The Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium ed. by Glenn Clever (review)

438 LETTERS IN CANADA 1984 humane people. The correspondence centres upon the preparation of At the Long Sault, the volume of for the most part unpublished poetry of Archibald Lampman that Scott and Brown brought out in 1943, and Brown's On Canadian Poetry, containing chapters on both Lampman and Scott, that appeared in the same year. Scholars will pick up all sorts of information about the literaryIscholarly currents ofthe time; there is some sensible discussion of what is known about Lampman's liaison with Katherine Waddell, and numerous gobbets of information and gossip about the literary establishment of the time. But the relationship between old and isolated poet on the one hand and energetic but careful academic on the other carries its own interest. McDougall escorts us with deft ease through the intricacies of the correspondence. His introduction is a beautiful piece ofwriting which is a pleasure to read for its own sake - firm proof (if proof were needed) that there is no reason to tolerate the sloppiness of Farmiloe and Varma. His notes tell us precisely what we want to know, and the whole volume is presented with loving care. Carleton University Press is to be congratulated on a model of scholarly book-production that should serve as an inspiration. To serious students of Canadian literature the message is clear: This is what can be achieved; why be content with anything less? (w.J. KEITH) Glenn Clever, editor. The Sir Cluzrles G.D. Roberts Symposium Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 10. University of Ottawa Press. xiv, 249. $12.95 paper The proceedings of the Charles G.D. Roberts symposium, held at the University of Ottawa in 1983, include a very uneven group of essays. Like former symposiain this series, someessays shedwelcome newlightwhile others provide only unscholarly and unrevised speculation. Six essays on the poetry make various claims for Robert's responses to traditional and contemporary poetry, although a glaring absence in their collective portrait is any treatment of the highly regarded 'Tantramar Revisited' and Maritimes sonnets. Fred Cogswell offers less a critical reappraisal than an appreciation of Roberts' classical verse, which would have yielded more insight had it considered previous criticism on this matter by BentleyI Keith, and Early. Tracy Ware's essay on I Ave' as elegy demonstrates fairly successfully how Roberts could sethis appreciation of Shelley in the context of his own regional experience. Problems arise, however, in Ware's neglect fully to question the heavily Wordsworthian understanding of Shelley favoured by Roberts. Like Ware, D.M.R. Bentley follows the spirit of a reappraisals symposium in his careful reading of New York Nocturnes, a volume thought by HUMANITIES 439 Roy Daniells, among others, to do only damage to the poet's reputation. Bentley traces the pre-Raphaelite presence in the poems, one that can be seen to unify the volume in terms of a sustained effort to reconcile sacred and profane love. In other essays, Les McLeod defends 'The Iceberg' on the grounds of the poet's essential materialism, but, rather doubtfully, only by skirting the logistical difficulties of the poem and by crediting Roberts with a modernist irony. R.A. Burns adapts Pacey's thesis, and finds that Roberts's reuvre never develops past the Romantic nostalgia voiced so perfectly early in his career. Meanwhile, Don Conway offers a noteless and nigh-incomprehensible treatment of the modernism of 'The Squatter.' This offering makes it clear that, after ten such gatherings, Ottawa must, like other conferences, now decide to print only the most thoughtful and impressive, and not also the most embarrassing, essays presented at the symposium. Five essays about Roberts's fictional prose include competent treatments of his romances by Elizabeth Waterston, and of his fictional interpretations of Acadian history by William Owen. R.D. Mathews contributes a lamentably wandering polemic about too many literary matters but, at last, about why The Heart of the Ancient Wood cannot be either a fable or the English-Canadian equivalent of the roman de la terre but must be something else. Mathews supplies no substantiation for his view that Roberts knew or cared what tradition he was adapting. Michael Hornyansky provides a much-needed and too-brief humorous look...