Wilfred Campbell
AS AN OBJECTIVE NATURE PAINTER—HUMANIZED SUBSTANCE OF HIS VERSE—PATRIOTISM AND BROTHERHOOD—DRAMATIC MONODY—POETICAL TRAGEDIES AND DRAMAS.
In the early nineties of the last century three young Canadian poets, who were employed in the Civil Service Departments at Ottawa, were closely associated in a systematic way as men of letters. They were Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. In the Toronto Globe they conducted a department of literary criticism and ‘causerie’ under the caption ‘The Mermaid Inn.’ Oddly, these three young Canadian men of letters were singularly dissimilar in poetic temperament, attitudes, vision, and ideals. As a poet Lampman was an interpreter of the inner meaning of the beauty and moods of Nature. He and Nature communed with each other by reciprocal sympathy, and he cared greatly for style and craftsmanship in poetry. Duncan Campbell Scott loved beauty for its own sake as a spiritual delight or source of ecstasy, but perfection of form, style, artistry—‘art for art’s sake’—pre-empted all other considerations in poetry. Wilfred Campbell occupied a middle ground. He was an objective Nature-painter, with tendencies to be more interested in Nature as a habitat or background of the human spirit which had come from God and was going to God. He was solicitous about form and imagery, color and melody in poetry, but for him these were always a means to an end, never a mere end in themselves. Or, harking back to influences, we may say that Lampman wrote poetry with the eye and the spirit of Keats and Wordsworth; Scott with the eye of Matthew Arnold for naturalistic and moral beauty and chaste artistry; and Campbell in the spirit of Longfellow and Emerson, and, sometimes, of Tennyson.
With Campbell it was the substance or matter,—the ideas, thought, and meanings for the spirit—not the formal elements or manner of poetry, that counted for most. It is the substance of poetry, its meanings for the spirit, that counts always for most with the people. For this reason, though Campbell is not the greatest of the poets of the first Systematic School, he is, and will remain, as he has been called, ‘the poet of the people’s choice.’
A distinct evolution—and advance in vision—from objective nature-painting of the spirit can be observed in the successive volumes of Campbell’s verse. Naturally, until he had reflected on his aims as a poet, he did not announce his poetic creed in his first volume of verse. He did this in his fourth volume, Collected Poems (1905) in his poem Higher Kinship:—
There is a time at middle summer, when,
In weariness of all this saddening world,
The simple nature aspects seem to me
As a close kindred, sweet and kind and true,
Giving me peace and comfort, and a joy