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265 Battle Verse Poetry and Nationalism after Vimy Ridge JONATHAN VANCE As dusk fell on 9 April, the battalions of the Canadian Corps were consolidating their gains along the Brown line. They had achieved almost all of the first day’s objectives—most of Vimy Ridge was firmly in their hands. The news from the battlefield reached Canada by wire in time to appear in the final editions of that day’s major newspapers, but it was not until the next day that the full story hit the front pages. “Whole German Line Wavers Under First Spring Attack,” proclaimed the Edmonton Journal. “Canada’s Troops Have Won Biggest Victory of Career in Taking Vimy Ridge.” Moncton’s L’Acadien was even more effusive: “Brillant fait d’armes canadiens. La fameuse crête Vimy, théatre de tant de combat meutriers, est enlevées aux allemands par un irrésistible assaut des gars du Canada.” “Progress Made in Offensive More Extensive Than Was First Indicated,” announced the Toronto Daily Star, “Canadians Thoroughly Secure Vimy Ridge.”1 Inspired by the news, Canada’s legion of amateur poets was probably at work by the end of that day. A great event in the nation’s history occurred: the only thing to do was to celebrate the victory in verse. Over the next twenty years, Vimy Ridge became the Great War’s most popular battle with poets of every stripe, from the amateur versifier to Canada’s most well-known writers. Its popularity lay in the fact that it was more than just a stunning military success of the kind that had inspired many a classic narrative battle poem.2 The special appeal of Vimy Ridge rested in its ability to bring together the religious and the nationalist. Easter Monday, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, was chosen as the offensive’s opening day for reasons that had nothing to do with religious symbolism, but that reality was irrelevant to Canadian poets. For them, Easter Monday 1917 brought together two events of tremendous import: the celebration of the resurrection of 15 266 JONATHAN VANCE Christ and the birth of a nation. The spiritual and the secular meshed so completely that the poet could not help but be drawn to it. Besides, Vimy Ridge was much easier to rhyme than Drocourt-Quéant. That Canadians turned to verse to celebrate such a momentous event should come as no surprise, for Canada was then a society in which poetry mattered. Because it was used so widely in schools to teach reading, grammar, composition and history to even the youngest of children, it was an idiom that most Canadians found comfortable and familiar.3 It was also much more widely disseminated at the time of the First World War than it is in the early twenty-first century. Virtually all of Canada’s newspapers printed poetry in every issue, as did high-circulation magazines like Maclean’s and Saturday Night. Nor was it the cultural preserve of the middle class and the idle rich. Labour newspapers like Winnipeg’s The Voice and agricultural newspapers like The Weekly Sun regularly printed poetry, although the rough doggerel in such publications contrasted strongly with the refined verse that graced the pages of The University Magazine and Queen’s Quarterly. Given the sheer amount of verse that was published (and we can assume that much more was written without ever making it into print) it is beyond question that poetry was the primary literary form where the memory of the Great War was negotiated and expressed. Even more importantly, it was a form occupied by soldiers and civilians, men and women, famous poets such as Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and people who are now nothing more than a name in an old newspaper. No other mode of public expression drew such a wide range of practitioners. There is an enormous range, not only in authorship but in quality, in the body of Vimy Ridge verse. Ironically, the most famous poem on the subject is not even Canadian: it is “To E.T.,” by the American poet Robert Frost, a tribute to Edward Thomas, the English poet who was killed at Beaurains, south of Vimy on 9 April 1917 while serving with the Royal Garrison Artillery.4 There is nothing in the Canadian canon that reaches the aesthetic standard of Frost’s poem: You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire On Vimy Ridge; and...

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