Literary Sites and Cultural Properties in Canadian Poetry

D.M.R. Bentley

I

A MINOR BUT ENGAGING sub-genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing is the literary site piece. Usually in lyric form, a writer describes a visit to a physical place associated with a deceased author, expressing in the process a sense of personal admiration and, implicidy, literary and cultural continuity. Well-known poems in the sub-genre include Wordsworth's Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott (Yarrow) series; less familiar ones are Keats's "On Visiting the Tomb of Burns," "Sonnet Written in the Cottage where Burns Was Born," and "Lines Written in the Highlands after a Visit to Burns Country," and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnets "On the Site of a Mulberry Tree / Planted by Wm. Shakespeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gaskell" and "William Blake (To Frederick Shields, on his sketch of Blake's work room and death-room, 3 Fountain Court, Strand)." Of course, the psychological theory that underwrites most such pieces in the post-Romantic tradition is associationism: an antecedent author's known presence at a particular place "make[s] it sacred" (Samuel 290) or, in Henry Lefebvre's terms, endows the site with "an affective kernel or centre" — a cluster of associations contingent upon a "sense of what happened [there] ... and thereby changed it" (42, 37).' In such " Representational spaces" suggests Lefebvre, a place is simultaneously "present" in its "actuality" and as a "script" of past "associations and connections" (37). An examination of the literary site pieces written in Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals a persistent yearning on the part of Canadian writers to connect themselves and their landscapes with the British literary tradition, particularly with the second generation of Romantic poets — Shelley, Keats, and Thomas Moore.

Needless to say, Moore's presence in this brief list stems from the fact that he was the only Romantic poet of any stature and reputation who actually visited Canada. While travelling from Niagara to Halifax in the late summer of 1804, Moore visited and described several locales on the Great- Lakes-St. Lawrence system, two of which became literary sites of major significance for later Canadian writers: the '"little wood'" in Upper Canada that evidendy inspired "Ballad Stanzas," and the picturesque stretch of the St. Lawrence above Montreal where, with a litde help from Isaac Weld's Travels (1799), Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages (1801), and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)," he located "A Canadian Boat Song." Apparendy Moore composed this song "to an air which ... [the] boatmen sung... frequendy" during his voyage down the St. Lawrence from Kingston to Montreal, and he asks the reader to imagine it being "sung by th[e] voyageurs who go to the Grand Portage by the Utawas River":

Faintly as tolls the evening chime Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time. Soon as the woods on shore look dim, We'll sing at St. Anne's our parting hymn. Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The Rapids are near and the daylight's past.
Why should we yet our sail unfurl? There is not a breath the blue wave to curl; But, when the wind blows off the shore, Oh! sweetly we'll rest our weary oar. Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast, The Rapids are near and the daylight's past.
Utawas' tide! this trembling moon Shall see us float over thy surges soon. Saint of this green isle! hear our prayers, Oh, grant us cool heavens and favouring airs. Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast, The Rapids are near and the daylight's past. (124-25)

An indication of the success of "A Canadian Boat Song" in planting an "affective kernel" at St. Anne's Rapids can be gleaned from Basil Hall's observation on visiting the site in 1827 that "it ... [was] difficult to say how much" of his response was due to "the magic" of Moore's poem and "how much to the beauty of the real scene" (1:199). Perhaps with an eye on Hall's Travels as well as Moore's poem, Catharine Parr Traill records that as she ascended the St. Lawrence in 1832 "the island of St. Anne's" brought "to ... mind ... Moore's Canadian boat song: 'We'll sing at St. Anne's our parang hymn'" (46).²

The most extended and eloquent response to St. Anne's Rapids as a literary site came from Charles Sangster after he had visited the spot in August, 1853. By that time, the Rapids had been bypassed by a set of locks, with physical consequences that, for Sangster, had almost destroyed their "affective kernel":

