I would give thanks for the autumn glory, for the teaching of earth and all her joys.
Her fine fruition shall well suffice me; the air shall stir in my veins like wine;
While the moment waits and the wonder deepens, my life shall merge with the life divine.
The immediate sense-perception of God through Beauty and the acceptance of Beauty as a factual proof of the union of the Soul with Nature, of the Real with the Ideal, and thus a proof of the supremacy of Good in the universe—this is the formula of Carman’s philosophical ‘reading’ of Nature and Existence. Always a poet of fine and assured artistry and of lyrical eloquence and spiritual power, Bliss Carman stands alone amongst Canadian poets as a verbal melodist, as a lyrist of love and the sea, and as a mystical interpreter of the moral and spiritual meaning of nature and existence. As an original verbal melodist and poetic impressionist and as an unexampled creator of songs of the sea, Bliss Carman has added significantly to English and to world poetry and to him, therefore, we may apply the distinction Great.
Quotations in this chapter, with the exception of a few lines, are from Later Poems, and from Ballads and Lyrics, by Bliss Carman, (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
CHAPTER X
Duncan Campbell Scott
INFLUENCES ON HIS WORK—OLD WORLD CULTURE—AUSTERE INTELLECTUALISM—MUSIC AND PAINTING—ASSOCIATION WITH LAMPMAN—SCOTT, CARMAN, AND LAMPMAN COMPARED—INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH POETS—TECHNICAL EXCELLENCIES—REVELATION OF THE INDIAN HEART—MYSTICAL SYMBOLISM.
In the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott there is more and finer expression of the pageantry of Nature in Canada and of the essential Canadian spirit than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. But, paradoxically, the genius and poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott are also more informed with an Old World culture and art than are the genius and verse of any other Canadian poet. Unless the reader and the critic of D. C. Scott’s poetry first realize that the mind and art of the poet are a product of Canada and of the Old World, a rare commingling of Canadian and European cultures, they will fail to understand how he is at once the least prolific and, to give him his outstanding distinction, the most exquisite artist of Canadian poets, not excepting Lampman and Bliss Carman. In his poem Frost Magic, Scott has written the formula of his own exquisite artistry:—