From Newsgroup: alt.arts.poetry.comments

Will-Dockery wrote:

George J. Dance wrote:
Penny's Poetry Blog's featured poem for January:
The Winter Lakes, by William Wilfred Campbell

[...]
Under the sun and the moon, under the dusk and the day;
Under the glimmer of stars and the purple of sunsets dying,
Wan and waste and white, stretch the great lakes away.
[...]

(read by Jolene Sentes)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2011/01/winter-lakes-william-wilfred-campbell.html

I remember reading about William Wilfred Campbell, he was a Confederation poet in the early years of Canada.

Yes, that's right. (That's the short answer.) He and the other Canadian poets are favourites of mine, whom I tried to feature in the early days of the blog. Unfortunately I've picked their resumes clean; I'm sure there's more to blog, but
I'd have to read their books more closely to find it.

Since I have time, I'll try to also give you the long answer: whether Campbell is a Canadian poet is a matter of academic debate. There was no actual school calling itself the "Confederation Poets" - the term was invemted years later. The term can be used either loosely, for every poet in the first generation that grew up in Canada (as I do), or in a canonical sense to the major writers. Of those there were two literary circles: one from the Maritimes and later New York, centered around Charles G.D. Roberts and his extended family (including Bliss Carman), and the other a group of three federal civil servants in Ottawa: Archibald Lampman, D.C. Scott, and Campbell.

Those five names were the first canon of major Canadian poets: Carman and Roberts on top, followed by the Ottawa circle. That's a classification that lasted for 50-odd years until World War II. when modernism came to Canada. In 1943, modernist critic E.K. Brown published /On Canadian Poetry/. which completely upended the canon: Scott and Lampman, in that order, were put on the top of the list, Roberts and Scott went to the bottom, and Campbell was cut out entirely, dismissed as a minor poet. The other four became the canonical "Confederation Poets" when that term came into vogue in the 1960s; and that's the modernist canon I learned when I hit university in the 1970s.

I don't agree with that at all. I wouldn't call myself a post-modernist, but I do agree with the post-modernists that the modernist concept of canons was snobbish and exclusive. So I've tried to seek out good poetry from the broad group. Campbell is one whose reputation has unfairly suffered; while some of his poetry and much of his criticism was pedantic, he also wrote some very good poems, especially in his earlier books. Here's a good assessment of him from the /Canadian Encyclopedia/ that I liked enough to quote in PPP:

"Although currently less fashionable than the other Confederation poets, Campbell was a versatile, interesting writer, influenced by Burns, the English Romantics, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, Carlyle and Tennyson. At his best, Campbell controls his influences and expresses his own religious idealism in traditional forms and genres."


This is a response to the post seen at: http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=700038960#700038960
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From Newsgroup: alt.arts.poetry.comments

George J. Dance wrote:

Will-Dockery wrote:

George J. Dance wrote:
Penny's Poetry Blog's featured poem for January:
The Winter Lakes, by William Wilfred Campbell

[...]
Under the sun and the moon, under the dusk and the day;
Under the glimmer of stars and the purple of sunsets dying,
Wan and waste and white, stretch the great lakes away.
[...]

(read by Jolene Sentes)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2011/01/winter-lakes-william-wilfred-campbell.html

I remember reading about William Wilfred Campbell, he was a Confederation poet in the early years of Canada.

Yes, that's right. (That's the short answer.) He and the other Canadian poets are favourites of mine, whom I tried to feature in the early days of the blog. Unfortunately I've picked their resumes clean; I'm sure there's more to blog, but
I'd have to read their books more closely to find it.

Since I have time, I'll try to also give you the long answer: whether Campbell is a Canadian poet is a matter of academic debate. There was no actual school calling itself the "Confederation Poets" - the term was invemted years later. The term can be used either loosely, for every poet in the first generation that grew up in Canada (as I do), or in a canonical sense to the major writers. Of those there were two literary circles: one from the Maritimes and later New York, centered around Charles G.D. Roberts and his extended family (including Bliss Carman), and the other a group of three federal civil servants in Ottawa: Archibald Lampman, D.C. Scott, and Campbell.

Those five names were the first canon of major Canadian poets: Carman and Roberts on top, followed by the Ottawa circle. That's a classification that lasted for 50-odd years until World War II. when modernism came to Canada. In 1943, modernist critic E.K. Brown published /On Canadian Poetry/. which completely upended the canon: Scott and Lampman, in that order, were put on the top of the list, Roberts and Scott went to the bottom, and Campbell was cut out entirely, dismissed as a minor poet. The other four became the canonical "Confederation Poets" when that term came into vogue in the 1960s; and that's the modernist canon I learned when I hit university in the 1970s.

I don't agree with that at all. I wouldn't call myself a post-modernist, but I do agree with the post-modernists that the modernist concept of canons was snobbish and exclusive. So I've tried to seek out good poetry from the broad group. Campbell is one whose reputation has unfairly suffered; while some of his poetry and much of his criticism was pedantic, he also wrote some very good poems, especially in his earlier books. Here's a good assessment of him from the /Canadian Encyclopedia/ that I liked enough to quote in PPP:

"Although currently less fashionable than the other Confederation poets, Campbell was a versatile, interesting writer, influenced by Burns, the English Romantics, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, Carlyle and Tennyson. At his best, Campbell controls his influences and expresses his own religious idealism in traditional forms and genres."

Thanks, excellent overview of Canadian poetry history. I read some of this in a biography of Leonard Cohen a few years ago.


This is a response to the post seen at: http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=700038960#700038960
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2