I expected to see the Rapid (St. Anne's) which Moore had immortalized in his "Canadian Boat Song," somewhat deserving the honor with which Erin's girted Bard has covered it; but I was sadly mistaken, and found that my imagination had been indulging itself too freely. At the present time it is a mere ripple; at the best of times not to be compared with the meanest of the many Rapids on the St. Lawrence. What it may have been when the brilliant author of "Lalla Rookh" condescended to elevate it into classic ground,³ I cannot tell, but I fancy that many tourists, approaching the Rapid with book in hand, their eyes upon the page, and their lips humming the beautiful air to which the words of the "Boat Song" have been wedded, have felt very much as if they had been hoaxed Notwithstanding this, the ground is sacred, one of the "green spots upon memory's waste" dedicate to Moore, and it will continue such, though the stream were dried to-morrow, and nothing but the pebbles at the bottom remained to mark the spot. Peace be to thy manes, Tom Moore! would there were others like thee to fling their classic verse broadcast over the many Isles of Beauty and nooks of fairy loveliness with which Canada is strewn. (125-26)

Whatever its present condition, St. Anne's Rapid connects Sangster to Moore, allowing him to address the Irish poet's spirit ("manes") with cheery familiarity and, as important, permitting him to envisage his own poetry as part of a continuity of "classic verse" in Canada. A little over two years after describing St. Anne's Rapid, Sangster would celebrate the Thousand Islands, Les Eboulements, and other Canadian "Isles of Beauty and nooks of fairy loveliness" in the self-consciously "classic verse" of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems (1856), a volume that was recognized at the time as a poetic companion for tourists visiting the picturesque, historical, and sublime sights of central Canada. That Sangster considered himself Moore's heir in elevating Canadian sites to "classic ground" is further and almost paradoxically indicated by the fact that St. Anne's Rapid is not among "the many Rapids on the St. Lawrence" that are mentioned in passing in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and described at length in the supplementary stanzas for the poem that he began to publish in the 1860s (see Sangster 133-47). As is the case with most, if not all, Canadian writers, Sangster wanted to replicate a major writer's achievement but in and for a different locale or theme.

Two years after the publication of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, die association of St. Anne's Rapid with Moore was made die subject of a poem by die writer who has been described as "die chief orator and literary man ... among the founding 'Fathers of Confederation'": Thomas D'Arcy McGee (Klinck 155). Before coming to Montreal by way of the United States in 1857, McGee was associated in the late 1840s with "Young Ireland," a group of Irish nationalists who followed Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich von Schlegel, and other German Romantic philosophers and critics in regarding literature and, especially, epics and ballads as an essential ingredient of national consciousness and cohesion. As Schlegel puts it in his Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern (1815; trans. 1818):

There is nothing so necessary ... to the whole intellectual existence of a nation, as the possession of a plentiful store of those national recollections and associations ... which it forms the great object of the poetical art to perpetuate and adorn.... When a people are exalted in their feelings and ennobled in their own estimation, by the consciousness ... that they have a national poetry... we are willing to acknowledge that their pride is reasonable, and they are raised in our eyes by the same circumstances which gave them elevation in their own." (9)⁴

Almost immediately after settling in Montreal in 1857, McGee began adapting such ideas to Canada. "Every country, every nationality, every people, must create and foster a National Literature, if it is their wish to preserve a distinct individuality from other nations," he argued in the April 24, 1858 issue of his newspaper, The New Era (1857-58), adding that

There is a glorious field upon which to work for the formation of... [a Canadian] National Literature. It must assume the gorgeous coloring and the gloomy grandeur of the forest. It must partake of the grave mysticism of the Red Man, and the wild vivacity of the hunter of [the] western prairies. Its lyrics must possess the ringing cadence of the waterfall, and its epics be as solemn and beautiful as our great rivers. We have the materials [and] our position is favorable [for] northern latitudes like ours have ever been famed for the strength, variety and beauty of their literature." ([2])

Less than a year later, in December 1858, McGee published Canadian Ballads, a volume dedicated to his Young Ireland colleague Charles Gavan Duffy in "memory of Old Times" and presented "to the younger generation of Canadians" in the belief "that we shall one day be a great northern nation, and develope [sic] within ourselves that best fruit of nationality, a new and lasting literature (7). "It is ... glorious to die in battle in defence of our homes or alters," continues McGee in his Preface, "but not less glorious is it to live to celebrate the virtues of our heroic countrymen, to adorn the history, or to preserve the traditions of our country. From Homer's age to that of Scott, Moore, and [Pierre-Jean de] Beranger, Patriotism has been the passion of the noblest succession of sweet singers the world ever saw — and the civic virtue they celebrated has, in turn, immortalized their own names" (8).

