Shelley, to whom the piece is dedicated, and upon whose works it is modeled. The "beautiful and shoeless" (1.42, 163) beings who wander "footloose" (1.265) through Jiles's Song are more ambiguous creatures. They are first witnessed "walking with candles / under the landfast ice" and "walking down from the northern / mountains in glowing zodiacal bituminous fires" (11.37-41), at once subterranean and heavenly creatures. Their counterparts are both the "criminal devils" operating the "Black Angel Lead and Zinc Mine" (11.13-14) whose call signs are heard upon the airwaves even as they dig under the ground, and the "seductive / and fraudulent voices" (ll.io-ii) of "Shaman Radio" itself - of which this poem is an example and this poet a devotee. The duality of human nature is thereby insisted on throughout the poem, and Jiles implies that our strength and weakness grow from the same root in our species: restlessness. We are as beautiful and footloose as our guardian angels. Thomas Weiskel's remarks on the verticality of the sublime illuminate Jiles's linking of voices and beings above and below ground: Height and depth are of course merely two perspectives within the same dimension of verticality; what is "lofty" for the idealist will be "profound" for the naturalizing mind ... The sublime moment establishes depth because the presentation of unattainability is phenomenologically a negation, a falling away from what might be seized, perceived, known. As an image, it is the abyss. When the intervention of the transcendent becomes specific, however, the image is converted into a symbol, and height takes over as the valorizing perspective.67

The second section of the poem associates people's quenchless appetite for news of disaster with our individual capacity for destruction, and suggests that experience of the sublime may be nothing more than sublimation: a momentary displacement of the compulsion for darkness. To quote it in full: I have been trying to reach you by radio all winter but the air is full of darkness, telepresences, moving stones, talking heads, wizards,

147 Song to the Rising Sun devices, shaky people moving without hands, devices, radio waves, refuelling aircraft. I sit up late, listening to Shaman Radio. The seductive and fraudulent voices tell me of murders in far places, committed with enthusiasm and skill. I do not know why the human mind pauses in the darknesses it does. But mine has as well. I drink so deeply of the crystalline and windless stillness But there is no still place for this thirst.

The arctic winter here represents a kind of chapel perilous, in which the sleepless initiate must confront shamans and wizards, presences and devices, all suspect and all far from natural. It's a weirdly perverted version of the "ministry" invoked in Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude: Ye Presences of Nature, in the sky Or on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places! can I think A vulgar hope was yours when Ye employ'd Such ministry, when Ye through many a year Haunting me thus among my boyish sports, On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, Impress'd upon all forms the characters Of danger or desire, and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With triumph, and delight, and hope, and fear, Work like a sea? (1,11.490-501)68

Jiles too seems to feel chosen as nature's spokesperson, but in a more disillusioned way than that of Wordsworth's ecstatic (and egocentric) little boy. But this is not her native landscape, nor is she an innocent child. What she attends to are the voices and visions of postindustrial society rather than the indigenous presences of the wilderness. As an initiation scene, this is far from the "still world of ecstasy" Roberts associates with his childhood in the Tantramar (Ave, 1.1O2).69 In that poem, the sublime moment is remembered as blessed if transient; the "rare illumined hours" (1.35) that never last for long, but constitute an apprenticeship of the senses: ... sometimes would you (as a stillness fell And on my pulse you laid a soothing palm)

148 The Picturesque and the Sublime Instruct my ears in your most secret spell; And sometimes in the calm Initiate my young and wondering eyes Until my spirit grew more still and wise. (11.25-30)

But in Jiles's adult confrontation with the wilderness, the "stillness" is not "soothing," because it echoes the speaker's own conviction of hollowness. Moreover, the air is generally so noisy that such stillness is imperilled. And all this noise is a form of spiritual pollution corresponding to the physical pollutions visited upon the planet by human activity. The catalogue of environmental disasters in the arctic include the "thickening, dirty pollution haze / that comes up from the megacities" (11.68-9), later quantified as "100 million tons of sulphur dioxide / staining the polar air" (11.90-1) and summed up by the refrain "junk is lethal" (1.67, 70, 93, 106, 107). But not only the air has been desecrated by industry; the water too has been invaded by the "deep acids of power / heavy metals washing ashore" (11.126-7): running up the Ungava coast in foam and black salt the routines of oppressive and heavy metals the heavy metals now in our flesh now and forever in our flesh and in the flesh of our people, and in the flesh of the animals we have dreamed. (11.202-7)

One could read this as an apocalyptic version of Roberts' Tantramar metaphor: "in my veins for ever must abide / The urge and fluctuation of the tide" (Ave, 11.49-50). But at another moment Jiles gives the Romantic identification of water and human life its more familiar, positive form, chanting that "every river is a song driven by longing" (1.237). Arid, this hopefulness permeates the poem, despite its imagery of disaster, its statistical language of despair. This is, after all, a song to the rising sun, driven by the faith that "the rising recreates us" (1.271) even if, as the poem concludes, it does so "just this second / and no more" (11.273-4). One way of approaching Song to the Rising Sun within the tradition of Canadian nature poetry might be in terms of Atwood's Survival, according to which it occupies a late, and therefore self-aware, victim position. Atwood suggests that: "A curious thing starts happening in Canadian literature once man starts winning, once evidence starts

149 Song to the Rising Sun

piling up of what Frye in The Bush Garden calls 'the conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.' Sympathy begins to shift from the victorious hero to the defeated giantess, and the problem is no longer how to avoid being swallowed up by a cannibalistic Nature but how to avoid destroying her."70 However, there is a respectable tradition of sympathetic nature literature in Canada which does not originate with the obvious desecration of the wild by industrial man, but with empathy for the non-human world. We have noted this earlier in Isabella Valancy Crawford's and Alexander McLachlan's portrayals of lumbering as regicide; the animal stories of Roberts and Thomson are perhaps more familiar examples. Identification with the land may be more obvious in fictional accounts of settlement and farming than in the bulk of Canadian nature poetry, which has tended to be lyrical and descriptive. But it is often implicit, even in works that seem at first pictorial, like so many nineteenth-century sonnets. As Susan Griffin has noted, "all experience of material existence threatens the imaginary schism between nature and consciousness; even language, which is itself a material experience, reflects the acoustical shape of mouth and tongue. The very word culture derives from the word for the cultivation of the soil. Spirit derives from the word for breath."71 These remarks are a contribution to the emerging literature of ecofeminism, a relatively new field which explores the analogy between the subordination of women and that of nature by society, particularly industrial society. From this orientation, Song to the Rising Sun reflects a female - if not explicitly feminist - identification with the vulnerable body of nature, as emphasized by the urgency of refrains like "junk is lethal." On the other hand, psychoanalytically-oriented theorists like Yeager would argue that this sense of identification is a return to infancy, a re-enactment of a primal union with nature. According to such critics, "if what is repressed in the 'oedipal' sublime is the desire for pre-oedipal bonding with a mother's body (which, in most Romantic poems, is given an imaginative correlative in the chaos and blissful heterodoxy of the cosmos), in the 'pre-oedipal' sublime these libidinal elements are not repressed; they break into consciousness and are welcomed as a primary, healthful part of the writer's experience, as part of the motive for metaphor."72 Yeager's argument here relies heavily on Weiskel's reading of the sublime moment as a Freudian struggle, an agon in which the poet's ego must subdue whatever is perceived as "other" in order to assert its own unity. The difference is that she valorizes the pre-oedipal experience he rejects as "narcissistic."73

150 The Picturesque and the Sublime

Still, it is not clear to me that, in the poetry of the sublime, this desire for bonding with the cosmic body is repressed. On the contrary, it often seems quite explicit! Moreover, Yeager's version of Weiskel perpetuates a disappointingly familiar vision of women's infantilism. As George Eliot noted dryly some time ago, "Women have not to prove that they can be emotional, and rhapsodic, and spiritualistic; every one believes that already."74 The only real difference between Yeager's feminist version of the sublime and Weiskel's masculinist theories is that, for her, the allegedly female side of the equation (sensual rather than intellectual, prephallic rather than oedipal) is championed as the higher route to enlightenment. But both critics perpetuate the same tired male/female polarization by which George Eliot was already bored. What Carolyn Merchant notes of gender dualism in contemporary ecofeminism holds true also of theories of the female sublime, that "in emphasizing the female, body, and nature components of the dualities male/female, mind/body, and culture/nature, radical ecofeminism runs the risk of perpetuating the very hierarchies it seeks to overthrow."75 One might hope for something else from theories of a female sublime: perhaps even a re-evaluation of the poetry of motherhood, a powerful tradition of writing in which transformative experience of nature occurs inside rather than outside the body. Such study might even provide new insight into the old conundrum of whether the sublime really exists beyond the perceiver. I recognize that this too may be seen as essentialist, as reducing woman to a purely biological destiny. But I am not saying this is the only or the proper expression of the female sublime; only that it is one entry into the sublime that is irreducibly female, and deserving of more study for that reason.76 To go through pregnancy and childbirth is, inevitably, to confront both "the beauty of terror and the beauty of peace" without travelling beyond the limits of one's own body. And despite the modernist aesthetic of "masculine" irony, which condemns domestic writing as inherently sentimental, such poems have been written continually in Canada. A good example is the following, first published in 1913, by Constance Lindsay Skinner. Song of Cradle-Making Thou hast stirred! When I lifted thy little cradle, The little cradle I am making for thee, I felt thee! The face of the beach smiled, I heard the pine trees singing,

151 Song to the Rising Sun In the White Sea the Dawn-Eagle dipped his wing. Oh, never have I seen so much light Through thy father's doorway! (Wast thou pleased with thy little cradle?) Last night I said: "When the child comes, If it is a Son I will trim his cradle with shells; And proudly I will bear him in his rich cradle Past the doors of barren women. All, all, shall see my Little Chief In his rich cradle!

That was last night: Last night thou hadst not stirred! Oh, I know not if thou be son Strong Chief, Great Fisher, Law-of-Woman, As thy father is; Or only Sorrow-Woman, Patient Serving Hands, Like thy Mother. I only know I love thee, Thou Little One under my heart! For thou didst move; and every part of me trembled. I will trim thy cradle with many shells, and with cedar-fringes; Thou shalt have goose-feathers on thy blanket! I will bear thee in my hands along the beach, Singing - as the sea sings, Because the little mouths of sand Are ever at her breast. Oh, Mother-face of the Sea, how thou dost smile And I have wondered at thy smiling! Aiihi! Thy little feet I felt them press me! Lightly, lightly I hear them coming: Like little brown leaves running over the earth Little running leaves, wind-hastened, On the sudden Autumn trails! Earth loves the little running feet of leaves,

152 The Picturesque and the Sublime (Thy little feet!) O K'antsamiqala'soe, our Praised One, Let there be no more barren women! May thou bring no tears, my child, When I bear thee in thy rich cradle By the chanting sea-paths where the women labour. Thou hast stirred! Oh, haste, haste, little feet Little brown feet lightly running Down the trail of the hundred days! The wind is white with rocking bird-cradles; Day is in the eyes of the Sea. Ah! never have I seen so much light Through thy father's doorway.77

It may be unfortunate that Skinner had to appropriate a native voice to allow herself this rhapsody, but her authenticity of feeling is powerful nonetheless. What is mosf moving is the way in which the enlightenment ("never have I seen so much light") resulting from the speaker's experience of the baby's quickening converts her from a rival to the ally of other women. No longer does she hope for a boychild so that her status will be enhanced, nor does she imagine herself parading her trophy before barren women to make them jealous. Now, feeling connected to all of nature, seeking analogies in the sea and the leaves for the ineffable movement she has felt, she wishes for everyone to experience the same joy and wonder as she does. This generous opening up of the spirit is far from the self-aggrandisement, the egotistical sublime, of most contemporary theorists. It does not accord with Keats' definition of the Wordsworthian moment as "a thing per se that stands alone." Nor does it conform to the psychoanalytic model of the struggle to repress the other and rise above union with nature as a transcendent self. On the contrary, we are reminded of Ferguson's contention that the classical sublime was not a means of achieving a "heroism of subjectivity" but rather, of becoming "representative" and "a metonymy of [one's] culture."78 But the way in which the sublime serves to connect the individual to the world has too often been overlooked in discussions of the topic. It is implicit, however, in Samuel Monk's outline: the imagination's "aspiration to grasp the object, the preordained failure, and the consequent feeling of bafflement, and the sense of awe and wonder."79 This wonder sustains the sublime beyond the momentary, and

153 Song to the Rising Sun

connects its acolyte to the object of his or her awe. It need not, and often does not, result in alienation or isolation. And this imaginative sequence is enacted over and over again in the work of many contemporary poets, among them Don Coles, Don Domanski, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Kim Maltman, Don McKay, Erin Moure, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, Phyllis Webb and Jan Zwicky: the list is inexhaustible. What these poets have in common is a compulsion towards the sublime which results not in withdrawal from the world but in a new sense of connectedness. And this connectedness comes about not in spite of but because of the ungraspability of the natural world. To contemporary poets, chastened by environmental disaster and social disintegration, picturesque delight in nature and sublime meditation are increasingly essential. But as Simon Schama argues, "the cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature. All our landscapes, from the city park to the mountain hike, are imprinted with our tenacious, inescapable obsessions. So that to take the many and several ills of the environment seriously does not, I think, require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity. It asks instead that we simply see it for what it has truly been: not the repudiation, but the veneration, of nature."80 It has always been a bulwark against spiritual chaos to know that there is something larger than one's own struggle. But in Canada, the sublime has had a particular status as an aesthetic category which allows the poem to escape classification and disable controversy. The sublime has allowed poets to steer a course between the imperial and the provincial and, later, the native and the cosmopolitan, by validating that which is at once radically individual and absolutely conventional. The sublime is apolitical and eccentric; the picturesque is minutely local and conservative. The co-operation of the sublime aesthetic with the picturesque method has encouraged writers to keep on writing through all these years of critics telling them what they ought or ought not to do, and provided a space for serious play, for meditation, for engagement with what Dennis Lee calls "cadence." As Lee notes: "It is in meeting the nonbeing with which living particulars are shot through - their mortality, their guilt, their incipient meaninglessness; or here in Canada their wordlessness for us that we cherish them most fully as what they are."81 Possibly this "wordlessness" is the true link between the sublime and the colonial condition, and a clue to the longevity of the sublime tradition in our literature. For if, as Lee argues, we writers are at a remove from our own language, and that language is the only means we have to make

154 The Picturesque and the Sublime

visible and shapely the errant polyphony of the world, how much more insistent must be the distance between knowing and saying for the Canadian writer! And how much more present must the sublime be, therefore, in such a writer's work. Certainly it continues to inform the work of writers like Roo Borson, who map an intimate reciprocity between the spirit and the natural world in which nature remains "other" even as it alerts us to the otherness in our selves. The following prose poem provides a good example of the delicate balance between imagistic exactitude and referential mystery - between the picturesque and the sublime - that we find so often in our encounters with the Canadian landscape. Grove It is a matter of spaces. Of infinitesimal nutrients built up over time. Of constant sound, as of hinges or newborn beings. How pleasant it is to be lost among the powerful sunlit columns. Nothing is obscured except by grandeur, nothing concealed. Pleasant, that is, unless you stray too long and dusk begins, which fills the legs with sand. Yet if you can stand just a little indiscriminate terror, if you can endure not knowing (never to know) whether you are being honoured on this earth or not so much as marked in passing: either way. And it will reveal itself, the alien, tribal nature of the grove. Stars called into being above the swaying crowns.82

How delightfully precise and yet whimsical is that definition of constant sound (cadence?) as "of hinges or newborn beings." How appreciative the recognition of "infinitesimal nutrients built up over time." That the sublime is a matter of infinity and eternity, that grandeur affords a pleasurable obscurity, and that "a little indiscriminate terror" is salutary, are observations with which Dennis and Burke would have been comfortable. That a poet writing in Canada at the end of the twentieth century speaks their language as casually as she does, is evidence enough of the persistence of this eighteenthcentury ideology in our poetry.

Notes

PREFACE

1 J. Mackay, Quebec Hill; or, Canadian Scenery. A Poem in Two Parts, D.M.R. Bentley, ed. (London, Ont.: Canadian Poetry Press, 1988). 2 Donna Bennett, "English Canada's Postcolonial Complexities," Essays on Canadian Writing 51-2 (Winter-Spring 1993-4): 176. 3 George G. Williams, "The Beginnings of Nature Poetry in the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Philology 27 (1930): 583. 4 D.G. Jones, "Private Space and Public Space," in On F.R. Scott: Essays on his Contributions to Law, Literature, and Politics, Sandra Djwa and R. St J. Macdonald, eds. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983), 44. 5 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 11. 6 The quotations are from The Empire Writes Back, 9; the conclusion at which they arrive is mine. 7 Janice Monk, "Approaches to the Study of Women and Landscape," Environmental Review 8 (1984): 24. 8 Paul Hjartarson, "The Fiction of Progress: Notes on the Composition of The Master of the Mill," quoted by Barbara Godard in "Structuralism/ Post Structuralism: Language, Reality and Canadian Literature," in Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, John Moss, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987), 44.

