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Portraits of the landscape as poet: Canadian nature as aesthetic symbol in three confederation writers JOHN OWER Throughout the course of our literary history, the Canadian poet has been faced simultaneously with two Herculean labours. The first is to create art in a wilderness which is both physical and spiritual. The second is to keep abreast of cultural movements abroad to which he may be only peripherally related, but upon which he is deeply dependent for his inspiration. As Archibald Lampman's remarks concerning Roberts' Orion suggest, both of these tasks assumed particularly formidable proportions in the pioneer and colonial society of the Nineteenth Century, and if our Confederation poets had any success in coping with them, they are particularly deserving of our admiration. It is the purpose of the present essay t'1 examine in detail some remarkable poems in which these artists tackle the job of mastering their native environment in a particularly direct and sophisticated manner by projecting upon the Canadian landscape complex and subtle discussions of their aesthetic concerns. Besides representing a bold frontal attack upon the problem of creating art in and from an unpromising environment, tlie pieces to be discussed represent an authentic beginning of a Canadian poetry in their shrewd anticipation of which branches of the English tradition upon which the Canadian literary stock was grafted were suffciently vital to bear fruit in the future. Our Confederation poets can be broadly described as postRomantics , and there are two aspects of the Romantic movement which in particular persist as vital issues into the Twentieth Century . These are the attainment of an intricate virtuosity of symbolic technique, and the concentration of the artist upon his own creative act in varying degrees of isolation from or atonement with his surroundings. That the Confederation poet could produce work which shows at least an intuitive awareness of these important matters, while remaining distinctively Canadian, should perhaps lead to a reassessment of some of our currently accepted perspectives and attitudes Journal of Canadian Studies regarding their work. It may then begin to emerge that far from being a "Group of Four," whose ideas if any are merely embarrassing manifestations of a "late provincial Victorianism," the Confederation writers are indeed authentic founders of a national literary tradition. We may begin with a consideration of Archibald Lampman's "Heat," a piece which stems from well-established Romantic conventions and yet achieves integrity through the skill of its technique and its vivid realization of a particular landscape through a highly refined poetic sensibility. The first three stanzas of Lampman's poem might on first inspection seem simply an exercise in landscape painting in the pre-Romantic tradition of Thompson, Cowper and Dyer, but the details which they incorporate are not, as Professor Pacey has demonstrated, without symbolic significance. 1 Perhaps of greater importance, however, is the change in the focus of the poet's "camera-eye" as his description proceeds. "Heat" opens with Lampman gazing into a distance in which detail is blurred by the hazy and shimmering air. The evocation of the visual remoteness of a landscape dissolved by heat continues with the movement of the poet's eye down the road by which he is standing, to come momentarily to rest in stanza two upon a wagoner who is already "half-hidden" by a "windless blur" of dust. However, in stanza three, there is a sudden shift in perspective from the distance to the foreground, and this is accompanied by the sharp realization of minute details in the brilliant sunlight: I count the marguerites one by one; Even the buttercups are still. On the brook yonder not a breath Disturbs the spider or the midge. The fourth stanza of "Heat" is pivotal, containing two parallel transitions. In the first place, there is a sense-transference from eye to ear, and this prepares for the domination of stanza five by auditory impressions. Accompanying this switch between senses, there is a shift in the focus of the poet's concentration from the external landscape to his own musings.2 In the first two stanzas, Lampman 's eye has moved his attention outward toward the landscape, but now his ear draws the songs...

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