The "civic virtue ... celebrated" in Canadian Ballads has immortalized McGee less as a "sweet singer" than as a Father of Confederation and as the victim of an assassin's bullet in Ottawa on April 8, 1868.⁵ Nevertheless, McGee's ballads, "especially 'Sebastian Cabot to His Lady,' 'Jacques Cartier,' 'The Arctic Indian's Faith' and 'Our Ladye of the Snow,'" "became immediate ... favourites" among Canadian readers and were much imitated by other writers, particularly Irish Montrealers such as George Murray and Rosanna (Mullins) Leprohon (Klinck 156-57; and see O'Donnell). As significant as any of the pieces in Canadian Ballads (and, arguably, in the commemorative collection of McGee's Poems that was published in Montreal a year after his death) is "Thomas Moore at St. Anne's," a brief treatment of the poet's visit to Canada that uses his response to the "glorious song" of the St. Lawrence and its "boatm[e]n" to make the point that Canadian poets do indeed possess "a glorious field upon which to work for the formation of... a National Literature":

... mark the moral, ye who dream
To be the Poets of the land: He
nowhere found a nobler theme
Than you, ye favor'd, have at hand.

Not in the storied summer Isles,
Not 'mid the classic Cyclades, Not where
the Persian Sun-God smiles
Found he more fitting theme than these.

So, while our boat glides swift along,
Behold! from shore there looketh forth
The tree that bears the fruit of song
— The Laurel tree that loves the North. (Canadian Ballads 42-43)

Just as the "Laurel" (or, more accurately, the Kalmia) whose leaves and branches are emblematic of literary accomplishment "loves the North" so, to quote again from McGee's article in The New Era,"northern latitudes" contain an abundance of "materials" to inspire a "National Literature," one very specific one being, as McGee explains in a note, the "particular spot" where by 1857-58 Moore was supposed to have "composed his well-known 'Canadian Boat-Song," (Canadian Ballads 63).⁶ For McGee, as, implicitly, for Sangster, a site associated with an esteemed poet and poem was a source of inspiration as well as an object of veneration — a token of the capacity of Canadian "materials" to generate accomplished poetry, not only in the past, but also in the present and the future. What had been done by a poet in Canada could surely be done again by a Canadian poet. But what of the coundess places in Canada that, unlike St. Anne's Rapid, bore no known literary associations? Were such associations creatively necessary and, if so, were there ways of compensating for their absence? These questions were far from meaningless to nineteenth-century Canadian writers, and their answers are far from devoid of ingenuity and interest. Canada is '"the most unpoetical of lands,'" proclaims Traill's friend and possible alter ego in The Backwoods of Canada; "'there is no scope for imagination ... no recollections of former deeds connected with the country. The only beings ... [of] any interest are the Indians'" (154). True, concedes Traill, but this will not trouble "the unlettered and industrious labourers and artisans" for whom Canada is "so admirably adapted.... They feel no regret that the land they labour on has not yet been celebrated by the pen of the historian or the lay of die poet." And for educated and sensitive emigrants like herself it matters little if the "volume of history is yet a blank" in Canada for "that of Nature is open, ... eloquendy marked by the finger of God" and abundandy rich in "sources of amusement, ... interest" and inspiration (155). Sangster knew and agreed with Traill's assessment of the literary limitations and compensations of the Canadian environment:

No Nymphic trains appear,
To charm the pale Ideal Worshipper
Of Beauty; nor Nereids from the deeps below;
Nor hideous Gnomes, to fill the breast with fear:
But crystal streams through endless landscapes flow,
And o'er the clustering Isles the softest breezes blow. (59-63)

While both Traill and Sangster recognized that in a few places at least "the land ... ha[d] ... been celebrated by ... the lay of the poet," both found it necessary to confront and transcend the country's relative lack of European literary and mythological associations.⁷ So, too, did the succeeding generation of writers — the Confederation poets — whose geographical location and late Victorian tastes deprived them of the sites associated with Moore as sources of connectedness and inspiration. To Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott, the problem became one of achieving and expressing continuity with the Hellenic and Romantic traditions that they admired in a country unvisited by Prometheus and Pan, Shelley or Keats.