156 Notes to pages 3-5 AN INTRODUCTORY RAMBLE THROUGH THE PICTURESQUE AND THE SUBLIME

1 Rainer Maria Rilke, "Worpswede" (1903), in Selected Works, G. Craig Houston, trans. (London: Hogarth Press, 1967) 1:10. 2 According to Robert Arnold Aubin in Topographical Poetry in XVIIICentury England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1936), 3. The story of Zeuxis was recounted in Pliny's Natural History, and became a commonplace in the Renaissance. 3 Henry V.S. and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955), 163. 4 Andrew Marvell, "Upon Appleton House," in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, H.M. Margoliouth, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) 1:59-82. All further quotations are from this edition. 5 G.R. Hibbard, "The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956): 159. The theme of retirement became increasingly popular in the eighteenth century as cities grew more populous. As George G. Williams notes, "the very fact that people were forced by circumstance to remain in the city and that they seldom attained that ideal state in which they could retire from the world only threw into sharper relief man's theoretical approval of the country." "The Beginnings of Nature Poetry in the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Philology 27 (1930): 587. Moreover, as Ann Bermingham reminds us, the "emergence of rustic landscape painting as a major genre in England at the end of the eighteenth century coincided with the accelerated enclosure of the English countryside ... As a result of its new economic value, land at the end of the eighteenth century acquired a new social and political value as well." Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 174.0-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), i. 6 For the different versions of Cooper's Hill see Brendan O Hehir's Expans'd Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham's "Coopers Hill" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). I quote the "B" text of 1668, because this is the version which influenced Pope, and therefore indirectly - if not directly - the Canadian poets under discussion in the next essay. 7 Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 53. Wasserman discusses the principle of concordia discors as it governs the design of Denham's poem on pages 53-66, as does Brendan O Hehir in Expans'd Hieroglyphicks, 165-76.

157 Notes to pages 6-8 8 Dr Samuel Johnson, "Denham," in Lives of the English Poets (1781; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1952) 1:58. Aubin lists almost two thousand loco-descriptive poems from eighteenth-century England. 9 E.K., preface to Shepheardes Calender in Edmund Spenser's Poetry, Hugh MacLean and Anne Lake Prescott, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 502. 10 Sir Kenneth Clark has traced the transformation of the medieval and Renaissance "landscape of symbols" first into idealized scenery and only gradually into more naturalistic representation in Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949). See also John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), and Jeffrey B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thomson (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 11 James Thomson, The Seasons, James Sambrook, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 305. All further quotations are from this edition. 12 William Blake, "The Song of Los," in The Complete Poems, W.H. Stevenson, ed. (London: Longman, 1971). 13 "God is omnipresent, not only in essence but also in substance, because spirit without matter cannot exist" (my translation). Quoted by Joseph Warren Beach in The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: Pageant, 1956), 56. On the relationship between Newton and later nature worship, see also F.E.L. Priestly, "Newton and the Romantic Concept of Nature," The University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (1948): 323-36. 14 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody. Being a Recital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects, (1709), in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2nd ed., corrected 1714, 2:393-4. 15 Williams, "The Beginnings of Nature Poetry in the Eighteenth Century," 607-8. C.A. Moore argues that it was through "poetical imitators" of Shaftesbury and similar thinkers "that English poetry acquired the various forms of defense and praise of the irregular and grand aspects of nature and likewise the apotheosis of nature in general." See "The Return to Nature in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Philology 14 (1917): 249. 16 Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700-1800 (1925; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 4. On the way this enthusiasm for painted landscapes contributed to the development of nature poetry in the following century, see also Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary

158 Notes to pages 8-12

17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26

Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 122. Laurence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970), quoted by David B. Morris in The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in i8th-Century England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 223. For further discussion of the tremendous influence of "ut pictura poesis" throughout the century, see also Hagstrum, The Sister Arts. Warton's praise of Thomson is quoted by Scott Elledge in "The Background and Development in English Criticism of the Theories of Generality and Particularity," PMLA 62 (1947): 147. Martin Price, "The Picturesque Moment," in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 262. Jerome Stolnitz remarks that "the impact of 'sublimity' upon aesthetic thought is the single most potent force in dislodging 'beauty' from its formerly unchallenged primacy among the value-categories." See "'Beauty': Some Stages in the History of an Idea," Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961): 191. William Gilpin, "On Picturesque Travel," in Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (2nd ed. 1794; reprinted in facsimile, Westmead: Gregg International, 1972), 423. In his later essay "The Sublime and the Beautiful," Wordsworth was to address this idea from a different angle, writing: "I take for granted that the same object may be both sublime & beautiful; or, speaking more accurately, that it may have the power of affecting us both with the sense of beauty & the sense of sublimity: tho' (as for such Readers I need not add) the mind cannot be affected by both these sensations at the same time, for they are not only different from, but opposite to, each other." See The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2:349. Clark, describing Claude in Landscape into Art, 129. Samuel Coleridge, "Unpublished Fragments on Aesthetics," Thomas M. Raysor, ed. Studies in Philology 22 (1925): 532-3. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 127. Price, "The Picturesque Moment," 276-7. Roy Daniells has compared Mackenzie's original journal to the published version and finds that Combe "did very well by it, for the most part contenting himself with imparting a fashionable elegance to Mackenzie's direct phrases." Alexander Mackenzie and the North West

159 Notes to pages 12-13 (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 30. See also W. Kaye Lamb's introduction to The Journals and Letters of Sir Alexander Mackenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) and I.S. MacLaren, "Alexander Mackenzie and the Landscapes of Commerce," Studies in Canadian Literature 7 (1982): 141-50, for the extent of Combe's revisions. It is worth remembering, as Barbara Belyea points out, that Mackenzie himself tried to transform his own spontaneous writings into something more palatable to the British public; see "Mackenzie Meets Moodie at the Great Divide," Journal of Canadian Studies 23 (Autumn 1988): 127. 27 William Gilpin, in the dedicatory letter to William Lock which serves as a preface to Three Essays, i-ii. In the essay "On Picturesque Travel" he notes that "we are most delighted, when some grand scene, tho perhaps of incorrect composition, rising before the eye, strikes us beyond the power of thought" (49). 28 Gilpin, "The Art of Selecting Landscapes" in Three Essays, 67. Gilpin was by no means alone in such attitudes. Belief in the grandeur of generality and the necessity of idealization was widespread among neoclassicists; Dryden, for example, argues that poetry and painting "present us with images more perfect than the life in any individual; and we have the pleasure to see all the scattered beauties of nature united by a happy chemistry, without its deformities or faults." Or as Goldsmith reminds us more bluntly, "To copy nature is a task the most bungling workman is able to execute; to select such parts as contribute to delight, is reserved only for those whom accident has blest with uncommon talents." Both are quoted by C.V. Deane in Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry (1935; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1967), 50; 5429 William Combe, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, in Doctor Syntax's Three Tours In Search of the Picturesque, of Consolation, and of a Wife (London: Chatto and Windus, 1868). 30 John R. Nabholtz, "Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes and the Picturesque Tradition," Modern Philology 61 (1964): 290 n. 8. Wordsworth might well have anticipated Price's interest in an essay which uses as sites of sublime phenomena locales in the Lake District rather than Europe. There is some controversy over the dating of "The Sublime and the Beautiful," but Owen and Smyser, the editors of Wordsworth's prose, think that it may have been begun as early as 1806, when he was working on the Guide to the Lakes. Theresa M. Kelley discusses the dating in Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 206-8. 31 Quoted by Price in "The Picturesque Moment," 288. 32 J.R. Watson, Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (London: Hutchison, 1970), 67.

160 Notes to pages 13-16 33 Quoted by Nabholtz in "Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes and the Picturesque Tradition," 288. In the course of the Guide Wordsworth refers to many earlier handbooks, including Gilpin's Wye Tour (1782). 34 William Wordsworth, An Evening Walk, in Poetical Works, Thomas Hutchinson, ed., corrected by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 1-7. All further quotations are from this edition. 35 Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, in Poetical Works, 7-17. All further quotations are from this edition. 36 Dr Samuel Johnson, "Cowley," in Lives of the English Poets, 1:14. 37 Wordsworth, "Imagination, How Impaired and Restored," in The Prelude, Ernest de Selincourt, ed., corrected by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). All further quotations are from this edition. 38 James B. Twitchell, Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770-1850 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 19. So also Samuel H. Monk: "The picturesque traveller, in search of Claudian beauty or Salvatorial sublimity, was busy seeing; Wordsworth had to teach him not only to see, but to interpret in terms of personal intuition." The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIIICentury England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1935), 204. Frank D. McConnell argues that the opposition of sight to vision is the unifying theme of The Prelude in The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth's "Prelude" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 127-45. 39 R.A. Foakes, "The Power of Prospect: Wordsworth's Visionary Poetry," in The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism, Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 130-1. 40 Quoted by Geoffrey H. Hartman in Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 363 n. Wordsworth echoes Burke in the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" to his 1815 Poetical Works when he declares that the business of poetry "is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions." Prose Works, 3:63. Paul de Man has explored this aspect of Romantic nature imagery at some length, arguing that it is not symbolic but allegorical, and that the relationship of signs to images designates not identity but difference. See "The Rhetoric of Temporality" in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, Charles S. Singleton, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 173-209. 41 M.H. Abrams notes: "The use of painting to illuminate the essential character of poetry ... almost disappears in the major criticism of the

161 Notes to pages 16-18

42

43

44

45

romantic period ... music becomes the art frequently pointed to as having a profound affinity with poetry." The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 50. See also Roy Park, "'Ut Pictura Poesis': The Nineteenth-Century Aftermath," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (Winter 1969): 155-64. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of a Poet's Mind," PMLA 76 (1961): 522. Wordsworth himself was quite explicit about this on several occasions; for example, he writes in a letter that Objects ... derive their influence not from properties inherent in them, ... but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant or affected by those objects. Thus the Poetry, if there be any in the work, proceeds whence it ought to do, from the soul of Man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the external world. Quoted by Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 54. de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," 180. To quote Coleridge again: "A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory." 22 September 1830, in Specimens of the Table Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1835), 1:205. David B. Morris, "Gothic Sublimity," New Literary History 16 (Winter 1985): 299. Yet another, different, but corroborative line of enquiry is that of Wallace Jackson, who charts the rise of "expressive" as opposed to "mimetic" aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century in Immediacy: The Development of a Critical Concept from Addison to Coleridge (Amsterdam: Rodopi NV, 1973). Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 231-2. On the other hand, Marshall McLuhan has argued that picturesque writers - and the Romantics and Victorians who borrowed their pictorial methodology could not succeed at evoking the inner world of the subject because they limited themselves to a single perspective, that of the prospect, or landscape seen by a single figure. He believed that symboliste technique of paysage interieur was a great advance on even Tennyson's symbolic landscapes because it was discontinuous. See "Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry," Essays in Criticism i (1951): 262-82. As my remarks on, for example, Gary's "reading" of the Quebec landscape will make clear, I think that McLuhan underestimates the

162 Notes to pages 18-21

46 47 48

49 50 51

discontinuity of even early "loco-descriptive" verse, taking at face value its pretence of an inevitable order of imagery arising from natural scenery. James Heffernan, "Wordsworth on the Picturesque/' English Studies 49 (1968): 497. Gilpin, "On Picturesque Travel," 47-8. Wordsworth, "The Sublime and the Beautiful," 349. As Frances Ferguson points out, "the problem that haunts Burke's Enquiry is the possibility that repeated exposure to the sublime may annihilate it altogether." She argues that by insisting that the habitual is always being "defamiliarized and rehabilitated" by our recognition of its sublimity, Wordsworth avoids Burke's dilemma. See "The Sublime of Edmund Burke or, the Bathos of Experience," in Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 8 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 70-1. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1959), 332. Joseph Warton, "An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope," in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, Scott Elledge, ed. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1961), 2:723. Anna Brownwell Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Clara Thomas, ed. (1838; reprint, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 162. CANADIAN PROSPECTS:

ABRAM'S PLAINS AND QUEBEC HILL IN CONTEXT 1 Thomas Gary, Abram's Plains: A Poem, D.M.R. Bentley, ed. (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1986), 1-2. All further quotations are from this edition. Although some critics have seen Gary's choice of couplet prosody as inevitable for someone with his Tory values - as conservative, that is - it is worth remembering that the brief vogue for the blank verse of Thomson's The Seasons was already over, and in the last quarter of the century even Wordsworth, in An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, was writing heroic couplets. Moreover, Gary confesses that he actually prefers blank verse and would write it if he could! 2 John Pengwerne Matthews, Tradition in Exile: A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). Matthews has been one of the few Canadian critics to look equably upon colonial writers' use of inherited forms, and to study their gradual transformation. The usefulness of the study is somewhat diminished,

163 Notes to page 21

3

4

5

6

7

however, by the way two literatures are oversimplified for the sake of polarization (i.e. because the environment was so alien, Australian writers had to start over entirely, and so produced a naive and popular literature, while Canadians settled in a land of familiar if exaggerated geography and weather, and so maintained their cultural traditions). Sandra Djwa, "Canadian Poets and the Great Tradition," Canadian Literature 65 (Summer, 1975): 45. Diane Bessai too dismisses all preConfederation writers as manifesting "the unthinking dependence of the emigre" in "Counterfeiting Hindsight," World Literature Written in English 23 (Spring 1984): 363. Critics have a tendency to favour the radicals of their own youth, however, so Wendy Keitner sees the modern period as merely one of "transition" to the "past decade ... a new, genuinely postcolonial period" in "Patterns of Decolonization in Contemporary Canadian Literature," Language and Literature, Proceedings of the Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, 1983), 202-3. R.E. Rashley, Poetry in Canada: The First Three Steps (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1958), 44. Rashley declares that even the first generation of writers born in British North America are "so completely a part of the intellectual country which produced them that they cannot be anything but minor poets of that country ... The possibility of thinking entirely in a medium created by the life in Canada is only beginning to appear, and so the new world is still held at a distance..." (45). However, as I will argue throughout these essays, the European culture he regards as alien was and is inalienably part of "the new world": there never will be a "possibility of thinking entirely in a medium created by the life in Canada" as long as we speak and write English. Peter Stevens, "Canada," in Literatures of the World in English, Bruce King, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 45. Prose writers get tarred with the same brush, as when Diana M.A. Relke refers to "Moodie's attempt to create literature out of her pioneer experience in the language of Victorian Romanticism, a language decidedly inappropriate to that experience." See "Double Voice, Single Vision: A Feminist Reading of Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie," Atlantis 9 (1983): 37. Mari Peepre-Bordessa, "Hugh MacLennan: Literary Geographer of a Nation," in A Few Acres of Snow: Literary and Artistic Images of Canada, Paul Simpson-Housley and Glen Norcliffe, eds. (Toronto: Dundurn, 1992), 17. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 27-

164 Notes to pages 22-3 8 Northrop Frye, "Preface to an Uncollected Anthology" (1956), reprinted in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971), 173; 175. Similarly in "Canada and Its Poetry" (1943), also reprinted in The Bush Garden, despite enlisting etymology to argue that "Originality is largely a matter of returning to origins, of studying and imitating the great poets of the past," Frye disparages Canadian poetry for "all its echoes and imitations and second-hand ideas" (136, 131). In neither case does he explain why imitation is bad for Canadian writers but good for English ones. For a provocative discussion of Frye's self-contradictions in this area, see Leon Surette, "Here is Us: The Topocentrism of Canadian Literary Criticism," Canadian Poetry 10 (Spring/Summer 1982): 44-57. 9 Frye, "Canada and Its Poetry," 136. As Surette remarks, Frye's appropriation of the classical and biblical traditions as the turf of Europeans but not North Americans glosses over the fact that "Obviously the resident of High Wycombe ignorant of Greek and Hebrew is much more cut off from the hypostatized 'linear sequence' than the resident of White Horse who is conversant in both languages." See "Here is Us," 48. Heather Murray sums up the tension in Frye's Canadian criticism adroitly: "As Frye construes it, there is on the one hand a literature which is Canadian, contextualized, connected somehow to life; it is unorthodox, slightly failed or fallen short. On the other hand is a Literature which is general and autonomous, the term 'Literature' signifying both the realm of 'literary experience itself and the fully achieved 'classics' which belong there." See "Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space," in Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, John Moss, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987), 7310 Frye, "Preface to an Uncollected Anthology," 163. 11 J.M. Zezulka, "The Pastoral Vision in Nineteenth-Century Canada," The Dalhousie Review 57 (1978): 221. 12 D.M.R. Bentley published "Thomas Cary: Abram's Plains," from which this comment was taken, after I completed my original study: it may be found in Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994), 37-8. His first lengthy discussion of the work was "Thomas Gary's Abram's Plains (1789) and Its 'Preface,'" Canadian Poetry 5 (Fall/Winter 1979): 1-28, which was reprinted in slightly revised form as the introduction to his edition. Bentley also discusses Abram's Plains in relation to other topographical works in "A Grey Inventory: Early Long Poems on Canada," in The GaylGrey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry 1690-1990 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992).

165 Notes to pages 23-6 13 Bentley, introduction to Abram's Plains, xii. 14 Robert Arnold Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1936), 24. Other early North American examples of "region" poems include William Bradford's "A Descriptive and Historical Account of New England in Verse" (before 1657), Jacob Steendam's "The Praise of New Netherland" (1661), and John Holme's "A True Relation of the Flourishing State of Pennsylvania" (1689), all listed in Aubin, 365. 15 D.E.S. Maxwell, "Landscape and Theme" in Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture, John Press, ed. (London: Heinemann, 1964), 89. 16 Bentley, introduction to Abram's Plains, xxxv. 17 Henry V.S. and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955), 143. See also pages 36-59 for discussion of the various types of landscape painting popular in the period. 18 John Milton, "U Allegro," in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, John T. Shawcross, ed. (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 106-10. 19 C.V. Deane discusses the relationship of Dyer's artistic training to the writing of "Grongar Hill" in Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry (1935; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1967), 63-71; see also pages 100-9 on "The Prospect Poem." Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring's pioneer study of the relationship between visual and verbal arts in the period is also germane: Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700-1800 (1925; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1965). 20 Deane, Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry, 102. 21 Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest, in the Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. i, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism (London: Methuen, 1961), 145-94. All quotations refer to this edition. 22 Deane summarizes Pope's debt to Denham as follows: "the invocation, the generalized though not indistinct description, the marshalling of historical and literary celebrities associated with the locality, the condemnation of historical misdeeds enacted there, the description of field sports, the meditation on rural retirement and peace of mind, the praise of thriving agriculture and commerce, and the conclusion on a political note." Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry, 116. All these motifs may also be found in Gary. 23 For a persuasive identification of William III with the hunting despot of Windsor-Forest, see Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 113-28.

