- Loyalist background. - Born in the early 1860s
- Victorian education: trained in the classics.
- Romanticism and transcendentalism.
- Nationalism; interest in landscape. Pastoral
landscape of Acadia
CHARLES G.D. ROBERTS
- Founding father. - Outspoken Canadian
nationalist (Canada First Movement).
Patriotic. - Marked by contradictions.
- Nature in New Brunswick.
- Pre-Raphaelite tradition, pictorial quality.
- Darwinian vision: survival as a matter of
luck and fitness. - He found change at the
heart of things.
“TANTRAMAR REVISITED” (1886)
- Mythologizing the Maritime
environment (Tantramar Marshes).
- Loco-descriptive unrhymed poem,
variant of hexameter. - Repetitions and
length→distance (spatial/temporal).
- Meditating on past and present (the
speaker returns to his homeland). Lyric
intensity. - World dominated by “chance
and change”. - Colloquial and detailed
descriptive diction. Visual images
“THE SKATER” (1901):
- Visual imagery of a frozen river
(glittering steel, long white dream…)
- The speaker turns away from a
beautiful scene (threatening nature)
- Pentameter, 4 stresses,
alliteration, rhyme. Classical form.
- “In the deep of my heart I heard
my fear”.
ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN
- Ideal beauty in the Canadian landscape. - Naturalis poet, vivid
simple images and diction (sounds, motion and colours of the
wilderness). - Experimental rhythms. Pictorial/musical effects.
- Social concerns, horrors if industrial city. - Celebration of
nature touched by fear. - He saw change only in the
superficialities of appearance (unchanging reality beneath the
surface)
“HEAT” (1888) - The speaker
contemplates a natural scene, reflects
upon it and, renewed, returns to the
city. “My thoughts grow keen and
clear”. - Dreamy hot atmosphere of a
rural landscape. - Tetrameter, rhythm
and rhyme. Abab. Allusion (Keats).
- Oppositions: movement/stillness,
coolness/heat, sound/silence,
dark/light.
“THE CITY OF THE END OF THINGS” (1895) - Again
Iambic tetrameter, rhythm abab. - Hallucinatory
focus on detail. Dream-like poem. - Disturbing
urban images (fiery engine, dazed crowds) grow
apocalyptic. - Individual endangered by a city
(mechanical and industrialized) is a version of the
Pandemonium. Dehumanized. - Anti-Utopian,
satirical revelation of the results of the
application of materialistic rationalism to the
search for social perfection.
“WINTER EVENING” (1899)
- Sonnet, iambic pentameter,
abba acca def dfe. - Visual
imagery, colour gold (wash of
gold). Atmospheric poem.
- Describes a sunset and the
feeling of fear aroused by
darkness. - Impressionist
landscape
DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT
- Response to the Canadian landscape
and its people (life and customs of
Aboriginal peoples, lumbermen and
French Canadian). - First Nation
subjects. - Depiction of conflicts, natural
struggle from which beauty and peace
arise. - Sense of man in confrontation
with a violent universe. - Death as a
part of life: heroism in death. - Isolation
of the individual. - He was a pianist,
imprinted musical effects to his poetry.
“AT THE CEDARS” (1893) - Lumberman Isaac Dufour, his
daughter also dies. Christ-like death. - Dramatic monologue.
End rhyme, repetition. - Combines long and short lines to
create rhythm
“THE ONONDAGA MADONNA” (1898) - Petrarchan
Sonnet. - An Iroquois woman holds her baby warrior,
race doomed. - Diction: related to past, war and
wildness, but sense of tragic fate.
“THE FORSAKEN” (1905) - Chippewa woman, 2 long stanzas: 1:
young woman, short lines convey the steady pulse of her
heart. 2: long lones, old woman’s slowing heart. - She fishes
using her own flesh as bait to feed her baby. Later, she
accepts her destiny and dies covered by the snow in
extraordinary conditions of peace. Serenity (“Then she had
rest”). Meets the “silence deeper than silence”. - Repetition
(Valiant, unshaken). Free verse, narrative poem. - Christian
imagery, she dies like a martyr.