The solutions to this problem began to appear in the work of Roberts and Carman in the 1880s. Shortly before he left the Maritimes for Ontario in the fall of 1883, Roberts was experimenting with what he later called "Ovidian elegiac metre" (Selected Poems vii) — alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter that combine classical resonances with a rising and falling movement which, perhaps with the help of Coleridge,⁸ he recognized, as peculiarly apt for descriptions of the ebb and flow of tidal water. Of course, the most successful outcome of Roberts's experiments in the summer of 1883 is "Tantramar Revisited," his masterful fusion of "Ovidian elegiac metre" with the Wordsworthian return poem and the Victorian sea meditation. Both technically and, more important, attitudinally, "Tantramar Revisited" could scarcely have been written without the poem immediately preceding it in Roberts's canon, a slighdy shorter experiment in the same metre entided "The Pipes of Pan" that offers a fanciful account of the way in which the music and spirit of the Greek god crossed the Atlantic to North America: after being tossed into the river Peneus in the Arcadian vale of Tempe the fragments of a set of a Pan's "outworn pipes" are "wind-blown ... Over the whole green earth and globe of sea ... to secret spots" where the god thus "Comes ... in his workings" though not "in a visible form" (CollectedPoems 77). Any "mortal" finding such a "secret spot," be it a "glade" in Kensington Gardens (where Matthew Arnold had contrived to be "breathed on by the rural Pan" [256]) or a "shad[y] covert" on the coast of New Brunswick, can set Pan's pipes "to their lips" and acquire the god's "charm-struck/ Passion for woods and the wild, the solitude of the hills" (Roberts, Collected Poems 78). As Sandra Djwa has shown (132), Roberts's poem lies centrally in the background of Lampman's "The Favorites of Pan" (1895), where the vehicle for the god's spirit is a creature — the frog — whose voice was regarded by the American naturalist John Burroughs as uniquely characteristic of spring in North America (6: 96-97). Very likely, Lampman's association of the "piping of ... frogs" (Burroughs 6:93) with the "murmur of Pan's pipes" (Poems 133) also stemmed from his recognition of the correspondence between their amphibious nature and the god's spirit-body dualism (see Bendey, Gay] Grey Moose 236-40) and his awareness that for residents of Ontario a vehicle other than the ocean was required to give classical culture a local presence.⁹

In their expressed desire to discover or plant evidences of European culture in the Canadian environment, "The Pipes of Pan" and "The Favorites of Pan" are typical of much eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and even twentieth-century writing in Canada. One implication of this is that Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, which achieves some of its most eccentrically successful results when applied to Emerson and other rebellious American writers, holds much less true for Canada, where the spirit of independence has tended to be balanced or outweighed by an anxiety of severance, a desire to transplant British culture to North America and maintain connections between the New and the Old World. Mainland Canada's most easterly and westerly provinces are called Nova Scotia and British Columbia. Ontario's provincial motto is Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanef. "Loyal it began, loyal it remains." When Haliburton contemplated "communication by steam [ship] between Nova Scotia and England" in 1840, he hoped that it would "draw closer the bonds of affection between the two countries" (283). And when Roberts pondered the implications of "The Atlantic Cable" (1898) that was laid between Newfoundland and Ireland in 1886, he envisaged it far beneath "some lonely ship" laden with "exile hearts that homeward ache" (Collected Poems 250). The final words of Henry Kreisel's "Chassidic Song" (1983) are "Remember your grandfather ... he sang too" (35).

Very much the same connective desire pervades the commemorative odes of the Confederation poets. The seminal poem in this sub-genre is Carman's "Shelley," a crisply structured appreciation of the English poet that was first published in the Literary World (Boston) on January 8, 1887 (Glickman 22-24, 27). After bringing the first five stanzas of the poem to rest at the site of Shelley's grave "beneath the wall / Of changeless Rome," Carman uses the remaining five stanzas to suggest a more appropriate repository for the poet's remains in the poem's compositional setting, "Frye Island, N.B., Canada":

More soft, I deem, from spring to spring,
Thy sleep would be, Where this far
western headland lies Beneath these
matchless azure skies, Under thee
hearing beat and swing
The eternal sea.
A bay so beauteous islanded —
A bay so stilled — You well
might deem the world were new; And some
fair day's Italian blue, Unsoiled of all the
ages dead,
Should be fulfilled.
Where all the livelong day and night
A music stirs The summer wind should
find thy home, And fall in lulls and cease to
roam: A covert resting, warm and bright,
Among the firs.
An ageless forest dell, which knows
Nor grief nor fear, Across whose green
red-berried floor Fresh spring shall come
and winter hoar, With keen delight and rapt
repose
Each year by year.
And here the thrushes, calm, supreme,
Forever reign, Whose glorious
kingly golden throats Hold but a few
remembered notes; Yet in their song is
blent no dream

Or tinge of pain!

