Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta,
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914, and co-editor of The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt.

“At least in the United States and England,” writes Lynch,
“success is recognized, even celebrated, by the writer’s audience,
if with characteristic hyperbole in the former and understatement in the
latter. In Canada, success remains a problem for critics and public
alike.” That, it seems to me, is the correct way to approach the
career and work of Bliss Carman, long known to most Canadians as a
writer of pleasant school-text lyrics (“The Ships of Yule”) and to
academics as a puzzling sort of genius who produced one or two memorable
works of art (“Low Tide at Grand Pré”). Yet Carman’s
contemporaries (critics and other poets) undeniably considered him the
leading poet of his generation, and he was once cited by an American
magazine as being the most prolific American poet alive.

Clearly, a reappraisal is in order. It best begins by recognizing what
readers many years ago agreed: Carman was a good poet and very
successful; and it is best done exactly as this editor sets out to do
it: “to progress from the biographical concerns, through
bibliographical, to theoretical, and finally to more practical
criticism.”

In a series of essays by some of Canada’s best scholars and
poets—John Sorfleet, D.M.R. Bentley, Terry Whalen, Louis MacKendrick,
Laurel Boone, Elizabeth Brewster, Doug Jones, and Al Purdy (who reveals
it was Carman who first inspired him to become a poet)—Carman’s
public career and poetic genius are examined in detail. The result is as
D.M.R. Bentley suggests, that “admiring Carman’s poetry is now not
quite as suspect and unfashionable, not quite as liable for dismissal .
. . as it was in the late 1940s when Malcolm Ross described it as a
‘secret sin’.”