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  • The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897
  • Allan Smith
The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897. D.M.R. Bentley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp 411, illus. $65.00

This thoroughly researched, carefully constructed, very interesting book takes as its focus the group of English-Canadian poets – Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Charles G.D. Roberts, William Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Frederick George Scott – who came into prominence in the 1880s.

Their thinking informed by a brand of romanticism that was at once a product of its high Victorian time and an echo of the Keatsian-Byronic impulses of an earlier day, these poets sought to enrich and develop their community's cultural life, inspire it with a sense of self and identity, and – not least – build their own careers. Promoting each other in reviews, essays, and correspondence, establishing connections in London and New York, worrying about both national culture and the conditions that would permit its production, they wrote poetry, criticism, commentary, and fiction, engaged in strenuous debate over the national question, and attempted to create work that would at once equal the best that had been done (Keats's, in their view) and move on to the new (mostly symbolist) ground that seemed to be so profitably in course of exploitation.

Prepared to be political – their support for the Garibaldi-inspired Young Canada movement was marked – they were active mostly in the cultural field, believing in the best romantic fashion that no nation could properly exist unless it had self-knowledge and self-awareness of the sort that could be generated only by artists, writers, journalists, and historians. Setting out to provide their share of that knowledge and awareness, they focused – again the romantic debt is clear – on nature, seeing it as [End Page 552] having a double significance in Canada's life. The Canada that was at once northern, wilderness, garden, and redemptive was thus extensively explored, not least in the animal stories for which Roberts in particular became known. In receipt of attention too – and foreshadowing concerns that both Emily Carr and Lawren Harris (among others) would develop – was the Canada whose natural endowment and plenitude allowed it a special place as a window onto the higher life that was observable only as one learned to look through, and beyond, the nature that was that life's outward sign and manifestation.

Historians will be especially interested in the book's subtext: Commenting implicitly on the relationship between a society's mass, density, experience, and history on the one hand, and its capacity to generate meaning about itself on the other, the book constitutes a case study in what happens when, in Benedict Anderson's well-known formulation, communities are imagined by those who live in them. Historians will also respond to the attention the book pays to what occurs when inte-rests – in this case, artistic interests – attach themselves (not always consciously) to nation and the promotion of nation as a way of advancing their work and increasing its status.

A reminder of how important cultural expression is in community-building, this book also serves as a rich and valuable resource in its own right: Well-grounded and in touch with an extensive range of material, it gives its period texture, recreates something of its ambient richness, and continues to show just how developed and vital the cultural life of the nation has been. Penetrating, wide in reach, and comprehensive in what it presents, it not only achieves its avowed purpose in rescuing its principals from what E.P. Thompson once called 'the enormous condescension of posterity,' but it also makes their age live, gives a sense of what went on in that age, and generally acts in the historicist style far more effectively than a good deal of what historians themselves do.

Allan Smith
University of British Columbia
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