166 Notes to pages 27-32 24 James Thomson, The Seasons, James Sambrook, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). All quotations are from the final, 1746 version. See "Spring," 11.67-78, for another panegyric of Britain. 25 For the ubiquity of such imagery in eighteenth-century British verse, see O.H.K. Spate, "The Muse of Mercantilism: Jago, Grainger, and Dyer," in Studies in the Eighteenth Century: Papers Presented at the David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, Canberra 1966, R.F. Brissenden, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 119-31. The centrality of mercantile and imperialist ideology to early Canadian poetry is explored by C.D. Mazoff in "Strategies of Colonial Legitimation in the Early Canadian Long Poem," Canadian Poetry 36 (Spring/Summer 1995): 81113. 26 To Bentley, "Gary seems to see in Canada's 'shining fire-flies' a metaphor for his own small but bright colony on the St. Lawrence, as well as, perhaps, a metaphor for his own 'mimic' yet distinctive poetic efforts"; "Thomas Cary: Abram's Plains," 38. 27 See Bentley, note to Abram's Plains, 11.485ff. Two hundred years later, the boulevard in Montreal formerly named after Dorchester has been renamed in honour of Rene Levesque - a wonderful historical irony. 28 Quoted by Sandra Djwa in "Canadian Poets and the Great Tradition," 42. A century after Abram's Plains, W.D. Lighthall states, in the introduction to his anthology Songs of the Great Dominion (London: Walter Scott, 1889), that "Canada, Eldest Daughter of the Empire, is the Empire's completest type!" (xxi). According to Geoffrey H. Hartman, from the seventeenth century onwards "the idea of a Progress of Poetry from Greece or the Holy Land to Britain" became integral to English poems about places. See "Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 317-18. 29 Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (New York: Galaxy, 1972), 8. 30 J. Mackay, Quebec Hill, D.M.R. Bentley, ed. (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1988), 5. All further quotations are from this edition. Bentley reviews the biographical speculation about Mackay (xi-xiii), and documents his reliance on other works about North America, particularly those of Jonathan Carver. The borrowings are so extensive that Bentley concedes "the very remote possibility ... that Mackay was never in Canada, but merely made that claim in his Preface to establish the authority of this poem" (xli n. 25). A revised version of this essay appears in Mimic Fires, 39-50. 31 The same pattern can be found in later topographical poems, such as Cornwall Bayley's Canada: A Descriptive Poem (1806), and Charles Sangster's The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856).

167 Notes to pages 33-9 32 The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "prospect." 33 The Traveller, in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Friedman, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:245-69. All further quotations are from this edition. 34 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody. Being a Recital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2nd ed., corrected, 1714, 2:382. It is noteworthy, however, that even Theocles reverts to English complacency at the end of this exercise, resolving to "leave these unsociable Places, whither our Fancy has transported us, and return to ourselves here again, in our more conversable Woods, and temperate Climates. Here no fierce Heats or Colds annoy us, no Precipices nor Cataracts amaze us" (391-2). Still, as C.A. Moore observes, "any defence of the rigors of winter was at the time of Shaftesbury's writing (1709) a catholic note hardly to be found in all the range of English literature." See "The Return to Nature in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Philology 14 (1917): 261. 35 Mackay might also have found a model for the man-lost-in-snow episode in Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1793). In this poem the man is a "chamois-chaser" in the Alps who slips from a mountain and dies bleeding, hungry, and cold, in a demonic landscape. Wordsworth goes farther than Thomson in merging the gothic and the sentimental: he not only shows the hunter's family waiting in vain, but speculates that one day the child might discover his father's bones and "start at the reliques of that very thigh / on which so oft he prattled when a boy" (11.411-12). Charles Sangster's poem, "The Frost King's Revel" (1856), is a grotesquely exuberant example of this motif; Patrick Lane's Winter (Regina: Coteau, 1990), an elegant contemporary version. 36 Paul Alpers, "The Eclogue Tradition and the Nature of Pastoral," College English 34 (1972): 352-3. "AFTER THE BEAUTY OF TERROR THE BEAUTY OF PEACE": NOTES ON THE CANADIAN SUBLIME 1 D.M.R. Bentley, introduction to Abram's Plains: A Poem, by Thomas Cary (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1986), xxiii. All further quotations are from this edition. 2 The Traveller, in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Friedman, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:245-69. All further quotations are from this edition. 3 The Deserted Village, in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 4:285-304. 4 J. Mackay, Quebec Hill, D.M.R. Bentley, ed. (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1988). All further quotations are from this edition. It's

168 Notes to pages 39-40

5

6

7 8 9 10

worth noting that to make Canada sufficiently terrifying, both Goldsmith and Mackay borrow poisonous snakes and tigers, as well as diseases bred in "swampy fens," from those dangers James Thomson lists as endemic to torrid zones in "Summer." The Seasons, James Sambrook, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 11.898-938, 1026-35. Mary Lu MacDonald notes that most visitors to Niagara Falls a few years later praised their sublimity; see "The Natural World in Early Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature," Canadian Literature 111 (Winter 1986): 59-60, and Literature and Society in the Canadas 1817-1850 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 212-16. See also Christopher Mulvey, "The Falls of Niagara: A Dangerous Subject," in AngloAmerican Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 187208, and Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), for confirmation that the predominant view was that the falls were spiritually exalting. Dennis's list of terrors reads "Gods, Daemons, Hell, Spirits and Souls of Men, Miracles, Prodigies, Enchantments, Witchcraft, Thunder, Tempests, Raging Seas, Inundations, Torrents, Earthquakes, Volcanos, Monsters, Serpents, Lions, Tygers, Fire, War, Pestilence." See "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry," Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, Scott Elledge, ed. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1961), 1:128. His list of passions may be found in the same essay on page 106. Dennis talks about admiration and terror and the relationship between them, but never gets around to his promised discussion of the epic function of the other enthusiastic passions. Dennis, "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry," 127. Longinus on the Sublime, H.L. Havell, trans. (London: Macmillan, 1890), 68-9. Longinus on the Sublime, 2. In The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 72-8, M.H. Abrams compares the mimetic theory of poetry to the "expressive," noting that the latter originates with Longinus and was spread in England by the influence of Dennis; see also Northrop Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility" (1963), reprinted in Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime, Harold Bloom, ed. (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 12. Scott Elledge reminds us that it was actually Dryden who first introduced Longinus's ideas to the general public in his "Apology for Heroic Poetry" (1676), although Dennis was the first to explore the sublime in any detail. See "The Background and Development in English Criticism of the Theories of Generality and Particularity," PMLA 62 (1947): 161-2.

169 Notes to pages 40-2 11 Quoted by Joan Pittock in The Ascendency of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 61. 12 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759; reprint in facsmile, Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), 97. Elledge remarks that "though not completely original, Burke's discussion of and emphasis upon fear or terror as important emotions in the complex reaction to what is sublime was chief among those things which distinguished the Enquiry from earlier treatments of the subject." "The Background and Development in English Criticism of the Theories of Generality and Particularity," 157. 13 Dennis, "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry," 129. 14 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 257. Dr Johnson, predictably, dissents. He dismisses the experience of "terror without danger" as "one of the sports of fancy, a voluntary agitation of the mind, that is permitted no longer than it pleases." Quoted by Christopher Hussey in The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 113. On the other hand, Thomas Weiskel argues that the fear of injury "points genetically and synechdochically to castration anxiety ... The fantasized character of castration anxiety seems related to the mediated conditionality of the sublime moment ... The sublime moment recapitulates and thereby reestablishes the oedipus complex, whose positive resolution is the basis of culture itself." The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 93-4. 15 Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIIICentury England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1935), 88. For an amusing exploration of "the oxymoron of agreeable horror," see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Random House, 1995)/ 447-5716 James Beattie, The Minstrel, or, the Progress of Genius, in The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer, Rev. George Gilfillan, ed. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1854), 1-38. 17 Mackay was by no means the only writer to admit that Niagara disturbed him; another such was Robert H. Rose, one of whose "Stanzas, Written at Niagara" (1810) reads: Yet I would not, for worlds, that my life were like thee! No, far be each thought of such tumult from me! Far, far be each wish that ambition might form To dwell in the horror and roar of the storm. Quoted by Robert Arnold Aubin in Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1936), 241. On the

170 Notes to pages 42-3

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19 20

21

22

other hand, a later Canadian poet, Charles Sangster, endorses the more typical response to sublime phenomena when he notes: "And we have passed the terrible LACHINE, / Have felt a fearless tremor thrill the soul," The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856), 11.407-8. Sangster was so fascinated that he kept revising and amplifying those sections of his poem describing rapids. See the appendices, The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, D.M.R. Bentley, ed. (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1990). Martin Price, "The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers" (1969), reprinted in Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime, 31-2. In this context it seems inevitable that the first Romantic poet to visit the Falls, Thomas Moore, should write home in 1804 that "We must have new combinations of language to describe the Falls of Niagara." Quoted by Mulvey in Anglo-American Landscapes, 187. And in his Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), E.H. Dewart publishes his own poem on "The Falls of Niagara" which reads in part No words of mortal lips Can fitly speak the wonder, reverence, joy, The wild imaginings, intense yet serene, Which now, like spirits from some higher sphere For whom no earthly tongue has name or type, Sweep through my soul in waves of surging thought. (11.33-8) (reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 137-40. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 36. The Oxford English Dictionary derives the word "sublime" from the latin phrase meaning "up to the lintel," and relates it to its cognate "subliminal," meaning "below the threshold." James B. Twitchell explores the implications of this etymology for horizons depicted in landscape painting, as well as for poetic approaches towards the border of consciousness, in Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770-1850 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983). For a detailed study of the etymology of the word, see "The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics, and Psychoanalysis," by Jan Cohn and Thomas H. Miles, Modern Philology 74 (1976-7): 289-304. Quoted by Patricia Meyer Spacks in The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 107. "The Sublime and the Beautiful," in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2:354. In "Wordsworth's Aesthetics of Landscape," The Wordsworth Circle 7 (Spring 1976): 70, Owen remarks that "the only thoroughly consistent aesthetics of landscape" in Wordsworth's poetry and prose is that derived from Burke, but in Wordsworth's Revisionary

171 Notes to pages 43-6

23

24 25

26 27 28

29

30

31 32

33

Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Theresa M. Kelley argues that Wordsworth modified Burke substantially; see especially pages 23-42. And in Romantic Horizons, 62, Twitchell goes so far as to distinguish incidents of the Burkean sublime (boating at Hawkshead) from those conforming to a "romantic" sublime (the ravine of Gondo) in The Prelude. Wordsworth, "The Sublime and the Beautiful," 354. In a chapter on the poet's "Family of Floods," Kelley notes: "From early to late, in major as well as minor poems, Wordsworth represents the unstable character of the sublime in images of floods, torrents, and waterfalls" (Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics, ijoff). Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 151. Friedrich von Schiller, "On the Sublime" (1801), in "Naive and Sentimental Poetry" and "On the Sublime": Two Essays, Julius A. Elias, trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 199. Desmond Pacey's obituary notice, "The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott" in The Canadian Forum 28 (August 1948): 107. "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde" in The Lyotard Reader, Andrew Benjamin, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 200. Dennis Lee, "Rejoinder," Saturday Night 87 (September 1972): 33. In response to a hostile letter from Robin Matthews in the same issue of the journal, Lee was clarifying his earlier remarks in "Running and Dwelling: Homage to Al Purdy," Saturday Night 87 0uly 1972), in which he praised the poet for his "celebration of the silencing victory of place" (16). Northrop Frye, "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada," reprinted in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971), 225. As Helen M. Buss remarks of this passage: "Since its publication in 1965 ... [it] has acquired the power of a biblical authority." "Women and the Garrison Mentality: Pioneer Women, Autobiographers and their Relation to the Land," in Re(Discovering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, Lorraine McMullen, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990), 123. Victor G. Hopwood, "Explorers by Land to 1867," in The Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed., Carl F. Klinck, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 1:41. Carl F. Klinck, "Literary History in the Canadas, 1812-1841," in The Literary History of Canada, 1:150. Susan Joan Wood, The Land in Canadian Prose, 1840-1945, Carleton Monographs in English Language and Literature (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 102-3. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Anne Barton, ed., in The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

172 Notes to pages 47-50 34 Alexander McLachlan, The Emigrant, in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Poetry, Frank M. Tierney and Glenn Clever, eds. (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1988), 131-72. All further quotations are from this edition. 35 Standish O'Grady, The Emigrant, Brian Trehearne, ed. (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1989). 36 According to Charles Steele, whose "Canadian Poetry in English: The Beginnings," is quoted by Brian Trehearne in the introduction to his edition of The Emigrant, xlix. 37 Isabella Valancy Crawford, Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story, D.M.R. Bentley, ed. (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1987). 38 MacDonald, "The Natural World in Early Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature," 49. The last three sentences of this quotation are repeated verbatim in her later study, Literature and Society in the Canadas 1817-1850, 192. D.M.R. Bentley observes in similar fashion that the sublime (like the picturesque) was "almost ubiquitous in Canada between the end of the eighteenth century and the First World War" in the introduction to Sangster's The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, Ivi n. 63. 39 Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, Mary Jane Edwards, ed. (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1985), 5-6. All further quotations are from this edition. 40 Quoted by Edwards in the introduction to The History of Emily Montague, xl. 41 Jerome McGann has gone so far as to characterize the sublime as an "ideology" - the Romantic ideology in his book of that name (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Peter de Bolla, who is reluctant to go so far himself, nonetheless notes: "Where we increasingly remove discussion of aesthetics proper to the philosophy schools and profession of academic philosophy, the eighteenth-century theorist moved in precisely the opposite direction, so that the enquiry into what is beautiful or sublime became progressively a topic for general discussion, articulated in areas of discursive activity which could not be further removed from the academic discipline of philosophy." The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 27. 42 E.H. Dewart, Selections from Canadian Poets; with Occasional Critical and Biographical Notes, and an Introductory Essay on Canadian Poetry, (1864; reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), xix. 43 Ralph Gustafson, introduction to The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967), 27. 44 Northrop Frye, "The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry" (1946), The Bush Garden, 146. See also "Preface to an Uncollected Anthology" (1956), in which we are told that there is no "imaginative

173 Notes to pages 50-2 balance" between man and nature in Canada, and that what "impresses poet and painter alike ... [is] its profoundly unhumanized isolation" (The Bush Garden, 164). 45 Northrop Frye, "Haunted by a Lack of Ghosts," in The Canadian Imagination, David Staines, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 31. Condescension also taints his comment that: "The Wordsworthian sense of nature as a teacher is apparent as early as Mrs. Traill, in whom we note a somewhat selective approach to the subject reminiscent of Miss Muffet." "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada," 244-5. 46 Diane Bessai, "Counterfeiting Hindsight," World Literature Written in English 23 (Spring 1984): 137. 47 Frye, "Canada and Its Poetry" (1943), The Bush Garden, 142. This piece was originally a review of A.J.M. Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry, but Frye ignores Smith's own introduction to the work and writes about his personal obsessions, concluding: "This is not, I hope, a pattern of thought I have arbitrarily forced upon Canadian poetry" (143). On the other hand, elsewhere he has declared that "the wise man has a pattern or image of reality into which everything he knows fits, and into which everything he does know could fit." Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1949; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 87. 48 See Bessai, "Counterfeiting Hindsight," 355. As Francis Sparshott notes, despite his real contribution to local criticism, "in the context of Canadian culture generally, the primary significance of Frye is that he is, without doubt or qualification, a world figure." "Frye in Place," Canadian Literature 83 (Winter 1979): 144. 49 John Moss, Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian Fiction (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 15. 50 D.G. Jones, Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 6. Heather Murray suggests that much misreading of Canadian literature is due to the persistence of this nature/culture dichotomy. She offers as a more accurate model of the way nature is approached by our writers a continuum from city to pseudo-wilderness to wilderness. See "Women in the Wilderness" in A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. (Edmonton: Longspoon/ NeWest, 1986), 80-1. 51 Quoted in Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 39-40. 52 Northrop Frye, "Culture as Interpenetration," in Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture, James Polk, ed. (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1982), 17-18. 53 Frye, "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada," 225. In her paper, "Forays in the Bush Garden: Frye and Canadian Poetry", presented at

174 Notes to pages 52-4 the October 1992 conference on "The Legacy of Northrop Frye" held at the University of Toronto, Sandra Djwa suggested that this view of Canadian poetry was profoundly influenced by Frye's reading of, and admiration for, the work of E.J. Pratt. She noted, moreover, that Pratt's view of nature as hostile, and of man as the only moral force on the planet, is atypical of Canadian poets - most of whom see nature as both beneficent and frightening. 54 Marcia B. Kline, Beyond the Land Itself: Views of Nature in Canada and the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 47. 55 Susanna Moodie, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (1853; reprint, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 18. All further quotations are from this edition. 56 Kline, Beyond the Land Itself, 55-6. Kline's statement that Canadians were "forced" to define themselves in opposition to Americans seems to derive from a misunderstanding of Frye's comment that "historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution" ("Letters in Canada" (1952), in The Bush Garden, 14). This witticism reflects a Maritimer's notion of all Canadians as United Empire Loyalists. Apparently Kline does not recognize the allusion, and takes American values as a given against which things Canadian must be opposed. 57 Lee, "Rejoinder," 33. 58 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972), 23. 59 Atwood, Survival, 12-13. 60 Frank Davey, "Atwood Walking Backwards," Open Letter second series 5 (Summer 1973): 82. 61 Frank Davey, "Surviving the Paraphrase," (1976), in Surviving the Paraphrase: Eleven Essays on Canadian Literature (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1983), 1-12; Russell M. Brown, "Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics," Essays on Canadian Writing 11 (Summer 1978): 151-83; WJ. Keith, "The Thematic Approach to Canadian Fiction," in Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, Charles R. Steele, ed. (Toronto: ECW, 1982), 71-90; Paul Stuewe, Clearing the Ground: English-Canadian Literature after "Survival" (Toronto: Proper Tales Press, 1984). While Davey was preparing his 1976 essay, Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon were editing the "Minus Canadian" issue of Studies in Canadian Literature 2 (Summer 1977), which included their "Mandatory Subversive Manifesto" (137-45) denouncing the school of Frye. At the same time, Barbara Belyea argued that Canadian poetry, with its variety of themes and styles, simply did not conform to critical expectations; see "Butterfly in the Bush Garden: 'Mythopoeic' Criticism of Contemporary Poetry Written in Canada," The Dalhousie Review 56 (Summer 1976): 336-45.

