Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

Anthologies

CANADIAN BIRTHDAY BOOK (SERANUS)—DEWART’s SELECTIONS FROM CANADIAN POETS—LIGHTHALL’S ‘SONGS OF THE GREAT DOMINION’—OXFORD BOOK OF CANADIAN VERSE—GARVIN’S CANADIAN POETS, ETC.

Every anthology of national literature must be critically appreciated from the point of view of the aim of the author. Properly, according to the roots of the word anthology, care, and even fastidiousness, are implied on the part of the compiler. The world-famous collection of Greek verse known as The Greek Anthology is properly, that is both etymologically and aesthetically, an ‘anthology.’ For the poems in it were most carefully chosen before being collected together; and they were selected strictly according to ideals of beauty in thought and expression. So that the term anthology hardly if ever applies strictly to the so called anthologies of Canadian verse. As a matter of fact such collections of Canadian verse as have been compiled, actually do not bear the title anthology; they bear some such title as ‘A Treasury,’ or ‘A Wreath,’ or ‘Flowers,’ of Canadian Verse. Sometimes the collections have the plainest of practical titles, such as Canadian Poets or Canadian Singers and Their Songs, or The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse.

It is quite irrelevant and an elaboration of the obvious to dispraise, as some Canadian critics have done, the contents of certain anthologies of Canadian poetry, as of ‘unequal merit.’ They might as well say that the culture and the cultural institutions of Canada are of ‘unequal merit.’ Relatively to the poetry of old civilizations the poetry of Canada is poor or mediocre or indifferent or fine in aesthetic substance and artistic structure and form according to the culture and genius of the country’s poets. Secondly, all Canadian anthologies, whether the aim was to select the very best of the very best poetry or to select representative poems from each period or all periods, contain poetry which is not all on the same level of excellence.

The first anthology to engage public attention and to win critical appreciation was a book which now belongs to the rarissimae of collectors of ‘Canadiana,’ namely, The Canadian Birthday Book, by ‘Seranus’ (pseudonym of Mrs. S. Frances Harrison), published at Toronto in 1887. It was compiled, with exquisite taste, in both English and French; and it is notable for the fact that its selections date as far back as the year 1732, with a poem by Jean Taché who, as the compiler has said in her notes, is ‘probably the first French-Canadian poet to publish.’ It is notable also for the fact that it contains some verses by the Indian Chief Tecumseh, and is, likewise, one of the earliest volumes to contain the work of such poets as Bliss Carman, Wilfred Campbell, Pauline Johnson, and Archibald Lampman. In a real sense, that is, in the Greek sense of the term, the Canadian Birthday Book is the first Canadian anthology. The poems in it, are dainty in themselves and the artistry of the poems also is dainty—‘little flowers’ of pretty or beautiful Canadian verse, pioneer, émigré, nativistic, and native and national.

Twenty years before the appearance of Seranus’ miniature anthology Rev. Edward Hartley Dewart published, under the plain title of Selections From Canadian Poetry, what may be called the first treasury of Canadian verse (1864). Dewart’s Selections was simply a ‘collection’ of poems for ‘good reading,’ or for pedagogical purposes in the Provinces of Canada. It was not intended to be received as literary anthology, but only as a volume of representative poems from the earlier periods of Canadian history up to the year of publication. Its audience was limited to Canada and it had only local or provincial appreciation.

The next anthology was W. D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889). It was informed with the Canadian outlook on life and national achievement within the twenty years after the formation of the Confederacy, and with the Canadian prevision of a national destiny which seemed implied in the genius of the Canadian people for autonomous government, in the vast resources of the Dominion, and in the relations which would inevitably develop between Canada and the United States and the other nations of the world. The aim of Dr. Lighthall was both literary and pragmatic. He desired to present to the English-speaking world the ideals and genius of Canada as these ideals and genius were embodied and expressed in the best poetry by émigré and by native-born Canadian poets.

