Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal

Grues and Gaunts: Carman's Gothic

Grues and Gaunts: Carman's Gothic LOUIS K. MACKENDRICK B, Beginning at least as early asJames Cappon's Bliss Carman and theLiterary Currents and Influences of his Time (1930), the literary influences upon Bliss Carman's poetry have been traced through a nowstandardized lineup. Among the poets who apparently stand behind the work—including Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, and Emerson—pride of place has invariably been given to the Romantics: Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. I would suggest that the Gothic dimensions of the Romantics, those characteristics more usually studied in the fiction of that era, have a not inconsiderable bearing on some of Carman's work. Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony (1933) has its droll revelations of several persistent Romantic figures: the linking of Beauty and Death, versions of Satan, the influence of "the divine marquis," de Sade, and the Fatal Woman. Sukumar Dutt's comprehensive study, The Supernatural in English Romantic Poetry (1938), still reads very well today. I mention these studies merely to suggest that a valid Gothic impulse may not be simply wished away from Carman's familiarity with the Romantics. Then, of course, there is Edgar Allan Poe, whose presence in Carman has been affirmed by Cappon, who suggested that "There was a certain affinity between Carman's mood of transcendental reverie and the dream-like fantasy in Poe's poetry."1 Poe's self-serving essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," advanced the importance of effect, and argued that a tone of sadness was the highest manifestation of Beauty—the death of a beautiful woman being his principal measure. Poe also wrote breast-clawingpsychological parables along with wonderfully sepulchral physical horror—a demonstrably closer affinity with Carman's Gothic practice. Carman is but one of a multitudeof Canadian 130 writers who manifest the "northern shudder," or what Northrop Frye, in a review of A.J.M. Smith's The Book of Canadian Poetry (194-3), felt was the outstanding achievement of the genre in Canada, "the evocation of stark terror."2 (In The Ledger Robert Kroetsch suggests that "you MUST / marry the terror.")3 In his years at Harvard (1886-1888) Carman took three courses under Francis Child,4 precisely when Child was producing Englishand Scottish Popular Ballads (1883-1898). If we require a confirmation of Carman's Gothic inclination, we need look little further than the ballad and its conventions; his own exercises in the genre, more literary than absolutely true to type, exist in many forms. The atmospheric extension into his other work is, again, not negligible. Furthermore, his friend and colleague Richard Hovey's attraction to matters medieval must figure somewhere in the equation. It is also important to remember that Carman had a cabin near Dr. and Mrs. King's home in the Catskills; it was called "Ghost House."5 Finally, Carman's alleged melancholy may have been responsible for the usually sombre tones of his Gothic poems. Perhaps the sum of these indications is sufficient to grant Carman more than a passing familiarity with the mood and practice of Gothic measures. Margot Northey's definition of the mode, in TheHaunted Wilderness, may suffice: "Gothic" refers here to a subjective view of the dark side of life, seen through the distorting mirror of the self, with its submerged levels of psychic and spiritual experiences. Non-realistic and essentially symbolic in its approach, the gothic opens up various possibilities of psychological, spiritual, or social interpretations. Its mood is pre-eminently one of terror or horror.6 It is interesting to note that Carman's dedicated acolyte, keeper of the flame, and virtually uncritical admirer, Rufus H. Hathaway, assisted in assembling such collections of Carman's work as Ballads and Lyrics and Bliss Carman's Poems. Three poems in particular, the more gruesome of Carman's supernatural productions—"The Night Washers," "The Hearse-Horse," and "The Red Wolf'—were omitted under Hathaway's protective attentions. Presumably these interfered with the implied portrait of the poet, and would compromise the popular view of the transcendental nature-worshipper and vagabond life-affirmer, thereby showing more of an earthy side of Carman. Nevertheless, several poems that will be considered in this paper as Gothic are effective, and relatively straightforward, as strictly carnal parables, far in excess of his more conventional spirit-thronged romances. (Carman's extraordinary achievement in his Sappho poems should have dispelled any such senti- 131 mental picture of the poet decades...