175 Notes to pages 55-7 62 Brown, "Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics," 180. 63 W.J. Keith includes among those stock responses whose appropriateness to Canadian literature is as dubious as their application is persistent not only "garrison culture," but also "colonial," "puritan," and "genteel." See "The Function of Canadian Criticism at the Present Time," Essays on Canadian Writing 30 (Winter 1984-5): 7-10. 64 Gaile McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 10. Arthur Kroker's praise of the book as "highly original" was one of six rave reviews by experts - including Atwood - on the back cover. In fact, McGregor acknowledges her heavy reliance on Kline, whose association of Major John Richardson's rejection of wild nature in Wacousta with the same phenomenon in Moodie seems to be the germ which inspired McGregor's own study. (See Kline, Beyond the Land Itself, 35-6). Atwood's puff describes the book as "Energetic, engaging, and essential reading for all those who purport to study the Canadian psyche as reflected in its literature." As Tracy Ware notes dryly, "those who read Canadian literature for other reasons, or who doubt the very existence of a Canadian 'psyche,' are unlikely to be engaged by this book." See "Notes on the Literary Histories of Canada," Dalhousie Review 65 (Winter 1985-6): 573. 65 McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome, 28. 66 Quoted in McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome, 28-9. 67 McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome, 43. 68 Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, Illustrative of the Domestic Economy of British America (1836; reprint, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 250-1. Her sister Susanna also complains of "the blank look of desolation that pervades all new settlements" in Life in the Clearings versus the Bush, 296. Goldsmith tells us it takes ten to fifteen years for the stumps to decay in The Rising Village, 11.67-72 and note. Further examples may be found in W.J. Keith's chapter on "The Battle of the Trees" in his Literary Images of Ontario, The Ontario Historical Studies Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 33-6. 69 McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome, 49-50. For a waspish expose of McGregor's scholarly inaccuracy, see also "The McGregor Syndrome; or, the Survival of Patterns of Isolated Butterflies on Rocks in the Haunted Wilderness of the Untamed Bush Garden Beyond the Land Itself," by I.S. MacLaren, Canadian Poetry 18 (Spring/Summer, 1986): 118-30. 70 According to Joseph Warren Beach in The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: Pageant, 1956), 572. 71 Wallace Jackson, Immediacy: The Development of a Critical Concept from Addison to Coleridge (Amsterdam: Rodopi NV, 1973), 25. This is precisely

176 Notes to pages 57-8

72

73

74

75 76 77

why Shaftesbury is so often considered the first Romantic, for as Robert Langbaum notes, "the essential idea of romanticism [is] the doctrine that the imaginative apprehension gained through immediate experience is primary and certain, whereas the analytic reflection that follows is secondary and problematic." See The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1957), 35. Robert Kroetsch, "Reading Across the Border," in Studies on Canadian Literature: Introductory and Critical Essays, Arnold E. Davidson, ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), 341. Frank Davey interrogates the notion of a Canadian canon throughout Canadian Literary Power (Edmonton: NeWest, 1993); see particularly 45102. Quoted by Donna Bennett in "English Canada's Postcolonial Complexities," Essays on Canadian Writing 51-2 (Winter-Spring 1993-1994): 195. Linda Hutcheon embraces this view of the post-colonial work as necessarily subversive in "Circling the Downspout of Empire," Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 167-90; Diana Brydon offers cogent objections in her piece in the same collection, "The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy," 191-204. Like Stephen Slemon, she sees some tension between postmodernism and post-colonialism as critical approaches, quoting his observation that "Western post-modernist readings can so overvalue the anti-referential or deconstructive energies of postcolonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them," from his essay in the same collection, "Modernism's Last Post," 7. Dorothy Seaton, "The Post-Colonial as Deconstruction: Land & Language in Kroetsch's 'Badlands,'" Canadian Literature 128 (1991): 77. Stan Dragland, The Bees of the Invisible: Essays in Contemporary English Canadian Writing (Toronto: Coach House, 1991), 88. T.D. MacLulich, "Thematic Criticism, Literary Nationalism, and the Critic's New Clothes," Essays on Canadian Writing 35 (Winter 1987): 334. The same year, Heather Murray suggested that thematic criticism deserved a retrospective because of its "integral role in the (thoroughly admirable) effort to read/teach/write 'Canadian' [and] its serious consideration of so-called 'minor' writers (such as women)" in "Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space," Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, John Moss, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987), 75. Such comments are becoming commonplace; see, for example Donna Bennett in "English Canada's PostColonial Complexities," 194, and David Staines, Beyond the Provinces:

177 Notes to pages 60-2 Literary Canada at Century's End (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 80-1. THE WAXING AND WANING OF SUSANNA MOODIE'S "ENTHUSIASM" 1 Rosemary Sullivan, "The Forest and the Trees," in Ambivalence: Studies in Canadian Literature, Om P. Juneja and Chandra Mohan, eds. (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1990), 43. 2 Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852; reprint Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 134-5. All further quotations will refer to this edition. 3 "The Sublime and the Beautiful," in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2:356-7; 351. 4 David Stouck, "'Secrets of the Prison-House': Mrs. Moodie and the Canadian Imagination," The Dalhousie Review 54 (Autumn 1974): 465. 5 Susan Joan Wood, The Land in Canadian Prose, 1840-1945, Carleton Monographs in English Language and Literature (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 96. 6 Critics are finally beginning to pay attention to Moodie as a gendered subject, as a young isolated mother. For welcome insights in this area, see Helen M. Buss, Mapping Ourselves: Canadian Women's Autobiography in English (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 84-94, and Bina Freiwald, "'The tongue of woman': The Language of the Self in Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush," in Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, Lorraine McMullen, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990), 155-172Carl Ballstadt's study of Moodie's letters to her husband explores some of the intimate detail she felt constrained to leave out of her narrative; see "'The Embryo Blossom': Susanna Moodie's Letters to Her Husband in Relation to Roughing It in the Bush," Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers, 137-145. As Sidonie Smith remarks: "An androcentric genre, autobiography demands the public story of the public life ... When woman chooses to leave behind cultural silence and to pursue autobiography, she chooses to enter the public arena. But she can speak with authority only insofar as she tells a story that her audience will read." A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 52. 7 Marian Fowler, "Roughing It in the Bush: A Sentimental Novel," in Beginnings, vol. 2 of The Canadian Novel, John Moss, ed. (Toronto: NC Press, 1980), 93. Similarly, Les McLeod contends that "pioneer writers

178 Notes to pages 63-7

8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16

sometimes could not 'see' the Canadian landscape because of their oldworld mind-set" in Cold Stars: The Movement Selfward in Late NineteenthCentury Canadian Poetry (diss., University of Calgary, 1981), 7; and Gordon Johnston argues: "The relative failure of the imagination in Canada before the Confederation poets is due its lack of engagement in the present world" in "Duncan Campbell Scott," Canadian Writers and Their Works Poetry Series: 2, Robert Lecker, Jack David and Ellen Quigley, eds. (Toronto: ECW, 1983), 243. In most cases what such critics seem to intend by "the present world" is the world as their own age views it. R.D. MacDonald, "Design and Purpose," Canadian Literature 51 (Winter 1972): 30. Ramsay Cook, "Imagining a North American Garden: Some Parallels & Differences in Canadian & American Culture," Canadian Literature 103 (Winter 1984): 13-14. Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970). All further quotations are from this edition. Stouck, '"Secrets of the Prison-House/" 472 n. 4. R.P. Bilan, "Margaret Atwood's 'Journals of Susanna Moodie/" Canadian Poetry 2 (Spring/Summer 1978): 9. Sherill E. Grace, "Moodie and Atwood: Notes on a Literary Reincarnation," in Beginnings, 73. Eli Mandel takes a similar tack in the introduction to his Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), when he acknowledges that Atwood's version of Moodie may be "bad criticism," but argues nonetheless that to "tell lies" may be a legitimate creative activity. See pages 24-5. Frye's description of Moodie comes from his "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada" (1965), in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971), 237. Robertson Davies, At My Heart's Core, in An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, Russell Brown and Donna Bennett, eds. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1:597. All further references are to this edition. For example, she observes of her husband's decision to fight the 1837 uprising that "honest backwoodsmen" such as he were "perfectly ignorant of the abuses that had led to the present position of things" (Roughing It in the Bush, 413). And in the introduction to the Canadian edition of the book she goes even farther in expressing sympathy for the rebels (530). As for religious non-conformists, she devotes a whole chapter of Life in the Clearings versus the Bush to second-hand accounts of Methodist camp meetings. While describing them as a "disorderly mixture of fanaticism and vanity," she also acknowledges that they may be "the

179 Notes to page 67 means of making careless people think of the state of their souls" (quotations from the 1989 reprint, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 142; 148). In her description of the churches of Belleville she notes that: "The Wesleyans, who have been of infinite use in spreading the Gospel on the North American continent, possess a numerous and highly respectable congregation in this place" (35). The social implications of her belief in the freedom of ideas are explored by Robin Matthews in "Susanna Moodie, Pink Toryism and Nineteenth Century Ideas of Canadian Identity," The Journal of Canadian Studies 10 (August 1975): 3-15. 17 Published in an edition of 500 by Smith, Elder and Company of Cornhill, Enthusiasm is now available on microtext, courtesy of the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (Ottawa, 1985). The CIHM number for the book is 38892. All quotations are from this, the first and only British edition. 18 Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime, Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). All quotations from Moodie's letters are from this edition, as are biographical facts. 19 Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime, 48 n. 7. 20 See Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime, 43-48, for all the details of this eventful week. That Pastor Ritchie opposed Susanna's romantic interest is clear from a letter John Moodie wrote to her on 7 September 1830: For God's sake my dearest, endeavour to calm your mind and despise the opinions of those who would reduce your best and most exalted feelings to their own standards. The most dangerous of all decievers [sic] are those who first decieve [sic] themselves. I believe Mr. R to be in many respects a good and an honest man, but you must excuse me dear Susan when I say that I consider him as a man whose mind is perverted by fanaticism. This is really the most charitable construction that I can put on his conduct. Letters of Love and Duty: The Correspondence of Susanna and John Moodie, Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 20-1. Although the Moodie children were baptized Presbyterian, their parents apparently kept some involvement with the evangelical movement since on 8 April 1845 they were "excommunicated" from the Church of the Congregational Faith and Order in Belleville "for their disorderly walk and neglect of Christian fellowship." See Letters of Love and Duty, 109 nn. 35, 36. 21 Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, Volume II: 1740-1780, Religious Sentimentalism in the Age of Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 370.

i8o Notes to pages 68-70 22 John Dennis, "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry," in EighteenthCentury Critical Essays, Scott Elledge, ed. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1961), 1:133. 23 Dennis, "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry," 125. 24 For the history of the word "enthusiasm," see Susie I. Tucker, Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), and Sister M. Kevin Whelan, Enthusiasm in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1935). 25 According to Clarence M. Webster in "Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of Puritan Enthusiasm," PMLA 48 (1933): 1141-2. Moliere proposed a similar theory, satirically, in Tartuffe. 26 For Meric Casaubon's A Treatise concerning Enthusiasme see "A Facsimile Reproduction of the second edition of 1656," (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970); for Henry More's Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, publication 118 of the Augustan Reprint Society (Los Angeles: Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1966). 27 Blount is quoted by George Williamson in "The Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm," Studies in Philology 30 (1933): 583. 28 Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection, E.L. Me Adam, Jr. and George Milne, eds. (New York: Random House, 1963), 166. 29 Quoted by Samuel H. Monk in The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1935), 3. The fashionable discrimination of sublimity is the subject of Joan Pittock's study, The Ascendency of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 30 Johnson's Dictionary, 166. 31 Quoted by Frederick C. Gill in The Romantic Movement and Methodism: A Study of English Romanticism and the Evangelical Revival (London: The Epworth Press, 1937), 22. See also Clarke Garrett, Spirit Possession and Popular Religion from the Camisards to the Shakers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 79. 32 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord [Sommers], in Characteristicks of Men, Manner, Opinions, Times, 2nd ed., corrected, 1714, 1:52. 33 Shaftesbury, The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody. Being a Recital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2:394. At the beginning of the piece, Philocles describes Theocles to a third party, Palamon, as having "nothing of that savage Air of the vulgar Enthusiastick Kind. All was serene, soft, and harmonious" (218). Shaftesbury takes great care to ensure that his refined enthusiasm for natural beauty should be distinguished from lower-class religious frenzy.

181 Notes to pages 70-1 34 Shaftesbury, The Moralists, 400. 35 Joseph Warton, The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature, in The Three Wartons: A Choice of their Verse, Eric Partridge, ed. (London: Scholartis Press, 1927). 36 Ernest Lee Tuveson, Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 5737 These are lines 899-903 in the early texts of the poem; they were retained in the complete 1746 version of The Seasons but the succeeding twelve lines, anticipating Wordsworth even more clearly, were dropped. See James Thomson, The Seasons, James Sambrook, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 38 From a letter to Richard West, 16 November 1739, in The Correspondence of Gray, Walpole, West & Ashton, 1734-1771, Paget Toynbee, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), 259. Simon Schama sketches an amusing context for this remark in Landscape and Memory (Toronto: Random House, 1995), 447-50. 39 This is the wording in the 1805 version, book XII, 11.151-73. The 1815 version is almost the same, except there Dorothy is a "gentle Visitant" rather than an "Enthusiast," and her life "blessedness." See Book XI, 11.199-223, William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Ernest de Selincourt, ed., corrected by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). 40 According to C.A. Moore in "The Return to Nature in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Philology 14 (1917): 259. 41 For the gradual convergence of evangelical and Romantic principles, see Richard E. Brantley, Wordsworth's "Natural Methodism" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, Volume III: 1780-1830, Romantic Faith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949); Frederick C. Gill, The Romantic Movement and Methodism; and Gary Kelly, "Romantic Evangelicalism: Religion, Social Conflict, and Literary Form in Leigh Richmond's Annals of the Poor," English Studies in Canada 16 (1990): 165-86. 42 Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime, 299. Charles Sangster uses the term the same way in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, published in 1856. Praising the "Thousand Island" area he exclaims: "Isles of o'erwhelming beauty! surely here / The wild enthusiast might live, and dream / His life away" (Stanza VII, 11.2-4). See the edition by D.M.R. Bentley (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, 1990). Almost eighty years later, Charles G.D. Roberts employs the same vocabulary. In a lecture to the Elson Club of Toronto on 18 March 1933, he says of early Canadian poetry: "In the main it was Nature poetry ... It was frankly enthusiastic. It was patently sincere ... [our poets] are all religious ... They are all incorrigible and unrepentant idealists." "Canadian Poetry in its

182 Notes to pages 72-5

43

44 45 46

47

Relation to the Poetry of England and America," Canadian Poetry 3 (Fall/Winter 1978): 81-2. Such admonitions evoke the art-versus-nature debate that was already traditional when Shakespeare wrote Perdita's lecture on flowers in The Winter's Tale, FV.iv. But with the cult of enthusiasm the debate gained renewed vigour; for example, William Cowper writes: Strange! there should be found Who, self-imprison'd in their proud saloons, Renounce the odours of the open field For the unscented fictions of the loom; Who satisfied with only pencil'd scenes Prefer to the performance of a God Th'inferior wonders of an artist's hand! The Task, in Poetical Works, in H.S. Milford, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967) 1,11.413-19. Of Cowper, Moodie writes to James Bird on 5 September 1828: "His sentiments are noble, excellent, sublime! ... I consider him as a Reformer of the Vices of mankind to stand unrivalled." John Byrom, "Enthusiasm. A Poetical Essay," in Miscellaneous Poems (Manchester: J. Harrop, 1773), 2:22-41. The text actually reads "to make Entheasm a Crime," (my emphasis) but I believe this to be a misprint. A letter to Richard Bentley, dated 22 January 1856, poignantly reminds us that Moodie was aware of her particular talents. She confides that all her early works had been dramatic, but that she was persuaded by foolish fanaticks, with whom I got entangled, to burn these MSS, it being they said unworthy of a Christian [sic] to write for the stage ... the little headings in blank verse, that often occur in my books are snatches that memory retains of these tragedies. Nature certainly meant me for a dramatic writer, and having outlived my folly, I really regret the martyrdom of these vigorous children of my young brain. Don't laugh at me. That portion of my life, would make a strange revelation of sectarianism. But it may rest with my poor tragedies in oblivion. I do not wish it to meet with their firey dooms or the ridicule of the world. The same mistrust of nature which compromised Susanna Moodie's delight in the outdoors was present in Northrop Frye's religious environment - but at an earlier, more formative stage. As I.S. MacLaren notes, the wilderness appeared "much more sinister to a Methodist than to a Roman Catholic or Anglican ... Were Northrop Frye not raised chiefly by Methodist grandparents of the circuit-riding era, it is doubtful that the garrison mentality would ever have been so foundational an aspect of his psyche or so strong a light on his view of

183 Notes to pages 75-6 Canada." "Buried Nuggets," Canadian Poetry 34 (Spring/Summer 1994): 103. 48 Gaile McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Landscape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 38. So also Robert Kroetsch: "We read her and wonder in horror - is this where Canadian culture comes from? The answer is - alas! as Mrs Moodie would say - in very strong part, yes." "Carnival and Violence: A Meditation" in The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 98. 49 Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself (1855)," Leaves of Grass, Malcolm Cowley, ed. (New York: Viking, 1959), 11.1314-16. 50 Michael Peterman, "Susanna Moodie (1803-1885)," in Canadian Writers and Their Works Fiction Series: i, Robert Lecker, Jack David and Ellen Quigley, eds. (Toronto: ECW, 1983), 80-1. Elsewhere he described the work as a "covert autobiography"; see "Roughing It in the Bush as Autobiography," in Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature, K.P. Stich, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988), 35-45. Since I wrote this essay, Peterman published his most sustained analysis of the work, This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie's "Roughing It in the Bush" (Toronto: ECW, 1996). His reading of the book here concurs with mine: he calls it "an autobiography concerned with growth and personal development, with the awakening of one's powers and understanding, even as one learns to respect the limits of one's capacities" (102).

