Is brought to me.
A poet who has won a distinct and fixed place in the popular heart and imagination of Canadians is Jean Blewett. Her first volume, Heart Songs, appeared in 1897 and immediately won a wide popularity. This was increased by her next volume, The Cornflower and Other Poems (1906). Her Collected Poems were published in 1922. Jean Blewett is essentially a ‘woman’s poet.’ By this is meant that she appeals to the domestic heart and the imagination, that she sings of the joys of home, the ways of children, the love of husband and wife. But Jean Blewett does this in an extraordinary way. She treats homely subjects indeed, but while she treats them in a homely or rather home-like way she does it with a simple and ingratiating sincerity and charm of sentiment and artistry which are quite her own and in the employment of which she is alone in Canada. If her poems deal with homely subjects, her artistry is by no means bourgeois. She rises and falls with the inherent dignity of her subject. But her human treatment of a homely subject never issues in vulgarity, or vivid ‘vaudeville’ verse. As an example of her genuine artistry and dignity of treatment in a high or serious subject we quote her Quebec:—
Quebec, the gray old city on the hill,
Lives with a golden glory on her head,
Dreaming throughout this hour so fair, so still,
Of those days and her beloved dead.
The doves are nesting in the cannons grim,
The flowers bloom where once did run a tide
Of crimson when the moon rose pale and dim
Above a field of battle stretching wide.