Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem

Colonial Colonizing: An Introductory Survey of the Canadian Long Poem

Colonial Colonizing: An Introductory Survey of the Canadian Long Poem D.M.R. BENTLEY Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way... —GEORGE BERKELEY, "America or the Muse's Refuge" (1726)1 We have but one choice between two different imperialisms, that of Britain and that of the Imperial commonwealth to the south. —WILLIAM WILFREDCAMPBELL, "Imperialism in Canada" (1904)2 INCE ITSPUBLICATION in 1929 in The Kelsey Papers, the Jonsonian verse epistle in which Henry Kelsey recounts hisjourney in 169091 from York Factory (Churchill)to the Canadian plains has increasinglyattracted the attention and imagination of Canadians whose interests include literary history and literary forbears. Pre-eminent among the poets and scholars who have been drawn to "NowReader Read..." by its prelusive position in Canadian poetry is the late Jon Whyte, who records in a note to Homage, Henry Kelsey (1981) that his reading of the explorer's journals in 1967-68 in preparation for a (centennial?) "Poem about muskoxen"—a "pleistocene relic" that "Kelsey had been the first to describe"—led to the recognition of "an ancestral voice" and a re-enactment of the colonial project: Kelsey "took over the poem about the muskox" and it "began to shape itself into epic. Myacademicwork on the medievalpoem Pearl started to inform what I wasdoing: I would, like the jeweller in that poem, put his S poem in a new setting. Hence 'homage'" (81). Whyte's remarks do more than confirm his participation in the nationalistic ancestor-hunting of the Centennial years.3 In the issues of poetic primality, power, and genre that they moot, they speak to the late twentieth-century reader of fundamental characteristics of the long poem on Canada that are embodied in "Now Reader Read..." An instrument of British imperialism like Kelsey himself, the three manuscript pages of "Now Reader Read..." enact most of the tasks that would characterize Canadian long poems in the ensuing three centuries: (1) comprehension (they provide an inclusive commentary on "the Country" and its inhabitants); (2) commemoration (they memorialize the 'Journey" that Kelsey hoped would distinguish him in the minds of his Hudson's Bay Company superiors); and (3) construction (they describe the "set[t]ing up [of] a Certain Cross" near what is now The Pas, Manitoba, as a "token" of the Company's active presence in the area [1-4]). Moreover, Kelsey's decision to present his "Relation" (1) in the form of forty-five couplets—as a poem neither epical in scope nor purely lyrical in quality" (Dixon and Grierson vii)—attests, not only to the affinity between accretive poetry and imperial appropriation, but also to the appropriateness as a vehicle for the celebration of colonial achievements of a genre that situates itself between the great narratives of imperial civilizationsand the brief utterances of solitary individuals. If confirmation were needed that "the defining tradition of Western epic" and a classical precedent for British imperialism reside in Virgil's Aeneid, it could be found in David Quint's Epic and Empire and in the chapter on "The Empire and the War" in DavidJenkyns' The Victorians and Ancient Greece, and perhaps Lionel Reams' answer to the question of "[W]hat is the nature of lyric"—"[a] fine line of the single voice alone" (np) —is sufficient to confirm the identity of lyric and individual expression .4 In the precarious and vacillating "betweeness" that Charles Altieri sees as a salient quality of the modernist long poem and Smaro Kamboureli extends to the contemporary Canadian long poem (75-77), the "middle-sized poem" (Frye, Anatomy 256) provides a generic equivalent for colonial experience—an appropriate vehicle for the stylish and persuasive communication of the liminal experiences, memorable achievements, and constructive activities of colonials engaged in the process of colonization. As insistent in its presentation of a "single voice alone" as it is in its pursuit of the Golden Fleece (see Bentley, Mimic Fires 13-24), "Now Reader Read..." is the primal poem of colonial colonizing in Canada, and it isjust as well equipped to coerce Whyte's poem about the muskox toward "epic" as to impress him with its "ancestral voice." An immediate effect of situating the Canadian long poem both generically and ideologically between the epic (imperialism) and the lyric 8 (individualism), is to foreground and polarize aspects of the genre that might otherwise appear transparent or insignificant.Located between the encyclopaedic ambitions of the epic (Frye, "EncyclopaedicForm") and the self...