51 Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography, 17-18. She explores the textual paradoxes specific to female self-representation on pages 44-62. William C. Spengemann acknowledges the generic instability of autobiography by dividing it into four "procedures" - "historical selfexplanation, philosophical self-scrutiny, poetic self-expression and poetic self-invention" - broad enough to embrace fictional works like David Copperfield and The Scarlet Letter. See The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), xiv. 52 Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 62. 53 John Thurston, "Rewriting Roughing It" in Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, John Moss, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987), 195. His argument is reminiscent of Paul de Man's that autobiography is representative only of textuality, not experience, in "Autobiography as De-Facement," Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919-30. Thurston too has published a book on Moodie since I completed this essay. In The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), he explores further the reasons for, and effects of, the instability of

184 Notes to pages 76-9

54 55 56

57

58

59

60 61 62

Moodie's text. His chapter on "Literary Affiliation and Religious Crisis" provides new insight into the writing and publication of Enthusiasm. Carl F. Klinck, introduction to Roughing It in the Bush, by Susanna Moodie (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962), x. Klinck, introduction to Roughing It in the Bush, x. These editions include, besides that of McClelland and Stewart published in 1989, Carl Ballstadt's for the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), and one published in London by Virago Press in 1986 (with a foreword by Margaret Atwood) which excludes Dunbar Moodie's contributions. Laura Greening, "The Journals of Susanna Moodie: A TwentiethCentury Look at a Nineteenth-Century Life," Studies in Canadian Literature 8 (1983): 166-7. As Groening notes, "Atwood's Susanna ... never has a social response to anything" (173). It is poignant to read Moodie's description of "the youthful bard" in "Enthusiasm" in the light of her later experience in Canada: ... he cannot comprehend The speculative aims of worldly men: Dearer to him a leaf, or bursting bud, Culled fresh from Nature's treasury, than all The golden dreams that cheat the care-worn crowd. His world is all within, He mingles not In their society; he cannot drudge To win the wealth they toil to realize. (11.89-96) T.D. MacLulich offers a slightly different perspective on Moodie as Crusoe in "Crusoe in the Backwoods: A Canadian Fable?" Mosaic 9 (Winter 1976): 115-26. That Robinson Crusoe may also be read as a central and enduring fable of imperial conquest does not detract from, indeed adds to, its interest as a work of Protestant spirituality. For a survey of approaches to the text as colonialist discourse, see Decolonizing Fictions by Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1993), 42-7. For the female Crusoe as a literary figure, see also Elizabeth Thompson, The Pioneer Woman: A Canadian Character Type (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), 25-6. Daniel Defoe, preface to The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719; reprint, London: J.M. Dent, 1945), i. Martin Priestman, Cowper's "Task": Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 36. Priestman, Cowper's "Task", 26. Priestman traces the conjunction of blank verse and the Protestant tradition of enthusiasm back through Cowper to Edward Young's Night Thoughts, Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, James Thomson's The Seasons and, ultimately, to Milton (17).

185 Notes to pages 80-2 63 G.A. Starr, Defoe & Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 5-6. I am also indebted to Starr for the observation on travel and agriculture as organizing metaphors of confessional literature; see pages 23-5. 64 Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 89. Frank D. McConnell also notes how much The Prelude has in common with religious prose tracts which recount how the author came to recognize his "election" to his "calling" in The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth's Prelude (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). 65 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989); 5"THE K E E N STARS' C O N F L I C T I N G M E S S A G E " : WORDSWORTH, SHELLEY, AND C H A R L E S G . D .R O B E R T S ' A V E 1 F.R. Scott, "New Poems for Old, II: The Revival of Poetry," The Canadian Forum 11 (1930): 339. 2 Fred Cogswell, "Literary Attitudes in the Maritime Provinces (18151880)," in The Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed., Carl F. Klinck, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 1:118. 3 William C. Spengemann, "Three Blind Men and an Elephant: The Problem of Nineteenth-Century English," New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 155. 4 Milton Wilson, "Other Canadians and After," in Masks of Poetry: Canadian Critics on Canadian Verse, A.J.M. Smith, ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962), 137-8. Smith himself makes the same point, a little more seriously, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Canadian Poetry (1943): "the Canadian poet has one advantage - an advantage that derives from his position of separateness and semi-isolation. He can draw upon French, British, and American sources in language and literary convention; at the same time he enjoys a measure of detachment that enables him to select and adapt what is relevant and useful. This gives to contemporary Canadian poetry in either language a distinctive quality - its ecletic detachment." Reprinted in Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays 1928-1971 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973), 21. This argument is developed further in "'Eclectic Detachment': Aspects of Identity in Canadian Poetry" (1961), Towards a View, 22-30.

186 Notes to pages 83-7 5 Barrie Davies, ed., At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in "The Globe" 1892-3, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 29. That Lampman was aware of Roberts' admiration for Shelley is not surprising; the two had become friendly during Roberts' six-month sojourn in Toronto as editor of The Week from November 1883 to April 1884, while Lampman was a student at Trinity College. See Lome Pierce's 1927 interview with Roberts, published as "Charles G.D. Roberts - Lome Pierce" in Canadian Poetry 21 (Fall/Winter 1987): 70. On 21 January 1893, Lampman dedicated his column to an enthusiastic review of Ave. 6 Tracy Ware identifies the "beautiful and original poem" of Carman's as The White Gull in "Charles G.D. Roberts and the Elegiac Tradition," in The Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium, Glenn Clever, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1983), 43. But the March date of Lampman's column makes it probable he was actually referring to the poem "Shelley," published in The Literary World 18, no. i (Jan. 8, 1887): 8. The White Gull was published in The Independent 44 no. 2279 (August 4, 1892): 910. According to Carman's biographer, Muriel Miller, it was written that summer. See Bliss Carman: Quest & Revolt (St Johns: Jesperson, 1985), 87. 7 See note 6 above. 8 Maia Bhojwani, "A Northern Pantheism: Notes on the Confederation Poets and Contemporary Mythographers," Canadian Poetry 9 (Fall/ Winter 1981): 42. We have seen precedents for this point of view in earlier Canadian poems such as Abram's Plains. 9 Miller, Bliss Carman, 86. 10 Charles G.D. Roberts, "More Reminiscences of Bliss Carman," The Dalhousie Review 10 (April 1930): 9. 11 Roberts made profuse but minor emendations to "Pastoral Elegies" before incorporating it into the introduction to his edition of Shelley's Adonais and Alastor (New York: Silver, Burdett, 1902). W.J. Keith reprints this revised version as "Shelley's Adonais" in his edition of Roberts' Selected Poetry and Critical Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). All further quotations will be from this version. This quotation is taken from page 283. 12 Ware, "Charles G.D. Roberts and the Elegiac Tradition," 44. 13 Charles G.D. Roberts, Ave, in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose. All further quotations from Roberts' work refer to this edition. 14 One also hears a faint reminiscence of section XIX of Tennyson's In Memoriam, in the analogy between the ebb and flow of the tides and the pulses of the poet's feelings. But even closer to Roberts are these lines from Swinburne's seaside autobiography "Thalassius":

187 Notes to pages 87-9

15 16

17

18

19 20

Now too the soul of all his senses felt The passionate pride of deep sea-pulses dealt Through nerve and jubilant vein As from the love and largess of old time, And with his heart again The tidal throb of all the tides keep rhyme And charm him from his own soul's separate sense With infinite and invasive influence That made strength sweet in him and sweetness strong, Being now no more a singer, but a song. (11.465-74) The poem, dedicated to Shelley's friend Trelawny, was first published in Songs of the Springtides (1880); Swinburne describes it as a "symbolical quasi-autobiographical poem after the fashion of Shelley." (See L.M. Findlay, Swinburne: Selected Poems [Manchester: Carcanet, 1982], 265 n.) In Shelley's Adonais and Alastor, Roberts calls Swinburne "the lyrical descendant of Shelley" (99 n). James Thomson, The Seasons, James Sambrook, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, John Kerrigan and Jonathan Wordsworth, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 193. An earlier Canadian example, emphasizing patriotism rather than poetic vocation, is Joseph Howe in his Acadia (Part I, 11.43-52). W.J. Keith, "Charles G.D. Roberts and the Poetic Tradition," in The Proceedings of the Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium, Mount Allison University, Carrie MacMillan, ed. (Halifax: Nimbus, 1984), 59. "Tintern Abbey" is clearly related to the tradition of topographical poetry growing out of Denham's Cooper's Hill. But Wordsworth turns what had been a public form of poetry, preoccupied with history and politics, into personal meditation. As Geoffrey H. Hartman comments: "The prospect with its monument or ruin is still nearby; the long specific title still indicates the epitaphic origin of the mode, as does the elegiac tenor; and the poem still claims to mark the very place in which it was inspired. But ... the corpse is in the poet himself, his consciousness of inner decay; and the history he meditates is of nature's relation to his mind." "Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 225. All quotations from Wordsworth are from Poetical Works, Thomas Hutchison, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). On the relationship of "The Tantramar Revisited" to picturesque conventions, see Tracy Ware, "Remembering It All Well: The Tantramar

i88 Notes to pages 89-91 Revisited," Studies in Canadian Literature 8 (1983): 225, and D.M.R. Bentley, who reminds us that Roberts was the author of the New Brunswick section of George Monroe Grant's Picturesque Canada (1882), in "The Poetics of Roberts' Tantramar Space," The Proceedings of the Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium, 22-3. 21 In "Scott's 'Lakeshore' and Its Tradition," Canadian Literature 87 (Winter 1980), Germaine Warkentin remarks "that Roberts' 'musing' leads to a reluctance to enter nature may be symptomatic of the poet's own problems or those of his age" (49). This seems to me a significant misreading, according as it does with the conventional belief that Canadian poets are afraid of the physical world. 22 Roberts, "The Poetry of Nature," in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, 280. 23 Roberts, "Wordsworth's Poetry," in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, 274. 24 See Lawrence Kramer, "The 'Intimations' Ode and Victorian Romanticism," Victorian Poetry 18 (Winter 1980): 317. 25 J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 15. Carol T. Christ also remarks that the Victorians "gradually lost the sense that there could be a fit between man's mind and nature" in Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 57. But she goes on to consider the way in which this change evolves within poetry itself, in part in reaction to the excesses of the sublime aesthetic. We will explore this subject further in the next essay. 26 Gaile McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 49; 38. Her own diction here betrays a lack of familiarity with the writings of the two authors she dismisses; neither Wordsworth nor even Shaftesbury is fond of "exquisitely enamelled" scenes; neither uses such static language to describe the active scenery he prefers. 27 D.G. Jones makes this comment while speaking of Lampman, whom he describes as "led and, at times, misled by Wordsworth" in Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 98. 28 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972), 50. 29 Les McLeod, Cold Stars: The Movement Selfivard in Late NineteenthCentury Canadian Poetry (diss., University of Calgary, 1981), 9; iii. See also his "Canadian Post-Romanticism: The Context of Late NineteenthCentury Poetry," Canadian Poetry 14 (Spring/Summer 1984): 1-37; John Ower too declares that "Our Confederation poets can be broadly described as post-Romantics" in "Portraits of the Landscape as Poet:

189 Notes to pages 91-5

30

31 32

33 34

35

36 37

Canadian Nature as Aesthetic Symbol in Three Confederation Writers," Journal of Canadian Studies 6 (1971): 27. Pierce, "Charles G.D. Roberts - Lome Pierce," 74. Gerald Noonan concurs with Roberts' view of his achievement as superior to that of Wordsworth, and therefore accuses critics like Desmond Pacey, James Cappon and W.J. Keith of being "remarkably limited by a Wordsworthian inheritance or concept of nature which filters out of Roberts the very additions which helped make his work new." "Phrases of Evolution in the Sonnets of Charles G.D. Roberts," English Studies in Canada 8 (1982): 458-9. Noonan's defense of New World writing is considerably weakened by his delirious praise of "the unblinking acceptance of nature's full cycle whereby Roberts goes beyond Wordsworth" (460). Roberts, "Wordsworth's Poetry," 272. Swinburne, "Notes on the Text of Shelley," 1869; reprinted in The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, eds. (London: William Heinemann, 1926) 15: 397. During an investigation of the paradoxical reception of Wordsworth's religious thought, Stephen Prickett notes that John Stuart Mill, who had been transformed by reading Wordsworth, nonetheless argues that Shelley is greater because a poet of purer feeling. See Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 70. L.R. Early, "Roberts as Critic," The Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium, 179-80. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," in Shelley's Critical Prose, Bruce R. McElderry, Jr, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 30; 31. This image recurs in Adonais to symbolize the spirit of the dead poet: "th'intense atom glows / A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose" (11.179-80). Shelley might have been prompted here by Milton who, in The Reason of Church Government (1621), says that his poetry is inspired "by devout prayer to that eternall Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallow'd fire of his Altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." See Milton's Selected Prose, C.A. Patrides, ed. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974), 59. Shelley, Alastor, in Poetical Works, 2nd ed., Thomas Hutchison, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). All further quotations from Shelley's poems are from this edition. Roberts, Shelley's Adonais and Alastor, 102 n. Paul Mueschke and Earl L. Griggs argue that Alastor is actually the first of Shelley's many attacks on Wordsworth, in "Wordsworth as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley's Alastor," PMLA 49 (1934): 229-45. But I

190 Notes to pages 95-8

38 39

40 41 42

43 44

45

don't think it's necessary to see the deluded protagonist as Wordsworth to make the point that Alastor questions Wordsworth's philosophy. That Shelley grew disillusioned with his early mentor is clear from his letters, his friends' reminiscences, and from works such as the 1814 sonnet "To Wordsworth," and the 1816 "Verses written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England," culminating in the satire "Peter Bell the Third" in 1819. It is odd that those who engaged in the Shelley-Wordsworth debate in the late nineteenth century didn't allude to Shelley's own love-hate relationship with Wordsworth, a relationship best symbolized by the fact that the Wordsworthian "Mont Blanc" was written in a Swiss notebook over a draft of the anti-Wordsworthian "Celandine." (Noted by Neville Rogers in his edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], 2:331.) Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," 12. He returns to this theme to more apocalyptic effect on pages 32-3. Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," 10, 6. On the problematic nature of Aristotle's original definition of mimesis, see S.H. Butcher, "Imitation as an Aesthetic Term," in Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), 121-62. Roberts, Shelley's Adonais and Alastor, 37-8. Roberts, "Shelley's Adonais" 295. But, as Milton Wilson remarks in a note to the author: "In a way, by following the post-classical otherworldly consolations of the pastoral elegy, Shelley allows the genre to force him into an extreme statement of a hypothesis of immortality that he ordinarily would think of only as hypothetical (if desirable). In the prose of his essay On a Future State he would never go so far." Roberts, "Shelley's Adonais," 290. Roberts, "Shelley's Adonais," 289. Earl Wasserman says virtually the same thing in "Shelley: Adonais," in The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 305-61. Thus Ellen Zetzel Lambert excludes Adonais from the genre of pastoral elegy, because "while retaining a number of the pastoral elegy's traditional formulae, [it] address[es] us from outside that common center of feeling." Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), xiii. She notes that "Death can never be preferred to life in the pastoral world" (xviii). For an analysis of the way Shelley takes apart the form he has built up, see Angela Leighton, "Deconstruction Criticism and Shelley's Adonais," in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Greynog Conference, Kelvin Everest, ed. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), 147-64.