Dr. Lighthall’s inclusive and pragmatic aim determines both the scope and the method of his aptly named Songs of the Great Dominion. In his Introduction he carefully explains the scope and method of his anthology. The order of this collection is in sections, treating of the Imperial Spirit, the New Nationality, the Indian, the Voyageur and Habitant, Settlement Life, Sports and Free Life, Historical Incidents, Places and Seasons. He says: They give merely, it should be understood, a sketch of the range of the subjects. Canadian history, for example, as any one acquainted with Parkman will know, perfectly teems with noble deeds and great events, of which only a small share have been sung, whereof there is only space here for a much smaller share. The Northwest and British Columbia, that Pacific clime of charm—the gold-diggings Province, land of salmon rivers, and of the Douglas firs which hide daylight at noonday—have been scarcely sung at all, owing to their newness. The poetry of the Winter Carnival, splendid scenic spectacle of gay Northern arts and delights, is only rudimentary also. Those who have been present at the thrilling spectacle of the nocturnal storming of the Ice Palace in Montreal, when the whole city, dressing itself in the picturesque snow-shoe costume and arraying its streets in lights and colors, rises as one man in a tumultuous enthusiasm, must feel that something of a future lies before the poetry of these strange and wonderful elements.’

What Lighthall in his Songs of the Great Dominion attempts to do is not to present us with a mere quantity of Canadian poetry which we may receive with delight or reject, but to invite us to the home of the Canadian National Spirit and to show us what the Canadian spirit, as it is envisaged and expressed in the poetry of the Dominion since Confederation, has achieved and means to achieve. One who reads Lighthall’s anthology cannot escape catching in it glimpses of the essential Canadian spirit. In the poems in Lighthall’s volume the Canadian spirit sings clearly its full gamut. We hear the ‘notes’ always of courage; of self-reliance; of hope; of exultation; and of good cheer and serenity; and these notes of courage and faith and exultation and indomitable will and heroism and good cheer and peace in the heart of man in Canada are but the antiphons to the voices of the land and the sea and the forest, the great waters and the sky and the maples, and elms in their strength and also in their gentler and peaceful humors.

The Canadian spirit, as evisaged and expressed in the Songs of the Great Dominion, is manly; and the supreme quality of the poetry in Lighthall’s anthology is the quality of manliness. But this is a moral quality. What of the aesthetic quality of the Songs of the Great Dominion? Agreeing that poets should rise and drop with their subjects, we note a high level of excellence in thought and in craftsmanship in the poems in Lighthall’s volume. Considering its scope and the variety of the subjects and styles of form in the volume, and considering also its expression of the full gamut of the notes of the Canadian spirit, Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion not only implies a kind of creative vision and imagination on the part of the compiler, but distinctly and unmistakably appeals to the same faculties in the reader. In other words, Lighthall’s volume delights the heart and the imagination by way of the intrinsic beauty and the moral substance of the poetry in it; but it delights more the constructive imagination of the reader by way of the illumination it sheds on the essential nature, will, and ideals of the Canadian spirit, of the Canadian people. It differs in this constructive way from all anthologies of Canadian verse that have preceded it and all that have followed it. In short, Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion, on the side of embodying and expressing spiritual essences, is unique amongst Canadian anthologies of native and national poetry.

Later Canadian Poems (1893), edited by J. E. Wetherell, is a much slighter volume than Lighthall’s but is significant as an expression of the new spirit in Canadian Literature, containing, as it does, the first publication of some of the work of Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Pauline Johnson.

It might have been expected that The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), inasmuch as it was seemingly compiled by Wilfred Campbell, one of the more important poets of Canada, would be on the level of the ideal required by the Oxford Press and superior to other anthologies of Canadian verse. As a matter of fact The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, as originally compiled by Wilfred Campbell, was not according to the standard of the Oxford Press. The necessary re-compilation was made by two hands, Mr. S. B. Gundy, Canadian Representative of the Oxford Press at Toronto, and J. D. Logan who selected and added fifty poems (Nos. 211 to the end, inclusive) from the work of the younger Canadian poets. Campbell’s Oxford Press anthology has been frequently appreciated as the best of the treasuries of Canadian poetry. But how a volume of such fortuitous origin and construction can be the best of the Canadian anthologies, passes understanding. As an anthology The Oxford Book is more than any of the other anthologies of Canadian verse a volume of poetry ‘of unequal merit.’ But the defect most conspicuous in the book is psychological rather than artistic, spiritual rather than aesthetic. It contains 251 poems by 100 poets. It is the slightest of the three great anthologies, and the most classical. Its contents have dignity, taste, correctness.

