Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings Through the First World War

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

The New Canadian Library is refurbishing its poetry anthologies, and
this book now offers a selection of what might be called the Canadian
pre-moderns. Superseding Malcolm Ross’s Poets of the Confederation, it
presents not only Roberts, Carman, Lampman, and D.C. Scott, but also
selections from numerous minor poets and poetasters from Robert Hayman
to Frank Prewett. Most of the poems are short lyrics, but Goldsmith’s
“Rising Village,” Crawford’s “Malcolm’s Katie,” and
Roberts’s “Ave” and “The Iceberg” are all complete.

Editors Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies are to be congratulated on
bringing greatly improved textual standards to bear. Original copy-texts
are indicated, dates of composition or first publication are given,
lines are numbered, and the texts seem accurately reproduced.

Unfortunately, their literary-critical powers do not match their
scholarship. Their highly historical afterword makes clear that their
basis for selection is social representativeness rather than artistic
quality. The minor writers are important, we are told, in order to
“situate” the major figures “within the larger field of poetic
endeavor in which they worked.” But most of these endeavors are
pseudo-poetic. For those adequately trained in reading poetry, this
volume merely shows that Roberts and company, even when off-form, were
streaks ahead of the pack.

It is decidedly useful to have certain minor writings available—the
“Canadian Boat-Song,” a taste of Alexander McLachlan, the best of
Wilfred Campbell, even “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”—but Gerson and
Davies have scoured archives to resuscitate obviously incompetent poets
(e.g., M. Ethelind Sawtell, Douglas Huyghue, George Copway) who should
have been left in decent obscurity.

Students are rendered a disservice when an anthology presents
accomplished and appalling verse side by side as if it all had equal
status and authority. The gifted will be frustrated, and the others
won’t notice anyway. Experienced instructors, of course, can turn the
situation to advantage and encourage the necessary artistic
discriminations. But how many will follow the anthologizers in a
pedantic intellectual cop-out? There is good verse here, but too much of
it is inept, a national embarrassment.