191 Notes to pages 98-100

46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53

A more radical argument is that of Tilottama Rajan, who contends that we characteristically misread the poems of Shelley and his contemporaries because we assume that any self-contradictions are intended to be resolved, whereas "the darker elements in Romantic works are not a part of their organic unity, but rather threaten to collapse this unity." See Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 19 and throughout. Ware, "Charles G.D. Roberts and the Elegiac Tradition," 51. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 225-33. Roberts, Shelley's Adonais and Alastor, 100 n. Roberts, "Shelley's Adonais," 287. Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," 36. Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," 26. Arnold first described Shelley thus in the preface to his 1881 Poetry of Byron; he quoted himself in his 1888 review of Dowden's biography of Shelley, published in The Nineteenth Century. Both pieces were included in the posthumous Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London: Macmillan, 1888), 203-4 and 252. Swinburne's rebuttal comes from his "Notes on the Text of Shelley," 377. In his own poem entitled "Shelley," Roberts' contemporary, Wilfred Campbell, rang yet another variation on the theme, addressing the poet as the "Ariel-winged of our choir" (1.22). The second stanza in particular is close to Roberts' poem in feeling; see William Wilfred Campbell: Selected Poetry and Essays, Laurel Boone, ed. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1987), 154. Lampman proposes Campbell's "Shelley" as another candidate for the memorial volume in "At the Mermaid Inn." Yet another possible influence on this final image is a rejected fragment from Adonais published by Richard Garnett in his Relics of Shelley (London: Edward Moxton, 1862), 52. Contemporary bibliographers have since amended Garnett's reading, but in the form in which Roberts could have seen it the fragment read: ... a mighty Phantasm, half concealed In darkness of his own exceeding light, Which clothed his awful presence unrevealed, Charioted on the night Of thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite. And like a sudden meteor, which outstrips The splendour-winged chariot of the sun, eclipse The armies of the golden stars, each one

192 Notes to pages 101-6 Pavilioned in its tent of light - all strewn Over the chasms of blue night For the modern reading of this fragment see Anthony D. Knerr, Shelley's "Adonais": A Critical Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 113-14. 54 Don Conway elucidates Roberts' choice of poetic form in these very terms: "'Ave' itself is a moment of vision, and in the strophe and antistrophe of the ode structure Roberts creates the moment between ebb and flow which had been a state of vision for him as a child." See "Roberts and Modernism: The Achievement of 'The Squatter/" in The Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium, So. NEW PROVINCES? OR, IN A C A D I A , NO EGO

1 Charles G.D. Roberts, Songs of the Common Day, and Ave: An Ode for the Shelley Centenary (London: Longmans, Green, 1893). The edition used for the purposes of quotation, however, is Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, W.J. Keith, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 2 Gertrude M. White and Joan G. Rosen, A Moment's Monument: The Development of the Sonnet (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), 94. 3 W.J. Keith, "Charles G.D. Roberts and the Poetic Tradition," in The Proceedings of the Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium, Mount Allison University, Carrie MacMillan, ed. (Halifax: Nimbus, 1984), 60. Keith acknowledges the accomplishments of John Clare in this vein, but notes that "his writings were little known in Roberts' time" (60). 4 Maia Bhojwani, "'The Tides': Roberts' Sonnet about the Sonnet," Journal of Canadian Poetry 3 (Winter 1981): 20. 5 Charles Sangster, Sonnets, Written in the Orillia Woods, in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and Other Poems; Herperus and Other Poems and Lyrics (reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 155-36. All quotations are from this edition. 6 Roberts dismisses Sangster in an 1927 interview, published as "Lome Pierce's 1927 Interview with G.D. Roberts (as reported by Margaret Lawrence)," ed. Terry Whalen, Canadian Poetry 21 (Fall/Winter 1987): 70. D.M.R. Bentley argues that "the sonnet, particularly the Petrarchan sonnet, with its spatial division between a blocked octave and sestet, furnished Canadian poets of the 'Confederation' period and before with 'framing' or 'fencing' structures suitable to the features of the cultivated and civilized baselandscape." "A New Dimension: Notes on the Ecology of Canadian Poetry," Canadian Poetry 7 (Fall/Winter 1980): 9. By the "ecology" of poetry, he means the innate decorum, or fit, between an aesthetic form and the landscape it describes; he seems to see Roberts' use of the sonnet as almost inevitable. Many of his

193 Notes to pages 106-10

7

8

9 10 11 12

13

explorations of this topos can be found in The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry 1690-1990 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992). William Wordsworth, The Excursion in Poetical Works, Thomas Hutchinson, ed., corrected by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). Marshall McLuhan suggests that "the notion of this pre-established harmony between the individual mind and the external world is the key to the eighteenth century passion for landscape. Wordsworth naturally underestimates the degree to which this 'theme' was rehearsed among men from 1730 onwards, if only because anybody tends to be least aware of the decades immediately before his own time. They are taken for granted, as known." See "Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry," Essays in Criticism i (1951): 272-3. On the other hand, there is a great deal more description in Roberts' sonnets than in Wordsworth's, which are mostly excursions on human history and emotion rather than close observation of nature for its own sake. The only descriptions in The River Duddon which contain Roberts' kind of concrete imagery are those of the cows in XVIII, 1-3; the sheep-washing in XXIII, especially 5-8; the gloomy niche in XV; and the resting place in XXIV, 1-9. Even "Return," sonnet XVII, while full of unusually brilliant imagery, turns into historical speculation. And "Flowers," sonnet VI, is fourteen lines of Augustan platitudes. As Wordsworth himself notes: "There is scarcely one of my Poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution." Quoted by Josephine Miles in Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 136. Don Precosky, "'The Need That Irks': Roberts' Sonnets in Songs of the Common Day," Canadian Poetry 22 (Spring/Summer 1988): 22-3. Charles G.D. Roberts, Poems (New York: Silver, Burdett, 1901). Roberts, "The Poetry of Nature," in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, 276. Jean Mallinson argues that it "describes accurately his own temperamental preference" even though the rest of the article proposes that the poetry of objective description is inferior to that of human experience. "Kingdom of Absence," Canadian Literature 67 (Winter 1976): 31. Precosky goes even farther, seeing "austerity," "reticence," "limitation" and "change" as the four moods which control both the tone and the content of Songs of the Common Day. See "The Need That Irks," 28-30, for an over-ingenious exposition of how these terms apply to the sequence. Barrie Davies, ed., At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in "The Globe" 1892-93 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 334. All further quotations are from this edition.

194 Notes to pages 110-13 14 John Moss, arguing that colonialism inevitably sets up a barrier between the poet and nature, promotes this poem as a serious, if failed, attempt by Campbell in which "the poet seems to recognize that the only way he can get into the picture - that is, find language that will effectively merge consciousness with the landscape - is quite literally to climb in. The effect is bizarre, and only a little redeemed from the ridiculous by the wistful supposition that his irony is intentional." "Landscape, Untitled," Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (Summer 1984): 31. 15 RW. Watt, "The Masks of Archibald Lampman," University of Toronto Quarterly 27 (January 1958): 182. In his own person, Lampman had already remarked in his column of 10 December 1892 that "the quarrel between realism and romanticism is about as empty a one as that over the iota in the Nicene Creed. Between realists and romanticists, provided they be men of genius, there is very little difference that any but the professional critic can see. The aim of both is artistic truth, and the difference of method fades out of sight before the larger meanings and grander motives of their work." 16 "Bereavement of the Fields," in William Wilfred Campbell: Selected Poetry and Essays, Laurel Boone, ed. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1987). All further quotations are from this edition. 17 Davies, At the Mermaid Inn, viii. 18 Boone, William Wilfred Campbell, 161. As well, not only are cows a recurrent motif in Songs of the Common Day, but the other titles Campbell lists for Bang's fictitious volume (especially "The Lonely Clam" and "Bunchgrass") are more reminiscent of Roberts' maritime milieu than of Lampman's Ontario. It may be also be worth noting that Lampman's letter to his friend E.W. Thomson at the time remarks only that "Our 'Mermaid Inn' engagement with the 'Globe' has terminated; they do not want us any more. That makes me a little poorer than I was." He does not allude to any conflict between the columnists. See An Annotated Edition of the Correspondence Between Archibald Lampman and Edward William Thomson (1890-1898), Helen Lynn, ed. (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980), 88. 19 In addition to his attack on realism in the Globe, he wrote several columns on the subject in an American publication, The Evening Journal: 3 September and 3 December 1904, and 23 January, and 25 March 1905, according to Carl F. Klinck in Wilfred Campbell: A Study in Late Provincial Victorianism (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1977 [1942]), 221-3. 20 Roberts, "A Note on Modernism" in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, 298. 21 Arthur Stringer, "A Foreword" in Open Water (Toronto: Bell and Cockburn, 1914), 18; 10-11. All quotations from Stringer's work are from this volume.

195 Notes to pages 114-16 22 The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, eds. (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967), 3. For his comments on Lampman, see "Lampman and the Death of the Sonnet," in The Lampman Symposium, Lorraine McMullen, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, !976), 39-48. 23 P.O. Call, Acanthus and Wild Grape (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1920). 24 R. Alex Kizuk, "One Man's Access to Prophesy: The Sonnet Series of Frank Oliver Call," Canadian Poetry 21 (Fall/Winter 1987): 32. 25 Munro Beattie, "Poetry 1920-35" in The Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed., Carl F. Klinck, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 2:236. Ken Norris repeats Dudek and Gnarowski's view of Call's preface as a manifesto for free verse equivalent to that of Stringer in "The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism," Canadian Poetry 11 (Fall/Winter 1982): 56. 26 P.O. Call, Blue Homespun (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1924). 27 Shapes & Sounds: Poems ofW.W.E. Ross, Raymond Souster and John Robert Colombo, eds. (Toronto: Longmans, 1968), 4. All quotations from Ross refer to this edition. Bruce Whiteman also ignores the sonnets in his column praising Ross, implying, by this omission, that the poet was an imagist pure laine. See "W.W.E. Ross: Imagism, Science, Spiritism" in Poetry Canada Review 6:3 (Spring 1985): 9. Don Precosky acknowledges the existence of the sonnets, but dismisses them in half a page as completely failed, devoting the rest of his essay on the poet to the thesis that "Ross's poetry is probably the purest example of Imagism ever written by a Canadian." Canadian Writers and Their Works Poetry Series: 4, Robert Lecker, Jack David and Ellen Quigley, eds. (Toronto: ECW, 1987), 168. By contrast, Peter Stevens reports that, far from considering himself an imagist, Ross "felt hostile to, and irritated by, William Carlos Williams," and that his most profound influences were e.e. cummings and Marianne Moore. See "On W.W.E. Ross," Canadian Literature 39 (Winter 1969): 43; 45. 28 Editorial Note, Shapes & Sounds, 8. The three sonnets included here are "The Pythagorean Basilica," "On the Supernatural" and "The Nimble Fish." 29 George Woodcock, introduction to Canadian Writers and Their Works Poetry Series: 3, Robert Lecker, Jack David and Ellen Quigley, eds. (Toronto: ECW, 1987), 6. 30 W.W.E. Ross, Sonnets (Toronto: Heaton, 1932). 31 Quoted by Michael Darling in "On Poetry and Poets: The Letters of W.W.E. Ross to A.J.M. Smith," Essays on Canadian Writing 16 (Fall-

196 Notes to pages 116-20

32

33

34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

Winter 1979-80): 95. Even Brian Trehearne, who declares that: "Unlike his Imagist poems, Ross's sonnets are behind his times by some thirty or forty years" recognizes that the "two distinct manners of verse he explored constitute a more substantial traditionalist-modernist tension in his artistic development than is generally recognized." Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic Influence (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), 33. A.R. Kizuk explores this tension in "Canadian Poetry in the Twenties: Dialectics and Prophesy in W.W.E. Ross's Laconics and Sonnets," Canadian Poetry 18 (Spring/Summer 1986): 35-54. Ross goes on to state that this prosody worked best with his "northern" poems. A Literary Friendship: The Correspondence of Ralph Gustafson and W.W.E. Ross, Bruce Whiteman, ed. (Toronto: ECW, 1984), letter 36. Arthur Henry Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry," in Victorian Poetry and Poetics, Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 850. Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6. C.K. Stead, The New Poetic (London: Hutchison, 1964). John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 17. See Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry. Norman Friedman also argues that the major difference between Romantic and Victorian poetry is that "the Romantic poem does not characteristically seek impersonality." See "From Victorian to Modern: A Sketch for a Critical Reappraisal," The Victorian Newsletter 32 (Fall 1967): 30. A.J.M. Smith, "F.R. Scott and Some of his Poems" (1967), in The McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott and Leo Kennedy, Peter Stevens, ed. (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969), 93. On the other hand, as Don McKay notes, something of the sublime persists even at the heart of imagism: "the sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments ... in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind's categories to glimpse some thing's autonomy - its rawness, its duende, its alien being." "BALER TWINE: thoughts on ravens, home and nature poetry," Studies in Canadian Literature 18 (1993): 131-2. Graham Hough, Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 14. Christ, Victorian and Modernist Poetics, 90. Roberts, "Canadian Poetry in its Relation to the Poetry of England and America" (1933), Canadian Poetry 3 (Fall/Winter 1978): 84. John Metcalfe, "The Curate's Egg," Essays on Canadian Writing 30 (Winter 1984-5): 43.

197 Notes to pages 121-2 43 Louis Dudek, "F.R. Scott and the Modern Poets" (1950-51), in The McGill Movement, 70. Scott himself argues thus in his two-part article "New Poems for Old" in The Canadian Forum 11 (1931): 296-8; 337-9. More than fifty years later we hear the same message from Bruce Whiteman: "most of the poetry written in Canada before the First World War was jejeune, amateurish and, with the obvious exceptions, now all but unreadable. It was in the 2os that Canadian poetry really began to come of age." "The Beginnings of Modernism (i)," Poetry Canada Review 7 (Autumn 1985): 44. Similarly, in a column commemorating Scott, David O'Rourke declares that "Canadian poetry properly begins with A.J.M. Smith." Poetry Canada Review 6 (Summer 1985): 8. But W.J. Keith goes even farther; according to him, "Canadian literature was still in its infancy" in 1943! See Canadian Literature in English (London: Longmans, 1985), 211. 44 Margaret Coulby Whitridge, introduction to The Poems of Archibald Lampman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), xxiv. 45 Mallinson, "Kingdom of Absence," 35-6. Mallinson appears indebted to Rashley for this argument; see Poetry in Canada: The First Three Steps (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1958), 44-5. But whereas he saw the lack of fit between poetic style and the environment as a predicament of "pioneer" writers, Mallinson includes Roberts' generation. In this regard she is closer to Desmond Pacey who declares that "Canadian literature, and Canadian culture generally, suffered, during the last century and for the first two decades of this, from the fault of being 'derived'. It is a fault that all colonial cultures have in common, and it is a fault that is by no means easy to eradicate." Among the invidious sources derived from he cites Wordsworth, Tennyson and Arnold. See "At Last - A Canadian Literature" (1938), Essays in Canadian Criticism: 1938-1968 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969), 1-2. 46 Trehearne, Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists, 21; 13. 47 Desmond Pacey, Ten Canadian Poets: A Group of Biographical and Critical Essays (1958; reprint, Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), 251. This evaluation is quoted approvingly by Stephen A.C. Scobie in "The Road Back to Eden: The Poetry of F.R. Scott," Queen's Quarterly 79 (Autumn 1972): 314. See also the introduction on Scott and the notes to the poem in An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, Russell Brown and Donna Bennett, eds. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1:346-8. 48 Chester Duncan, in a review of Scott's Selected Poems, The McGill Movement, 75. 49 Bentley, The GayJGrey Moose, 259. Bentley explores the implications of the name and characterization of "Miss Crotchet", and notes that the masculine bias of modernist criticism is implicit in the vocabulary of its proponents; for example, "manly" is "Smith's term for such traits as

198 Notes to pages 123-6

50 51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

'irony' and 'intellect'" (259). On the way in which this bias has shaped the Canadian canon, see Carole Gerson: "Anthologies and the Canon of Early Canadian Women Writers" in Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, Lorraine McMullen, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990), 55-76, and also "The Canon between the Wars: Field-Notes of a Feminist Literary Archaeologist," in Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, Robert Lecker, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 46-56. Dudek, "F.R. Scott and the Modern Poets", 58. E.K. Brown, "The Development of Poetry in Canada, 1880-1940," Poetry 58 (April 1941): 39-40. Similarly, Smith notes that "The powerful influence of Roberts, Carman, and Lampman was both an inspiration and a handicap to their successors for at least two generations." Introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 24. A.J.M. Smith, "A Rejected Preface," in New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors, Michael Gnarowski, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), xxvii. On Poetry and Poets: Selected Essays ofA.J.M. Smith (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 108-9. As Robin Mathews remarks: "Since the McGill Movement the hallmark of general misunderstanding has been the tendency to lump good and bad poetry into 'the maple leaf school/ dismissing the whole without examining the parts." See "Poetics: The Struggle for Voice in Canada," CVII 2:4 (December 1976): 6. Letter from Pratt to Scott, dated 20 December 1935, quoted in the introduction to New Provinces, xix. New Provinces, v. Letter of 17 February 1934, quoted in the introduction to New Provinces, xiii. John Ferns, A.J.M. Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 107; 108. Smith, "A Rejected Preface," xxvii. Leo Kennedy, "Direction for Canadian Poets," in The McGill Movement, 12. Pacey, Ten Canadian Poets, 214. A.J.M. Smith, "The Lonely Land," in Ten Canadian Poets, 212. Gary Shapiro suggests that, despite the fact that the New Criticism was a consistent effort to read all poetry in terms of the criteria of the beautiful ("coherence, autonomy and organic unity"), modernist poetics still tend to give a privileged position to what has traditionally been known as the sublime. See "From the Sublime to the Political: Some Historical Notes," New Literary History 16 (Winter 1985): 217. This might explain anomalies like "The Lonely Land" being published in New Provinces. On the other hand, Smith himself did not reprint the work in any of his three editions of the Book of Canadian Poetry (1943, 1948, 1957), nor

199 Notes to pages 126-9

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66 67

68

in The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1960), and he told Michael Darling this was because the poem was too romantic, in "An Interview with A.J.M. Smith," Essays on Canadian Writing 9 (Winter 1977-8): 59. George Woodcock, in his review of Smith's Collected Poems (1963), The McGill Movement, 123. Gary Boire, "Canadian (Tw)ink: Surviving the White-Outs," Essays on Canadian Writing 35 (1987): 4. D.G. Jones, "Private Space and Public Space," in On F.R. Scott: Essays on His Contributions to Law, Literature, and Politics, Sandra Djwa and R. St J. Macdonald, eds. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983), 47. Sandra Djwa doesn't look back quite so far, but still notes the presence of traditional concerns: "In poems like 'Old Song/ 'Lakeshore/ and 'Laurentian Shield,' Scott wrote of a terrain first explored by Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott - and, for that matter, by his father, F.G. Scott, in 'The Unnamed Lake.'" Canadian Writers and Their Works Poetry Series: 4, Robert Lecker, Jack David and Ellen Quigley, eds. (Toronto: ECW, 1990), 179. Djwa, "'A New Soil and a Sharp Sun': The Landscape of a Modern Canadian Poetry," Modernist Studies 2 (1977): 16. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 26. Robert Kroetsch, "A Canadian Issue," Boundary 2 3 (Fall 1974): i. SONG TO THE R I S I N G SUN