(qtd. in Glickman 23-24)

With its stock diction ("azure skies," "beauteous islanded") and awkward syntax (see especially the third and fourth stanzas), "Shelley" does not represent Carman at his best, but it is nevertheless remarkable for two interrelated reasons: (1) its suggestion that Shelley's "soul" might be more at home in a natural, unspoiled Canadian environment than in the carceral, historied space of Europe (see Bhojwani 42); and (2) its association of the English poet with a Canadian landscape that he never visited or described (see Glickman 25). In effect, Carman creates a literary site where none existed before, transforming the animate and inanimate features of an island in New Brunswick into a "representational space" whose "affective kernel or centre" is Shelley. After reading Carman's poem, it would be difficult, if not impossible, at least for a while, to hear the thrushes of Frye Island without thinking of the author of Alastor, "Adonais," "Ode to the West Wind," and "To a Sky-Lark."

This last tide is perhaps the most intertextually interesting because it points to another aspect of Carman's originality in "Shelley": his preservation and reinscription of the authorized association of the English poet with high-flying birds through the substitution of a North American species (the thrush) for an English species (the skylark) that is not indigenous to Canada. A variation on this strategy can be found in "The White Gull," Carman's contribution to the 1893 "Centenary of the Birth of Shelley," where, probably with an eye on "The Pipes of Pan," he treats the "solitary sea-bird" that reportedly put in several appearances at Shelley's "funeral ceremony" (Dowden 2:534) as a partial analogue for his new renown in Canada. "In that sea-rover's glimmering flight," Carman tells Shelley,

... something ... like thy fame Dares the wide morn...
As if the Northland and the night Should hear thy splendid name Put scorn to scorn. (Poems 169)

Several stanzas of "Shelley" are incorporated into the final portion of "The White Gull" but pride of concluding place in the later poem goes, not to the thrushes of Frye Island, but to "A white gull searching] the blue dome / With keening cry" by the "ruthless noisy sea" (Poems 173-74). The implication is clear: anyone seeing or hearing a seagull on the coast of Canada or the United States should think of Shelley.

Since Roberts read and admired "The White Gull" before completing "Ave (An Ode for the Shelley Centenary, 1892)" in late October of that year (see Collected Letters 154-55), it is scarcely surprising that his commemorative ode also contains a reference to the seagull that graced the poet's funeral. In "Ave," however, the "wild white bird" is the "wailing semblance" of a "grieving ghost" — possibly, as Desmond Pacey and Graham Adams suggest, the ghost of Keats (Roberts, Collected Poems 461) who is "made one with Nature" towards the end of "Adonais" and, hence, becomes a "Presence to be felt or known ... where'er that Power may more / Which has withdrawn his being to its own" (402). While this neo-Platonic notion of the universal immanence of a dead poet's spirit obviously lies in the background of "Ave," Roberts's poem also betrays its debt to Carman's commemorative pieces in its association of Shelley with a particular New Brunswick landscape, in this case the tidal marshes of the river that Roberts had begun to make his own almost a decade earlier in "Tantramar Revisited."

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the notion that by writing about the Tantramar area in the 1880s and 1890s Roberts somehow made it "his own" or, in contemporary critical parlance, "appropriated" or "authored" it. Is there a sense in which the Tantramar had become Roberts's poetic or intellectual property by the time he wrote "Ave"? Such a suggestion may seem far-fetched as well as anachronistic, but, in fact, it is metaphorically consistent with John Locke's legally seminal statement in the Two Treatises of Government (1690) that ownership in land devolves to the person who "hath mixed his labour with [it]" and, hence, "remove[d] [it] from the common state that nature ... placed it in" (134). "Where a man bestows labor and industry upon any object which before belonged to nobody," explains David Hume in An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), "die alteration which he produces causes a relation between him and the object, and naturally engages us to annex it to him by the new relationship of property" (125-26n.). Needless to say, the "labor" and "industry" that Roberts bestowed on the Tantramar were literary rather than manual and the resulting "alteration" and "annex[ation]" perceptual rather than legal, but in the consensual community of Canadian letters in which he worked these were the necessary and sufficient conditions to establish the area as his and to mandate the term "Roberts's Tantramar."¹⁰