Of the other two chief anthologies—Theodore Harding Rand’s A Treasury of Canadian Verse (1900) and John W. Garvin’s Canadian Poets (1916)—the Rand anthology was compiled from the point of view of the history, rather than the aesthetics, of Canadian poetry, whereas the Garvin anthology was compiled from the point of view of modernity in the aesthetic substance and artistic construction of Canadian poetry. Garvin’s volume contains the work of only fifty-two poets, whereas Rand’s and Lighthall’s contain the work of more than twice that number of poets. Garvin’s volume is better suited to its century than is any of the others. It is not only a repository of modern Canadian poetry but also a critical vade mecum to 20th Century Canadian poetry. For in addition to the poems in the volume, each poet’s work is prefaced by a biographical sketch and by critical appreciation or comment by others than the compiler. The latter fact relieves the critical apparatus itself of the charge of personal bias on the part of the compiler. The Garvin anthology, again, is distinguished by a peculiarity of singular spiritual import. It contains nothing that is not typical of the Canadian national spirit and Canadian civilization and culture. Lighthall’s volume, despite its good sense and genuinely aesthetic quality, had such variety and diversity of ‘notes’ of the spirit in it that it is hard to distinguish which is the essential note, the typical voice, and which the ‘overtones’ of the Canadian spirit. The Oxford Book, again, is untypical of the Canadian spirit by way of too many poems that are ‘poet’s poems’—too much of art for art’s sake. But Garvin’s Canadian Poets contains the work of such poets, both of the older and the younger generation, as expresses the typical work of each of the singers and the typical spirit of the Canadian people. It is a companionable volume; and it has the distinct advantage of biographical and critical comment, which fit it, according to its scope, for private reading and enjoyment and for critical study of the history of Canadian poetry. In those regards Garvin’s Canadian Poets is an anthology which is at once aesthetically satisfying and pragmatically the most serviceable in the field that it covers. Mr. Garvin is also the compiler of the only anthology of the Canadian poetry of the Great War.

Several other anthologies of Canadian poetry require no more notice here than to mention their names and scope. L. J. Burpee’s Flowers From a Canadian Garden is a genuine anthology in the Greek meaning of the term. It is a bijou anthology containing seventy-five fastidiously selected short lyrics, lovely ‘little flowers’ of Canadian poetry. The selections in Mr. Burpee’s A Century of Canadian Sonnets are also most carefully chosen. E. S. Caswell’s Canadian Singers and Their Songs is a unique volume of selected poems in fac-similes of the authors’ holograph manuscripts; and is illustrated with portraits of the authors of the poems. It is essentially a literary curiosity, and meets the express design of the compiler, namely, to produce a book of ‘personalia’ which would be appreciated as a gift book. Mrs. C. M. Whyte Edgar’s A Wreath of Canadian Song (1910) is too fragmentary in the poetry which chiefly forms its substance to be considered a genuine anthology. Moreover, it is limited to the verse of Canadian poets who have died. Aesthetically viewed it is a work of no significance; but it contains historical and bibliographical data that is curious and useful for critical purposes. Our Canadian Literature (1923) is a collection of Canadian poetry and prose by Dr. Lorne Pierce and Dr. A. D. Watson. It is much more valuable as a reading course or class room textbook than as a treasury of aesthetic poetry and prose. A Book of Canadian Verse and Prose (1923) is the compilation of Professor E. K. Broadus and Mrs. Broadus. It is a collection of Canadian poetry and prose in English and French.

A number of compilations of Canadian poetry and prose have been made from time to time for school use. Among these are Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises, by G. W. Ross; Selections from Canadian Poets and Selections from Canadian Prose, both by E. A. Hardy; The Standard Canadian Reciter, by Donald G. French; The Canadian Poetry Book, by D. J. Dickie.