1 A.J.M. Smith, The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943). 2 Don Precosky, "Seven Myths about Canadian Literature," Studies in Canadian Literature \\ (Spring 1986): 87. Smith's view of the McGill Movement as the fans et origo of Canadian modernism is one of the myths referred to in Precosky's title. In support of this contention, he quotes Phyllis Webb's remark that "the history of Canadian literature has been ... documented mainly by Frank Scott and A.J.M. Smith themselves and they have created their own little history" (86). 3 Dorothy Livesay, "This Canadian Poetry," The Canadian Forum 24 (April 1944): 20. 4 Patrick Anderson, "Correspondence," The Canadian Forum 24 (May 1944): 44. 5 Dorothy Livesay, "Correspondence," The Canadian Forum 24 (July 1944): 89. 6 W.W.E. Ross, "On National Poetry," The Canadian Forum 24 (July 1944):

88

2oo Notes to pages 129-30 7 On the magazine wars, see Wynne Francis, "Montreal Poets of the Forties," Canadian Literature 14 (Autumn 1962): 23-5, and "A Dramatic Story Missed," Canadian Poetry 15 (1984): 84-93; Ken Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada, 1925-80: Its Role in the Development of Modernism and Post-Modernism in Canadian Poetry (Toronto: ECW, 1984); Don Precosky, "Preview: An Introduction and Index," Canadian Poetry 8 (Spring/Summer 1981): 74-89; and F.W. Watt, "Climate of Unrest: Periodicals in the Twenties and Thirties," Canadian Literature 12 (Spring 1962): 15-27. 8 John Sutherland, "Literary Colonialism," reprinted in Essays, Controversies and Poems, Miriam Waddington, ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 32. The essay first appeared in First Statement 2 no. 4 (February 1944). 9 Quoted by Ken Norris in The Little Magazine in Canada, 40. 10 John Sutherland, Other Canadians (Montreal: First Statement Press, 1947). However, Milton Wilson argues that: "Since, at a rough estimate, eighty per cent of the poems in Sutherland's anthology were written after the Book of Canadian Poetry went to press, Smith can hardly be accused of overlooking them. Other Canadians is an appendix to Smith (they have only five poems in common), not an attempt to correct his errors of exclusion." "Other Canadians and After," in Masks of Poetry: Canadian Critics on Canadian Verse, A.J.M. Smith, ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962), 123-4. 11 John Sutherland, "Mr. Smith and the 'Tradition,'" reprinted in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, eds. (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967), 50. This doubt about the existence of a "native" tradition comes out also in Northern Review, the journal Sutherland ran after First Statement. The editorial to the first issue declares its mandate to be publication "not in the light of a dubious nationalism or regionalism, not in obeisance to 'big Canadian names' or so-called national traditions, but in respect to that general cosmopolitan culture to which we all adhere." Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada, 45. See also Hilda M.C. Vanneste in "Northern Review", 1945-56: a History and an Index (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1982), for Sutherland's continued pursuit of this issue. 12 Quoted by Frank Davey in Canadian Literary Power (Edmonton: NeWest, 1994)/ I13 Sutherland, "Mr. Smith and the Tradition/" 59. 14 A.J.M. Smith, The Book of Canadian Poetry, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), viii. Philip Kokotailo traces the gradual refinement of Smith's theories in "Native and Cosmopolitan: A.J.M. Smith's

2oi Notes to pages 131-2 Tradition of English-Canadian Poetry," The American Review of Canadian Studies 20 (Spring 1990): 31-40. Some critics still subscribe to a dualistic view of Canadian letters. For example, Frank Davey reprises Smith in more contemporary language when he declares that "there have been until recently only two underlying ideologies in Canadian modern poetry. One is the aesthetic/ humanist ideology that assumes that the writing of poetry reveals and celebrates human creativity and the spiritual dimensions of a common humanity ... The second is a nationalist ideology in which it is not merely a shared humanity that joins Canadian writers but a common humanity as Canadians. This Canadianness signifies difference." "Poetry, Audience, Politics and Region," Canadian Poetry 30 (Spring/Summer 1992): 13-14. 15 Smith, The Book of Canadian Poetry, 2nd ed., 14. 16 Sutherland, "The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry," from Northern Review, reprinted in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, 119-20. 17 Malcolm Ross, "Critical Theory: Some Trends," 1976; reprinted in The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions: Reflections on Canadian Literature (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 127-8. A variation on Smith's two categories can be found in John Pengwerne Matthews' Tradition in Exile (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), a comparison of Australian and Canadian literature which divides colonial compositions into the popular (folk ballads, shanties, drinking songs and the like) and the academic (belles lettres). While at first this seems like a plausible distinction, it too breaks down when one considers that verse in traditional forms - ostensibly "academic" - has always been more popular among readers in this country. 18 Julian Symons, "A National Style?" Canadian Literature 36 (Spring 1968): 58-61. 19 David Solway, "The Flight from Canada," CVII 3:3 (January 1978): 4-5. 20 David Staines, Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century's End (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 88-9. W.H. New remarks of this country that "its divided heritage and divided focus militate against the distillation of a unified national character, and to seek a definition of Canadianism may be to deny the imaginative sources of Canadian art." See Among Worlds: An Introduction to Modern Commonwealth and South African Fiction (Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1975), 101. 21 Dennis Cooley, "Three Recent Tish Items," Canadian Poetry 3 (Fall/ Winter 1978): 98. 22 Robin Matthews, "Poetics: The Struggle for Voice in Canada," CVII 2:4 (December 1976), 6-7, and Keith Richardson, Poetry and the Colonized

202 Notes to pages 132-4

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24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

Mind: Tish (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic, 1976). Useful criticism and summary of the controversy may be found in Cooley, "Three Recent Tish Items"; Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada, 97-122; and Peter Quartermain, "Romantic Offensive: Tish," Canadian Literature 75 (Winter 1977): 77-84. Matthews, "Poetics: The Struggle for Voice in Canada," 7. As Norris notes, it is wrong to suggest that the modernism of Scott and Smith is primarily derived from American rather than English sources. See The Little Magazine in Canada, 99. But Raymond Souster was quite open about his continental affiliation, declaring that "the most important fact for Canadian poetry has been that Canada is situated on the northern border of the United States of America." Preface to New Wave Canada (Toronto: Rubicon, 1966). Warren Tallman concurs with him in "Wonder Merchants: Modernist Poetry in Vancouver during the i96o's," Open Letter series 3 no. 6 (Winter 1976-7): 186, and in "Reading across the Border," Robert Kroetsch argues that Canadian literature is intrinsically deferential to American, always anticipating criticism, and therefore working by cliche, parody and riddle. Studies on Canadian Literature: Introductory and Critical Essays, Arnold E. Davidson, ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), 338-43. Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada, 99. Lionel Stevenson, "Manifesto for a National Literature" (1924), in Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials, and Manifestos Vol. i 1752-1940, Douglas M. Daymond and Leslie G. Monkman, eds. (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1984), 207. Eli Mandel, introduction to Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 9. E.K. Brown, On Canadian Poetry (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1943), 133. Smith, The Book of Canadian Poetry, 2nd ed., 24-5. Reported by Sutherland in "Earle Birney's 'David,'" (1943) in Essays, Controversies and Poems, 93. Hugh Kenner, "The Case of the Missing Face" (1954); quoted by Diana Brydon in "Landscape and Authenticity: The Development of National Literatures in Canada and Australia," The Dalhousie Review 61 (Summer 1981): 286. It is amusing to note that to Kenner, craving for unity with the wilderness is "pathological"; to Margaret Atwood, the pathology resides in resisting such union. Sutherland, "Mr. Smith and the 'Tradition,'" 49. John Moss, "Landscape, Untitled," Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (Summer 1984): 26. Robert Kroetsch, "Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction," The Journal of Canadian Fiction 3 (1974): 43.

203 Notes to pages 134-7 34 Susan Rudy Dorscht, "Decolonizing Canadian Writing: Why Gender? Whose English? When Canada?" Essays on Canadian Writing 54 (Winter 1994): 124-52. 35 Dennis Lee, "Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space," Open Letter series 2, vol. 6 (Fall 1973): 52. Elsewhere in the essay, he clarifies that when speaking of words, "I mean all the resources of the verbal imagination, from single words through verse forms, conventions about levels of style, characteristic versions of the hero, resonant structures of plot" (38). 36 Lee, "Cadence, Country, Silence," 46. 37 Lee, "Cadence, Country, Silence," 43. In response to the foregoing, Lee wrote: "I'm hardly 'blaming the language itself,' am I? I'm recording the fact that my alienation from a home language was inscribed right in the language, and that this is true in a broader way that just a Dennis-Lee predicament. And where's the 'blame' in noting that?" 38 Dennis Lee, introduction to The New Canadian Poets 1970-1985 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985), xliii; xxi. 39 Milton Wilson, "Recent Canadian Verse" (1959), in Contexts of Canadian Criticism, 205. On the same subject, see also D.M.R. Bentley, "Remembering and Forgetting in Canadian Literature and Criticism," What 4 (April 1986): 15-17. 40 Eldon Garnet, introduction to W]HERE? THE OTHER CANADIAN POETRY (Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1974), 7. Perhaps he got this idea from D.G. Jones, who declared that modern poets "abandon the garrison of an exclusive culture and go into the wilderness, where they experience, not a greater sense of alienation, but a greater sense of vitality and community." Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 136.

41 Garnet, introduction to W]HERE? THE OTHER CANADIAN POETRY, 6. 42 V.A. de Luca, "That Deep Romantic Chasm: Some Recent Critical Currents," University of Toronto Quarterly 56 (Summer 1987): 576. Ronald Paulson notes that: "Beginning with Frye's myth-ritual criticism ... the criticism now in the ascendant is obsessed with breakage, aporia, slippage, indeterminacy, and incoherence, looking elsewhere for its aesthetic pleasure than to the beautiful. Indeed, the beautiful has come to seem an agent of repression." "Versions of a Human Sublime," New Literary History 16 (Winter 1985): 428. See also Linda Hutcheon, "Eruptions of Postmodernity: The Postcolonial and the Ecological," Essays on CA 43 Sutherland, "Earle Birney's 'David,'" 93-4. 44 E.J. Pratt, Review of David and Other Poems in The Canadian Poetry Magazine 6 (March 1943): 34. See also E.K. Brown's praise in "Letters in

204 Notes to pages 137-45

45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52

53 54

55

56 57 58 59

60

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Canada 1942: Poetry," University of Toronto Quarterly 12 (April 1943): 305-7Desmond Pacey, "Earle Birney," in Ten Canadian Poets: A Group of Biographical and Critical Essays (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1958), 303. Quoted in Ten Canadian Poets, 305. Richard Robillard, Earle Birney, Canadian Writers 9 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 17. Peter Aichinger, Earle Birney (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 104. Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 22. Earle Birney, "Bushed," in Trial of a City and Other Verse (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952). All further quotations from Birney's poems refer to The Collected Poems of Earle Birney (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975). Friedrich von Schiller, "On the Sublime," in Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, Two Essays, Julius A. Elias, trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 204. Patricia Yeager, "Towards a Female Sublime," in Gender & Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, Linda Kauffman, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 204-5. Margaret Atwood, "Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer," in The Animals in that Country (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968). Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 123. Gaile McGregor declares that Birney "tends to fluctuate between ... naive primitivism ... and outright natureparanoia" in The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 88. George Woodcock, "The Wanderer: Notes on Earle Birney," in Perspectives on Earle Birney: Essays Delivered at the Earle Birney Symposium York University, 1981 (Toronto: ECW, 1981), 91. Paul West, "Earle Birney and the Compound Ghost," Canadian Literature 13 (Summer 1962): 10. Milton Wilson, "Recent Canadian Verse," 1959, reprinted in Contexts of Canadian Criticism, 203. Donald Davie, "On Sincerity," quoted by Carol T. Christ in Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 51. D.M.R. Bentley, The GaylGrey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry 1690-1990 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992), 97-8Frances Ferguson, "The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or the Bathos of Experience," Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 8 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 63. Paulette Jiles, "Waterloo Express," in Waterloo Express (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1973). "The sublime hero of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was strikingly different from our modern versions not only in that he quoted

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71

72 73

almost obsessively from epics but also in that he aspired to the condition of an epic hero, so that he, like Aeneas, might be taken as a metonymy of his culture." Ferguson, "The Sublime of Edmund Burke," 63. Paulette Jiles, "You There," in Sudden Miracles: Eight Women Poets, Rhea Tregebov, ed. (Toronto: Second Story, 1991), 145. Jiles, "You There," 145. Of course, as Walter Ong notes of all works for electronic media: "This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas. But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well." Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), 136. Charles G.D. Roberts, "Shelley's Adonais," in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, W.J. Keith, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 283-7. Paulette Jiles, Song to the Rising Sun, in Sudden Miracles, 156-69. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 24-5. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Ernest de Selincourt, ed., corrected by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). All further quotations are from this edition. Charles G.D. Roberts, Ave, in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, W.J. Keith, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). All further quotations are from this edition. Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972), 60. There are some interesting echoes here of Yeager's analysis of Shelley's "Mont Blanc," quoted above. Atwood's nature is female ("pre-Oedipal," to Yeager) while Yeager's is "the father-imago," but both critics use the same imagery of devouring or being devoured to evoke the agon in the wilderness. Susan Griffin, "Curves along the Road," in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 93. Yeager, "Towards a Female Sublime," 205. Weiskel declares that: "In principle at least, a poetic identity which declines transcendence - or subdues it to an undifferentiated immanence - is regressing to a prephallic stage of desire, a version of narcissism." The Romantic Sublime, 134. His derogatory tone here seems to be overlooked by Neil Hertz, who praises Weiskel's invocation of the maternal phase as the deep structure of the sublime. See "The Notion

206 Notes to pages 150-4

74

75

76

77

78 79

80 81 82

of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime," The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 49-53. Quoted by Sidonie Smith in Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15. Carolyn Merchant, "Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory," in Reweaving the World, 102. See also Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989). Many feminist writers have been reluctant to examine childbearing as a spiritual experience, for fear of perpetuating the old identification explored by Sherry Ortner in "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" Woman, Culture and Society, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974). See also Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), and for a specifically Canadian exploration of the identification of women and land as the objects of male colonization, Wayne Fraser, The Dominion of Women: The Personal and the Political in Canadian Women's Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). Constance Lindsay Skinner, "Song of Cradle-Making," in Canadian Poets, John W. Garvin, ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1926), 360-1. The author's note following the poem defines "K'antsamiqala'soe" as "God, literally 'our Supreme or Highest Praised One.' The language is that of a British Columbian coast tribe." In the same collection, see also "The Firstborn" by Jean Blewett, 187-8, and "The Mother" by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, 228. Ferguson, "The Sublime of Edmund Burke," 63. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in EighteenthCentury England (1935; reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 58. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Random House, 1995), 18. Lee, "Cadence, Country, Silence," 51. Roo Borson, "Grove," in Intent, or the Weight of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 107.