Nor would Roberts himself have had to look beyond the famous opening chapter of Emerson's "Nature" (1836) to find the issue of land ownership clarified in favour of the poet:

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no tide. (188)

This statement of the abilities and rights of the poet may well have struck a sympathetic chord in Roberts and his fellow Confederation poets not only because they were seeking to give imaginative expression to local landscapes but also because they were attempting to establish themselves as authors in and of the new Dominion of Canada — and, indeed, as creators of goods that would be of use and value in and for a predominantly agricultural but increasingly urbanized society. It is surely not fortuitous that when Roberts spoke of the future of Canadian and Acadian literature at the University of New Brunswick in 1883 and at Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1886, he referred to the "poetical wealth" that remained "unappropriated in [Canada's] broad and magnificent landscapes" and envisaged Acadian legend as a "new field" that had been broken by two New Englanders, Charles Godfrey Leland and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but was now set to yield its "richest harvests" to their poetic successors (Selected Poetry 258, 263): it was time for Canadian poets to take metaphorical ownership of the Canadian landscape and, in Pierre Bourdieu's phrase, transform its constituents and productions into "cultural capital" — that is, objects of value from which they could derive income (see Bourdieu 262). "Think not, O master of the well-tilled field / This earth is only thine," Lampman would write in "The Poet's Possession" (1895); "for after thee ... Comes the grave poet with creative eye, / And from these silent acres and clean plots, / Bids ... A second tilth and second harvest be, / The crop of images and curious thoughts" (Poems 157). The fact that by 1892 the Tantramar marshes were well on their way to becoming Roberts's literary property — a poetic tenancy that he could sublet at will — adds a magnanimity born of self-confidence to his association of their "tranquil meadows" and "fierce tides" with Shelley:

Strangely akin you [the marshes] seem to him whose birth
One hundred years ago With fiery succour to
the ranks of song Defied the ancient gates of
wrath and wrong.
Like yours, O marshes, his compassionate breast,
Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace, Was
tortured with perpetual unrest.
Now loud with flood, now languid with release,
Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife
Of tides from the salt sea of human pain
That hiss along the perilous coasts of life
Beat in his eager brain; But all about the
tumult of his heart Stretched the great calm of his
celestial art.
Therefore with no far flight, from Tantramar
And my still world of ecstasy, to thee,
Shelley, to thee I turn, the avatar
Of Song, Love, Dream, Desire, and Liberty; To thee
I turn with reverent hands of prayer
And lips that fain would ease my heart of praise,
Whom chief of all whose brows prophetic wear
The pure and sacred bays I worship, and have
worshipped since the hour When first I felt thy
bright and chainless power.

(Collected Poems 145, 147)

Conceived as a "Commemoration Ode" rather than an "elegy" (Collected Letters 156), "Ave" nevertheless belongs in the tradition of the pastoral elegy that Roberts traces back to Bion and Moschus in an essay first published in the New Princeton Review in May 1888 and subsequently reprinted, first in the King's College Record (Windsor, N.S.) in March 1893 and then as the preface to his 1902 edition of Shelley'sAlastorandAdonais. Almost as predictable as the presence of the two stanzas beginning "He is made one with Nature" as the principal sample of Adonais in "Pastoral Elegies" is Roberts's Victorian insistence that the "spiritualized pantheism" of Shelley's neo-Platonic consolation is "vivified by a breadth of the essence of Christian philosophy" and "a creed of personal immortality, of inextinguishable identity" (365). The Shelley who is one with the Tantra-mar marshes in "Ave" may have "Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong," but he also followed the same "star" as Dante and "saw ... the living God / And worshipped ..., beholding Him the same / Adored on earth as Love" (CollectedPoems 148, 151). In short, the Shelley associated and connected with the Tantramar is a Browningesque Shelley "strangely akin," not merely to the physical qualities of a particular Canadian place, but also to the religious disposition of late Victorian Canada.

