The Collected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

This volume arranges Roberts’s 384 poems in a chronological order that often records dates of composition as well as of publication. Four poems appear for the first time. The editorial principles of this well-made and attractive volume are lucidly explained and carefully applied. The ample notes, contained in a section almost 280 pages long, explain the publication history and variants of the poems. The notes convey how widely Roberts was published; they show that his poems appear in a large number of journals, collections, and anthologies. The perceptive and frank, if unenthusiastic, introduction by Fred Cogswell accounts for the poet’s popularity in his own times, while admitting reasons why it now seems difficult to grant that popularity much significance. Although not providing a biographical or historical description of Roberts’s poetic development, Cogswell offers “fragments,” discursive remarks deriving from a generic classification of the poems. These remarks are helpful since the common reader is likely to maintain generic awareness only with difficulty; Roberts’s poems employ diction that is conventional and repetitious, mellifluent and archaic. Cogswell’s generic approach is dictated by the fact that the poet did not undergo much development and by his current unpopularity.

It does not take long for the reader of this volume to conclude that Roberts’s former popularity had nothing to do with formal experimentation or original thought. His versifications of classical legends copy those of the English Romantic poets without possessing anything like the psychological and philosophical intensity of the latter. In Roberts’s classical imitations Cogswell does praise grammatical skill, the impulse to resist iambic metre, and a desire to employ New Brunswick scenery. He lauds the appropriation of Canadian scenery in Roberts’s sonnets while he concedes that they are empty of thought. Cogswell’s praise is also dubious when he celebrates the poet’s grammatical skill at the same time as pointing out that his inversions are too repetitious and artificial. On the other hand, sometimes Cogswell’s changes seem questionable: he dismisses the ballads about military heroism on the grounds of contemporary anti-war sentiment. However, Cogswell is a firm guide when it comes to recognizing that much of Roberts’s patriotic poetry was popular only for occasional reasons. His elegies, like his odes and sonnets, are merely conventional; they convey a facile, mystical sense of merging with the universe in grief. The numerous love poems are hardly more convincing; they tend both to reveal sexist attitudes and to evaporate into transcendentalism. Roberts’s persistent view that life which accepts the limitations of time and space has no value gives his poems an unsatisfactory vagueness. The most recurrent feature of his poetry seems to be the loss of awareness in dreams and cosmic processes. Even his poems that explore urban alienation avoid modern experimentation. Although Cogswell claims that the mystical poems have been always read superficially and that there is more in them, he can do little to rehabilitate them. In the final analysis, the reasons for this edition seem to be extrinsic. Roberts is the father of Canadian poetry because of his historical situation; he expressed the sentiments people wanted to hear and established the English tradition in Canada, giving to later poets an audience. It is somewhat ironical that a poet who so much resisted time should be celebrated for his historic rather than intrinsic value.