Index

Abrams, M.H., 117, 16011.41, i68n.io Aichinger, Peter, 138 Alpers, Paul, 36 Anderson, Patrick, 129 Arnold, Matthew, 100-1, 118-20; as editor of Wordsworth, 90-1 As You Like It, 46 At the Mermaid Inn, 82-3, 85, 92, 108-13. $ee a^so Campbell; Lampman; D.C. Scott Atwood, Margaret, i75n.64, 2O2n_3o; on Romanticism in Canlit, 82, 91; "survival" as a cultural stereotype, x, 55; works: "Afterword" to The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 75-6; "Backdrop Addresses Cowboy," 65; The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 64-7, 141; "Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer," 65, 141; Survival, 53-4, 66, 135, 141, 148-9. See also thematic criticism Aubin, Robert Arnold, 23

Baillie, John, 40 Beattie, James, The Minstrel, 41, 72 Beattie, Munro, 114, 122 beautiful, the, 10-11, 42, 44-5; in Canada, 48-9, 85, 123-4; m relation to the sublime and the picturesque, 44, 49, igSn.62 Belyea, Barbara, 158^26, 17411.61 Bennett, Donna, viii Bentley, D.M.R., 122, 143, i92n.6; on Gary, 22-4, 38, i66n.26; on Mackay, i66n.3o; on the picturesque and the sublime, i72n.38 Bermingham, Ann, 156^5 Bessai, Diane, 50, 163^3 Bhojwani, Maia, 85 Bilan, R.P., 64 Birney, Earle, 137-44; and the sublime, 138; works: "Atlantic Door," 142; "Bushed," 138-41; "Creston Valley Fall," 141; "David," 137-8; "Holiday in the Foothills," 141; "Sinaloa," 141;

"State of Sonora," 141; "The Mammoth Corridors," 141-2; "What's so big about GREEN?," 144 "Black Mountain School," 132 Blake, William, 7 Blount, Thomas, 69 Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 40 Boire, Gary, 126 Borson, Roo, 154 Brooke, Frances, The History of Emily Montague, 48-9, 55 Brown, E.K., 123, 133 Brown, Russell, 54-5 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 105 Browning, Robert, 119-20 Burke, Edmund, viii, 9-10, 40-4,154; influence on Canadian immigrants, 61-2. See also sublime Burton, Robert, 68 Buss, Helen M., 171^29 Byrom, John, Enthusiasm, 73-4 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 92

2o8 Index Call, P.O., Acanthus and Wild Grape, 114-15 Callaghan, Barry, 115 Campbell, William Wilfred: on realism in poetry, 108-10, 112-13, 19411.19; on Shelley and Wordsworth, 92, 108; works: "At Even," no; "Bereavement of the Fields," 112; "Shelley," i9in.52. See also At the Mermaid Inn Carman, Bliss, 81, 123, 128; works: "Shelley," 83-7, 100; The White Gull, 85-6, loo. See also Confederation poets Carter, Paul, 17 Gary, Thomas, 23; Abram's Plains, 20, 23-31, 33, 38, 127; in contrast to Quebec Hill, 31-3, 35-7, 43-5; the picturesque in, 23-5; "Preface" to, 20, 22-3; the sublime in, 44-5. See also colonialism Casaubon, Meric, 69 Christ, Carol T., 118, 120, i88n.25 Cogswell, Fred, 81 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 11, i6in.43 colonialism, vii-viii, 23, 128-32, i63nn.3,4; and Canadian poetry, 45-50, 82, 88, 133-4; and language, 21, 134-6, i63n.5; and use of traditional forms, 20-22, 82, 121-34, i77n.7. See also Gary; Frye; Mackay; "garrison mentality" Combe, William, 12-13 concordia discors, 6, 31, i56n.7 Confederation poets, 81, 91; disparagement of, by modernists, 128, 132-4. See also Camp-

bell; Carman; Lampman; Roberts; D.C. Scott Conway, Don, 192^54 Cook, Ramsay, 63-4 Cowper, William, 79, i82n.43 Crawford, Isabella Valancy, Malcolm's Katie, 47

Elledge, Scott, i68n.io, i69n.i2 The Empire Writes Back, ix, 21,80 enthusiasm, 7, 39, 68-72, i8in.42, i84n.62. See also Dennis; Moodie; sublime

Daniells, Roy, 158^26 Davey, Frank, 54, 2oon.i4 Davie, Donald, 143 Davies, Barrie, 112 Davies, Hugh Sykes, 87 Davies, Robertson, 66-7 "The Death of General Wolfe," 28 de Bolla, Peter, 172^41 Defoe, Daniel: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 78-9; Crusoe as a colonial archetype, 56, 139 Deism, 70-1. See also Shaftesbury de Luca, V.A., 137 de Man, Paul, 16, i6on.4O, i83n-53 Denham, John, Cooper's Hill, 5-6, 25, 27, 30-1, i87n.i8 Dennis, John, viii, 39-40, 43, 68. See also enthusiasm; sublime Derrida, Jacques, n Dewart, E.H., 49,17on.i8 Djwa, Sandra, 21, 127, i74n.53, i99n.65 Dorscht, Susan Rudy, 134 Dragland, Stan, 58 Dryden, John, 159^28, i68n.io Dudek, Louis, 114,121-3 Dyer, John, "Grongar Hill," 24

Fairchild, Hoxie Neale, 67 Ferguson, Frances, 143-5, 152, i62n.48, 2O4n.62 Ferns, John, 124 First Statement, 129-31 Foakes, R.A., 15 Foucault, Michel, 58 Fowler, Marian, 62 Friedman, Norman, I96n.37 Frye, Northrop, 50-7, 120, 174^56, i82n.47, 203n.42; as both a modernist and a post-modernist, 137, 173^48: on Canadian literary tradition, 21-2, 16411.8, i64n.9; on the "garrison mentality," 45-6, 50-1, 66; on nature in Canada, 46-7, 50, 52, 149. See also thematic criticism

elegy, 86-8, 97-8, 105, 144-6 Eliot, George, 150 Eliot, T.S., 120, 128

Gage, John T, 119 Garnet, Eldon, 136-7 "garrison mentality," x, 45-6, 50, 54-5, 136, i75n.63, 2O3n.4o; See also colonialism; Frye; thematic criticism Gilpin, William, 9-10, 12, 18 The Golden Fleece, 30 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Deserted Village 38-9; The Traveller, 34, 37-9, 143, i59n.28 Goldsmith, Oliver (Canadian), The Rising Village, 38, I75n.68 Grace, Sherill E., 65

209 Index Gray, Thomas, 71 Griffin, Susan, 149 Greening, Laura, 77 Gustafson, Ralph, 49, 116 Hall, John, 40 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 118 Hartman, Geoffrey, 98, i66n.28, i87n.i8 Heffernan, James, 18 Hertz, Neil, 205^73 Hibbard, G.R., 5 Hjartarson, Paul, x-xi Hopwood, Victor G., 46 Horace, 4, 34 Hough, Graham, 120 Hutcheon, Linda, 176^74

Klinck, Carl, 46, 76-7 Kline, Marcia B., 52-4, 175^64 Kokotailo, Philip, 2oon.i4 Kroetsch, Robert, 57-8, 127, 134, 183^48, 2O2n.23

Lambert, Ellen Zetzel, i9on.45 Lampman, Archibald, 114, I94n.i8; proposal for a Shelley memorial, 82-3, 85, i9in.52; on realism and romanticism, I94n.i5; on Wordsworth and Shelley, 92; works: Among the Millet, 111-12; "Reality," 11011. See also Confederaidentity, Canadian, x-xi, tion poets 75, 130-6, 142, 2oon.i4, landscape, ix-x, 4, 57, 20in.2O i56n-5, 15^.15; CanaImagism, 115, 118-21; See dian, in poetry, 3,18-19, also Modernism; pictur49-50, 132-3, 149; relaesque; ut pictura poesis tionship between ideal and natural, 7, i57n.io, Jackson, Wallace, 57, i59n.28; representation i6in.44 in painting, 3-4, 8-9; Jameson, Anna Brownrepresentation in poetry, well, 18-19, 55-6 3-9, 108. See also beautiJiles, Paulette: Song to the ful; picturesque; prosRising Sun, 144-9; pect; sublime; ut pictura "Waterloo Express," 144 poesis Johnson, Dr Samuel, 5-6, Langbaum, Robert, 14, 35, 69, i69n.i4 i75n.7i Johnston, Gordon, 177^7 Lee, Dennis, 45, 53,135-6, Jones, D.G., ix, 91, 127, 138, 140-3; as a fol153-4 lower of Frye, 50- 2, 54, Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 16 57, 203n.40 Levin, Harry, 30-1 Kant, Immanuel, 10-11, 42 Lighthall, W.D., 49, i66n.28 Keats, John, 118, 152 Lipking, Laurence, 9 Keith, W.J., 54, 88, 105, Livesay, Dorothy, 129 197IM3 Longinus, 39-40, 71. See Keitner, Wendy, 163^3 also sublime Kelley, Theresa M, Lorrain, Claude, 8,10; i7on.22, i7in.23 "claude-glass," 12, 15 Kennedy, Leo, 122, 125 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, Kenner, Hugh, 133 Kizuk, Alex, 114 45

McConnell, F.D., i6on.38, i85n.64 MacDonald, Mary Lu, 489 MacDonald, R.D., 63 McDougall, Robert, 131 McGann, Jerome, 172^41 "McGill Movement," 132, i99n.2. See also Kennedy, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith McGregor, Gaile, 55-7, 75, 82, 91, 2O4n_54 McKay, Don, 196^38 Mackay, ]., Quebec Hill, viii, 31-7, 39, 41-4, 55 McLachlan, Alexander, 46-8 MacLaren, I.S., 175^69, i82n.47 McLeod, Les, 91 McLuhan, Marshall, i6in.45, i93n.7 MacLulich, T.D., 58 Mallinson, Jean, 121-2, I93n.i2 Mandel, Eli, 133, 178^13 Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler, 8 "Maple-Leaf School," 128, i98n.53- See also Confederation poets Marvell, Andrew, "Upon Appleton House," 4-5 Matthews, John Pengwerne, 20-1, 2Oin.i7 Matthews, Robin, 132, i98n.53 Maxwell, D.E.S., 23 Merchant, Carolyn, 150 Meredith, George, 100, 105 Metcalfe, John, 120 Miles, Josephine, 119 Miller, J. Hillis, 90 Milton, John, 24, 97-8, i89n.34 Modernism, in Canada, 112-28, 136-7, i97n.43, 197^-49 Monk, Janice, ix

2io Index Monk, Samuel H., 41, 152, 16011.38 Moodie, Susanna, 66-8, 71, 73,177n.6,179n.6; as a Crusoe figure, 56, 789; as an enthusiast, 67, 71-2, 75; and evangelicalism, 66-7, 71-2, 78-9, I78n.i6, 182^47; fear of nature in, 60, 62-3; and the "garrison mentality," 62-3, 66; the influence of Wordsworth on, 61-3; on Niagara Falls, 53; on the sublime, 612, 66, 74; as a symbol of Canadian identity, 60, 75-6, 183^48; works: Enthusiasm, 66-8, 72-6, 80; Life in the Clearings versus the Bush, 53, 65, 67, i75n.68; Roughing It in the Bush, 60-5, 67, 75-80. See also Atwood: The Journals of Susanna Moodie; colonialism; enthusiasm Moore, C.A., i57n.io, 16^.34 Moore, Thomas, lyon.iS More, Henry, 68-9 Morris, David B., 16-17 Moss, John, 50, 54, 134, I94n.i4 Murray, Heather, 164^9, i73n.5o, I76n.77

Radcliffe, Ann, 42-3 Rajan, Tilottama, 190^45 2O2n.23 Rashley, R.E., 21, 163^4, 197^-45 Ogden, Henry V.S. and Relke, Diana M.A., 163^5 Margaret S., 4 Repton, Sir Humphrey, 12 O'Grady, Standish, 47, 55 Ong, Walter, 205^64 Rilke, Rainer Maria, i, 3 O'Rourke, David, 197^43 Roberts, Sir Charles G.D., Owen, W.J.B., i7on.22 106, 108, 123, 128, 136; as editor of Shelley's Ower, John, i88n.29 Adonais and Alastor, 957; on "enthusiasm" in Pacey, Desmond, 125, 137, Canlit, i8in.42; influi97n.45 Page, P.K., 133 ence of Shelley and Wordsworth on, 90-6, Paulson, Ronald, 203^42 paysage interieur, 88, 100-2, 106-7; on modernism, 112; on i6in-45 pastoral elegies, 86,145; Peterman, Michael, 76 the picturesque in, 103, picturesque, the, viii-x, 9106, 108, 118; the sub19, 118-20; in Canada, lime in, 87-90; 92-8, 23-5, 32-4/ 44/ 49/ 89, 102-3, 108, 118; as 103-7, *53~4; co-operatarget of Campbell's tion with the sublime, satire, 112; works: Ave, 9-11, 44, 48-50, 92, 15382-8, 93-105, 117-18, 4. See also prospect; ut pictura poesis i45n.48; "The Cow Pasture," 103, 108; "The Pope, Alexander, 18-19, no; Windsor-Forest, 25Iceberg," 98, 117; "The Mower," 103; "The Oat 30 Threshing," 106; "The Post-colonialism, ix, 21, 58, i76n.74; Pea-Fields," 104; "The Pipes of Pan," 93; Post-modernism, 58, 127, "The Skater," 98; Songs i76n.74 of the Common Day, 107Pound, Ezra, 116, 119 9, 113, 117, 126; "The Poussin, Caspar, 8, 10, Sower," 103, 112; "The 126 Tantramar Revisited," Pratt, E.J., 137, 17411.53 New, W.H., 2oin.2o "New Criticism," 57 Precosky, Don, 107, 128, 88-9, 93-5; 97' 102; i95n.27 "Winter Fields," 103 New Provinces: Poems of Robillard, Richard, 138 Preview, 129-31 Several Authors, 122-5, Romanticism, n, 16, 91, Price, Martin, 10-11, 42 128. See also Kennedy; 143, I96n_37; in Canada, Modernism; F.R. Scott; Price, Uvedale, 9,13 48, 81-2, 91, 124; and Prickett, Stephen, 80, A.J.M. Smith rejection of the pici8gn.32 Newton, Sir Isaac, 7-8 Priestman, Martin, 79 turesque, 18; and the Niagara Falls, 41-2, 44, 52-3, i68n-5, 169^17, sublime, 70-1. See also prospect, 9,17, 24-5, 31-4, Shelley; sublime; 61, i87n.i8; in Abram's i7on.i8. See also sublime Plains, 31, 33; in Quebec Wordsworth Nichol, bp, 130 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Hill, 33-4. See also land- Rosa, Salvator, 8, 11 18 Ross, Malcolm, 131 scape; picturesque Noonan, Gerald, 189^30 Norris, Ken, 132, 195^25,

211 Index Ross, Sinclair, As for Me and My House, 51-2 Ross, W.W.E., 115-17, 124, 129; as an imagist, 115, i95n.27; works: "Forward" to Shapes and Sounds, 116-17; Laconics, 116; "On Art," 115; Shapes and Sounds, 11617; Sonnets, 116. See also Imagism Sangster, Charles, 105-7, 116, i8in.42 Schama, Simon, 153, 169^15 Schiller, Friedrich von, 44, 139 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 45, 92, no, 123. See also At the Mermaid Inn; Confederation poets Scott, F.R., 81, 122-7, i9gn.2. See also New Provinces Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord, viii, 56-7, 62, i57n.i5; works: A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 6970; The Moralists, 8, 35, 70 Shapiro, Gary, 198^62 Shee, Martin, 69 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 934, 85, 118, 130; own ambivalence towards Wordsworth, 189^37; in Canadian poetry, 828, 91-102; as a contrast to Wordsworth, 91-3, 101-2; works: Adonais, 95-7, 100-2, i9in.53; Alastor, 72, 94-6, 101-2; "A Defence of Poetry," 95-6, 100; "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," 87; "Mont Blanc," 140; "The Revolt of Islam," 95. See also Romanticism; sublime

Skinner, Constance Lindsay, "Song of CradleMaking," 150-3 Slemon, Stephen, 176^74 Smith, A.J.M., 122-7, *33/ i98n.5i, i99n.2; division of writers into native and cosmopolitan, 128-31; on "eclectic detachment," 185^4; works: "The Lonely Land," 125-7, i98n.62; rejected preface to New Provinces, 123-5, 13^See also "McGill Movement"; Modernism; New Provinces Smith, Sidonie, 76, 177^6 Solway, David, 131 Souster, Raymond, 132 Sparshott, Francis, 173^48 Spengemann, William C., 82, 183^51 Spenser, Edmund, 6, 32 Staines, David, 131 Starr, G.A., 79 Stead, C.K., 119 Stevens, Peter, 21, 195^27 Stevenson, Lionel, 132 Stolnitz, Jerome, i58n.2o Stouck, David, 61, 64 Stringer, Arthur, Open Water, 113-14, 124 sublime, the, viii-x, 35, 39-45, 69-71, 138, 146, i7on.2O, i72n.4i; and the beautiful, 9-11, 42, 44, 49, i58n.2o, 198^62; breakdown of consciousness in, 41-3, 968, i69n.i7; in Canada, 44-59, 61-2, 153-4; eighteenth century and Romantic distinguished, 16-17, 143~5' 152; "egotistical" 118, 141, 143, 152; failure of language in, viii, 40, 578, 61-2, 74, I7on.i8; the female, 149-52; and the picturesque, 9-11, 44,

48-50, 92; psychoanalytic interpretation of, 127, 140-1, 146, 149-50, i69n.i4, 2O5n.70, 2O5n.73; rejection of, by Modernists, 117-27. See also Burke; Dennis; enthusiasm; Moodie; Roberts; Shelley; Wordsworth Sullivan, Rosemary, 60 Surette, Leon, 1641111.8,9 Sutherland, John, 129-31, 133-4, 137 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 92, 100, i86n.i4 Symons, Julian, 131 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 101, 119-20, i86n.i4 thematic criticism, 54-8. See also Atwood; Frye; Jones; Moss Thomson, James, descriptions of scenery in, 8-9, 16; influence of, viii, 7, 87; works: Preface to "Winter," 7, "Rule Britannia," 27; The Seasons, 26-7, 34-6, 41, 44, 70 Thurston, John, 76 Tish, 132, 136 Traill, Catharine Parr, 56, 66 Trehearne, Brian, 122, i95n.3i Tuveson, Ernest Lee, 70 Twitchell, James B., 15, i7on.2O ut pictura poesis, 9, 16, i6on.4o, i6on.4i. See also picturesque; prospect Virgil, viii, 4, 28 Ware, Tracy, 86, 98, i75n.64 Warkentin, Germaine, i88n.2i

212 Index Warton, Joseph, 18, 70 Wasserman, Earl R., 5 Watson, J.R., 13 Watt, F.W., 111 Webb, Phyllis, 19911.2 Weiskel, Thomas, 127,146, 149-50, 16911.14, 20511.73 Wesley, John, 69. See also Moodie, and evangelicalism West, Paul, 142 Whiteman, Bruce, 195^27, 197*43 Whitman, Walt, 75-6, 113 Whitridge, Margaret Coulby, 121-2 Williams, George G., viii, 8, i56n.5 Williams, Raymond, 8 Wilson, Milton, 82, 136, i9on.42, 2oon.io

Wood, Susan Joan, 46, 61 Woodcock, George, 116, 142 Wordsworth, William, 44, 56, 119, i6in.42; in Canadian criticism, 912, 108-12, 121; on enthusiasm, 71; influence of Burke on, 43, i6on-40, i7on.22; as an opposite to Shelley, 567, 90-3; and the picturesque, 13-16, 119; and the sublime, 44, 88-9, 98 the Beautiful and the Sublime"); "Wordsworthian," as an adjective, 56-7, 90-1, i73n_45; works: Descriptive Sketches, 14, 16,

107, i67n.35; An Evening Walk, 13-14, 16, 89, 107; The Excursion, 90, 106; A Guide to the District of Lakes, 13; "Intimations" Ode, 93; "On the Sublime and the Beautiful," 13, 43, 61, 158^31; The Prelude, 14-15, 18, 44, 119, 147; The River Duddon, 93, 107, i93n.8; "Tintern Abbey," 88-90, 945. See also Romanticism Yeager, Phyllis, 140-1, 149-50, 2O5n.7o Zezulka, J.M., 22