A Note on Canadian Poetry

The first Canadian poet was probably the Frenchman who came over with Champlain, and had intelligence a good deal beyond the ordinary in that he saw the new world even as Champlain did. Before leaving, and almost on the dock, he had written his "Farewell to France," and by that act intended a new life, one might say; at least it was his own decision. There is an account in Parkman of how Champlain came back to Port Royal (I think it was) after a miserable voyage down the Atlantic coast. Putting in for water, he had been attacked by Indians, and off Mount Desert he had almost lost his ship in the heavy seas. In any case, he came back bitter and tired out, and was utterly dumbfounded to find himself met by men in strange costumes chanting alexandrines—a true poetic homage to himself.

As Parkman has it, the Frenchman was not lazy, and if the old world could not be translated quite so literally to the new, it was an honest sense that had made the attempt. The masque was the old form, but the context was altogether a new one.

Canadian poetry might always be this attempt, not so much to fit, say, into an environment but to act in the given place. If there is no 'major' poet in Canada, if there never was one, etc., I think it is a part of this same problem. A theoretic embarrassment of 'culture,' all the tenuosities of trying to be local and international at the same time, etc., take an energy otherwise of use in the making of an idiom peculiar to the given circumstances. In this way Canadian poetry, in its earlier forms, has much in common with the Ameri-

can poetry of Lowell, Longfellow, et al. The model is English, and it is precisely the English which is of no use whatsoever. "Like some grey warder who, with mien sedate, etc." comes too late, and too borrowed, to be helpful. It is incredible to think of the man writing it, even then, being where he must have been. The impact of the place is dulled in the overlay of the English rhythms, and the politenesses which couldn't have been actual.

The Frenchman with Champlain was, finally, a poet in a much, much deeper sense, and it was he who catalogued a good many of the plants around their camp, and also made a garden which kept them all in vegetables. There is that sense of it, of where, particularly, one is. I think that is more 'poetic vision,' call it, than any other sense could be. The Frenchman has size in his intention, and more than that, what he intends he does, i.e., the garden, and the masque in the dead of winter, completely improvised and successful.

I don't see any other way to do it. The problems of form and content, and all the other contentions of poets, are utterly intimate with each one writing, and where he is writing, and what he tries with what's around him. Canadian poetry becomes, in each instance, which man or woman it is, and what their work can effect.