A further continuation of the line inaugurated by Carman's "Shelley" is the "Ode for the Keats Centenary" that Duncan Campbell Scott "Read at Hart House Theatre before the University of Toronto" on "February 23, 1921" (Poems 151). Perhaps remembering the commemorative poems of both Carman and Roberts, Scott follows some preliminary remarks on Keats's posdiumous fame by focussing on his burial site "Beneath the frown of... old Roman stone" and conceding the impossibility of reviving and contacting him either through a passionate "incantation" of "his most sacred lines" or through "all the praise that sets / Towards his pale grave" (Poems 151-52). But if Keats were to escape the "Shadow" of death, suggests Scott, then his "power / Of'seeing great things in loneliness'" — as Tracy Ware notes (113), the quotation is from one of Keats's letters to Benjamin Robert Haydon — would propel his "Spirit" away from the "toil and press" of southern Europe to the solitude and purity of the Canadian arctic. Two parallel verse paragraphs — the first a catalogue of northern flora and fauna and the second a tribute to lonely scientists and poets — conclude with incantatory prayers to the "Spirit of Keats" to "unfurl [its] deathless wings" in Canada and "Teach us ... Beauty in loneliness" (153- 54). What makes Keats a desirable teacher for both the scientist and the poet is his lonely dedication, "oft in pain and penury" (Poems 153), to the cause of beauty, truth, and the betterment of the human condition.¹¹ When ... calling on the name of poetry," Scott told the Royal Society of Canada in his presidential address on "Poetry and Progress" in May 1922, "I am thinking of that element in the art... in which the power of growth resides, which is the winged and resdess spirit keeping pace with knowledge and often beating into the void in advance of speculation.... This spirit en deavours to interpret the world in new terms of beauty It absorbs sci ence and philosophy, and anticipates social progress in terms of ideality. It is rare, but it is ever present, for what is it but the flickering and pulsation of the force that created the world" (19). The fact that Keats is mentioned and quoted several times in "Poetry and Progress" reinforces the suspicion that in Scott's mind the winged "Spirit of Keats" and the "winged and rest less spirit of poetry" were so closely linked as to be almost identical.

The remainder of "Ode for the Keats Centenary" is a meditation on the forces that have driven Beauty into the Canadian arctic and the means by which the "goddess" might be persuaded to return to the "desolate world" (Poems 155). Driven into solitude by human ignorance, aggression, and sordidness, Beauty might be persuaded to return to "the great highways" of human life "if the world's mood" were to "Change" for the better and if the "Spirit of Keats" would "lend [its] voice ... like surge in some enchanted cave / On a dream-sea-coast" to that of the poet and her other devotees. Without the necessary change in the weltkultur, however, even a chorus containing Keats's "Spirit" must fail to tempt Beauty away from "the precinct of pure air / Where moments turn to months of solitude": "'Let me restore the soul that ye have marred,'" she implores, "'Leave me alone, lone mortals, / Until my shaken soul comes to its own'" (Poems 156-57). After this request the "mortals" redouble their appeal to Beauty to return to the "lonely world" and the poem draws to its muted and crepuscular conclusion: "All the dim wood is silent as a dream / That dreams of silence" (Poems 157). Beauty, it would appear, has taken "permanent ... refuge from life" and can only be found in regions "beyond the bitter strife" (Poems 156). Such realms are as geographically remote as the Canadian arctic and as readily available as the town library, for, as Scott says at the conclusion of his essay on "Poetry and Progress," "If the poetry of our generation is wayward and discomfiting, ... bitter with the turbulence of an uncertain and ominous time, we may turn from it for refreshment to those earlier days when society appears to us to have been simpler, when there were seers who made clear the paths of life and adorned them with beauty" (27). It was this anti-modern yearning for less complex and more aesthetically congenial times and places that drew Scott to both Keats and the "lonely north" and led, in "Ode for the Keats Centenary," to a conjunction of the Romantic poet and the Canadian arctic that emphasizes the remoteness even while it affirms the persistence of a Beauty that may yet "return / Even lovelier than before" to grace the "crowded southern land" (Poems, 155). After all, had not the "seer" himself asserted in the famous opening lines of Endymion that "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" whose "loveliness increases" and "will never / Pass into nothingness" (55)? No more in "Ode for the Keats Centenary" than in "Ave," "The White Gull," or "Shelley" is the English literary tradition a burden that stifles creativity and provokes rebellion. On the contrary, in Scon's commemorative ode, as in the earlier poems, the naturalization of a Romantic poet in Canadian space is a creative and connective act that bridges the temporal and geographical gaps between the Old and the New World and, in so doing, offers cultural memory as a source of inspiration and hope for a troubled present and an uncertain future.

