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DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT AND "THE MOMENT OF BECOMING" JOHN P. MATTHEWS The thrust of Canadian poetry from the beginning of the nineteenth century has always been through the adaptation of familiar imagery rather than through the search for the new and startling. The slow but steady renaming, which the poet must always do, was a procedure quite different in Canada from, for example, its more predictable course in the United States and in Australia. Canadian images tended to remain very close to their originals in the parent tradition, but the meanings of the things named, the understanding which the words conjured to the initiated, became almost a secret language whose opacity was not penetrated by those who did not know the distinctive Canadian way of doing things. But protective coloration has always been an element of survival — "The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour / Woos his own end." The close friendship between Scott and Lampman has always, rightly, been considered important. What was it that Lampman, from this perspective can now be seen to have passed on to his literary executor? There is one basic practice which Lampman arrived at only after anguished experiment and tension, and which is as natural and unforced in Scott as breathing. The re-interpretation of Canadian nature as an emblem for Canadian society grew out of Lampman's inability to accept in this country that wise passiveness which he claimed was his goal, but which was always disturbed by thought. Dream-as-escape kept turning, willy-nilly, into dream-as-vision; and clarity of vision (as "Heat" demonstrated) came from the refusal to respond passively to the apparent dictates of the environment. Stoicism too, with Lampman, changed from dumb endurance to an emphasis on life for its own sake — life which has implications far beyond one's own knowing, as "The King's Sabbath," "At the Long Sault" and "Freedom" attest. But perhaps the most important legacy to be inherited by Scott was Lampman's instinctive perception of the implications of his own use of unchanging imagery to connote things in a state of change. 1 "Morning on the Lievre" celebrated a stillness that was pervaded not so much by the threat of impending action, as by its felt presence. The determined emptying of the mind in "Among the Timothy" and in "Freedom" for the purpose of inducing the sweeter visions of nature, led instead to the Daliesque landscape of the over-topped child-daisies, the distress of the poplarleaf-hands beating together, and the ravaging bees plundering a landscape suddenly warped "with the white-hot noons and their withering fires." Although less obvious, the violence of Lampman's imagery is more pervasive than Scott's, because for Lampman it was a part of the problem of poetic energy, rather than, as it was for Scott, part of the solution. The distinction, often made, that Scott was "metaphysical" whereas Lampman was principally devoted to sensation, needs a great deal of modification. Perhaps a poetry can be said to have come of age when its poets see in their own environment (physical and emotional and social) the instinctive objective correlative for their own subjective concepts of reality. In most countries this involves a familiar three-part relationship : the poet, his language (which is drawn from and grows out of a set of connotations peculiar to his culture which he and his readers largely share), and a universal (apart from time and place) Poetry. In Canada, the historical and cultural necessities have interpolated a fourth stage. And this came from the peculiar cultural imperatives in Canada which encouraged the poet to coin not new names, but new meanings for the old ones. As the poet is to Canada so Canada is to the world outside it. There is a new syllogism to embody the new poetic logic. There were two seminal essays written some twenty years ago, and to their authors the critic of Scott's poetry must remain indebted. The first was A. J. M. Smith's "Duncan Campbell Scott: a Reconsideration" in the first number of Canadian Literature, and the other was Milton Wilson's "Klein's Drowned Poet" in the sixth issue of the same journal, and which contained an interpretation of "The Piper of Aril" as an introduction to his discussion. Between them they came close to identifying the distinctive nature of Scott's contribution which makes him eligible to be considered as the first major poet to emerge from Canada. During...

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