II. THE POETRY OF THE WORLD WAR
The Canadian Poetry of the World War is, as was previous martial verse by Canadian poets, both inspirational and commemorative. What is significant for literary history, is, first, that there is a distinct advance in the excellence both of the ideas and of the artistic form of the Canadian poetry of the world war; and, secondly, that both the activity in poetic composition occasioned by the late war and the quality of the poetry became an inspiration to other poets whose genius was dormant and unawakened, and caused a genuine Renascence of the Poetic Spirit and of Poetry in Canada.
In what respect may the Canadian Poetry of the world war be said to be excellent, or even unexcelled by the martial poetry of the United States, if excelled by that of England and France? It is relatively great in noble ideas. In it we see clearly and vividly what Canadian men and women, at home and in the field of war, really thought and felt about war and death, love and home and country, self-sacrifice, and the good green earth, and peace.
Truth, beauty and splendor of ideas—these are the three supreme excellences of the Canadian poetry written by the soldier-poets in active service on the fighting field, and by the professional or amateur non-combatant poets at home, during the war.
As to the artistic form of this poetry, considering all the conditions of distraction and perturbance under which it was written, the wonder is that it has any formal finish at all. As a matter of fact, however, the Canadian poetry inspired by the world war cannot be depreciated as ‘twinkling trivialities’ either in substance or in form. All the best of it is good poetry—originally conceived, winningly suffused with beauty of sentiment, rich in noble ideas and spiritual imagery, engaging in verbal music, and technically well-wrought. If the formal finish of Canadian Poetry of the world war is not always quite the equal of the British and American poetry similarly occasioned, still the altogether most famous and most popular poem of the war and most likely to perdure in the popular memory, is neither the sonnet of the English soldier-poet, Rupert Brooke, The Soldier, nor the poem of the American soldier-poet, Alan Seeger, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, but the lyric of the Canadian soldier-poet, John McCrae, In Flanders Fields. Further, special circumstances, special sentiments, and special color and form went to making the poem by McCrae the supreme lyric of the world war, and the popularity of In Flanders Fields affected the appreciation of other Canadian poetry of the late war to such a degree as to cause the popular imagination, as well as the critical sense of the cultured, to estimate all other Canadian poetry of the world war as so far below McCrae’s exquisite lyric as to be second-rate in substance and form. This is not so. Save that they do not embody a special form and are not as musically insinuating as McCrae’s, the best of other Canadian poems of the world war are as nobly conceived, as spiritually subduing or exalting, and as technically finished as In Flanders Fields.
During the world war, as in previous wars, the women poets of Canada were to the fore in writing inspirational and commemorative martial verse. In Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War about one third (26) of the total number (73) of poets represented are women, and their war verse, especially the verse of Katherine Hale (whose poetry has been already dealt with), Helena Coleman, Frances Harrison, Isabel Graham, Agnes Maule Machar, Gertrude Bartlett, Grace Blackburn, Jean Blewett, Minnie Hallowell Bowen, Louise Morey Bowman, Isabelle Ecclestone Mackay, Lilian Leveridge, Lucy Montgomery, Beatrice Redpath, Sheila Rand, Florence Randal Livesay, Richard Scrace (Mrs. J. B. Williamson), Virna Sheard, Eloise Street, Ruth Strong, is not a whit below the level of the war verse by Canadian men and in some instances surpasses the latter’s.
Dr. O’Hagan’s Songs of Heroic Days (1916) is a popular volume, in which, for the most part, the poet recrudesces, in good newspaper verse, the traditional war spirit of bloodshed, retaliation and revenge. The poems, however, are made engaging by a ready humor and an Irish jeu d’esprit in the thought of ‘squaring things’ with an enemy guilty of ‘dhirty thricks’ in war. Several other volumes of war verse appeared during and shortly after the close of the war—The Fighting Men of Canada by Douglas Durkin; Over the Hills of Home and Other Poems by Lilian Leveridge; Sea Dogs and Men at Arms by Jesse Edgar Middleton; A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems (posthumous) by Lieutenant Bernard Freeman Trotter; Laurentian Lyrics and Other Poems (1915) by Lieutenant Arthur S. Bourinot; Insulters of Death and The New Apocalyse by Sergeant J. D. Logan, and several other volumes by returned men. The only comprehensive anthology of verse of the Great War, written by Canadians, is J. W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918). This volume furnishes adequate proof that, as foreign critics have said, ‘the war poetry written by Canadian civilians and Canadian poets on active service is as excellent as that written by the poets of the older Allied Nations.’
For the purpose of just appreciation we remark the fine, spirited, and imaginatively impressive qualities, as well as the artistic finish, of selected Canadian war poems that are really worthy to stand beside the best verse of English and American poets who were inspired by the late war. Aside from McCrae’s In Flanders Fields the most celebrated commemorative war poem by a Canadian is Dr. J. B. Dollard’s sonnet to the memory of Rupert Brooke—a sonnet in which, as English and American critics observed, Dr. Dollard made beautiful use of the supposed cause of Brooke’s death (sunstroke, ‘arrows of Apollo’) and the place of burial in the Aegean. Brooke’s grave is on the island of Scyros, not Lemnos. But the error in fact only enhances the beauty of the poem:—
Slain by the arrows of Apollo, lo!
The well-belovèd of the Muses lies