Canadian Prospects: Abram's Plains in Context
- Canadian Prospects: Abram's Plains in Context
Canada Research Fellow, University of Toronto Complicity (1983); Henry Moore's Sheep, and Other Poems (1990)
Notes
1. Abram's Plains: A Poem, ed D.M.R. Bentley (London, Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press 1986), 1–2. Parenthetical line references are to this edition. Although some critics have seen Cary'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, Cary confesses that he actually prefers blank verse and would write it if he could!
2. The only interpretative essay has been D.M.R. Bentley's ‘Thomas Cary's Abram's Plains (1789) and Its “Preface”’Canadian Poetry, 5 (Fall–Winter, 1979), 1–28, reprinted in slightly revised form as the Introduction to Bentley's edition of the poem.
3. ‘Canadian Poets and the Great Tradition,’ Canadian Literature, 65 (Summer, 1975), 45
4. See ‘The Pastoral Vision in Nineteenth-Century Canada,’ Dalhousie Review, 57 (1978), 221.
5. Bentley, Introduction to Abram's Plains, xii.
6. See the ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada’ (1965), repr in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi 1971), 231. Diane Bessai argues persuasively that the Canlit industry, following Frye's lead, has been ahistorical in its readings of our earlier poets. However, although she rejects Frye's contention that before the modern period Canadian poetry was necessarily derivative because lacking local mythology, in order to make a persuasive case for Roberts and Lampman as performing ‘the creative translation of the true literary colonist,’ she too dismisses all pre-Confederation writers as manifesting ‘the unthinking dependence of the émigré.’ See ‘Counterfeiting Hindsight,’ World Literature Written in English, 23 (Spring 1984). 363.
7. Robert Arnold Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Languages 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, 368.
8. Bentley, Introduction to Abram's Plains, xxxv.
9. For the different versions of Cooper's Hill see Brendan O Hehir's Expans'd Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham's ‘Cooper's Hill’ (Berkeley: University of California Press 1969). I quote the 1668 edition of the poem, because this is the version which influenced Pope, and therefore indirectly - if not directly - the Canadian poets under discussion in this paper. Parenthetical line references are to this edition.
10. 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.
11. Samuel Johnson, ‘Denham,’ in Lives of the Poets, 2 vols (1781; repr London: Oxford University Press 1952), I, 58.
12. According to Pope, the first 290 lines of the poem were written in 1704, and ‘the latter part was not added till the year 1713, in which it was publish'd.’ His modern editors suggest that, in fact, there was ‘a comprehensive revision of the poem throughout its entire length, down to the moment of publication.’ E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, Introduction to Windsor-Forest in the Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol I, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism (London: Methuen 1961), 131. Parenthetical line references are to this edition.
13. For a persuasive identification of William III with the hunting despot of Windsor-Forest, see Wasserman, The Subtler Language, 113–28.
14. All quotations from The Seasons are from the final, 1746 version, as edited by James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981). The panegyric of Britain just quoted comes from ‘Summer,’ 423...