II

At about the time that Carman and Roberts were finding ways to naturalize Shelley in Canada, a minor and now little-known member of their literary circle, John Frederic Herbin, was busy crediting Roberts especially with the creation of a "representational space." With an eye, very likely, on both "The Pipes of Pan" and "Tantramar Revisited," Herbin suggests that Roberts has transformed the Tantramar area, not merely into "classic ground," but into "classical ground" — ground imbued with the qualities of ancient Greece. "Is green-walled Acadie a later Greece, / And Thou a classic come to life again?" Herbin asks Roberts in the second of the four tributary sonnets "To the Singers of Minas" in his Marshlands volume of 1893. His answer reveals the question to be as rhetorical as it is flattering:

The broad green plain of level
Tantramar Is but the Tempe of thy ancient
time.
The tides, and all the Fundean crystal ways Live as
thy blue Aegean was in far Dim yesterdays; and all
the suns that climb This sky knew thee in Helle's
brightest days.

(The Marshlands 51)

In his desire to flatter, Herbin makes Roberts himself a resurrected Hellenic artist, a "sculptor then, a poet now, whose lease of labour" is to "carve" lyrics that call to the mind's eye vivid "pictures" of the Acadian landscape. As well as identifying Acadia with Arcadia, Herbin's extravagant tribute gives Roberts's transmigratory spirit the credit for creating the artistic glories of both modern Canada and ancient Greece. It would be difficult to imagine the desire to connect the New World with the Old producing a more fulsome compliment.

Thankfully, Herbin's tribute to Carman is more muted and fraternal. One reason for this is that when "To the Singers of Minas" was published in 1893 in Herbin's second collection of poems (The Marshlands), Roberts was already the author of Ave and two substantial volumes (Orion, and Other Poems [1880] and In Divers Tones [1886]) but Carman was still in the process of making a belated poetic debut with Low Tide on Grand Pre. A Book of Lyrics (1893). Another is that Herbin, the descendant of an Acadian exile who later used his influence as "mayor of Wolfville, Nova Scotia ... [to] secur[e] land at Grand Pre for the establishment of a park dedicated to his ancestors" (Large 35-36), regarded Carman as his spiritual kinsman in treating of places associated with the Acadians:

The dyke-lands and meadows of the sea
That fill with joy the sunshine of our day;
The river-lances driven from the Bay;
The Gaspereau's unmoved serenity Beside
that place of crime and misery,
Marked by the hallowed willows of Grand-Pre;
The plowing Blomidon — make an array Of phases to
inspire both you and me.


(The Marshlands 52)

The fact that the two poets, one of French and the other of British descent, derive parallel inspiration from places "Sad with remembrance of ... deathless wrong" (52) speaks to Herbin of the peaceful coexistence of the two linguistic groups in Canada:

Where was that hate of yore That made our fathers foemen, now grows strong The peace of nationhood, although the flow Of tears has marked the whole red reach of shore. (52)

The "crime and misery" of the Acadian expulsion cannot be forgotten, but they can be subordinated to a bond born of shared knowledge and sympathy. "Whatever, once, their country and their race, / One hope and one ambition closely tie / This people to a common destiny," Herbin had written in Canada, and Other Poems (1891). "Stray winds of discontent do sometimes fan / The flowering peace, and dull the day with shade" but still and overall "Union has raised up her stainless flag ... where nothing shall betray" ([5, 9]). Time is still testing Herbin's optimism.

Pardy because of Herbin's later writing about Acadia in Grand-Pre (1898), The Heir to Grand-Pre (1907), Jen of the Marshes (1921), and, especially, The Land of Evangeline (1921), the poet associated with Grand Pre by most of today's visitors is not Carman but Longfellow. A section of the shore of Long Island off the coast of Grand Pre is named Evangeline Beach (see Herbin, Evangeline [vi]), and a statue of Longfellow's fictional heroine completes the conversion of the area's dominant literary association into a sentimental tourist attraction that began about 1895 with a promotion by the Dominion Atlantic Railway (see Woodworth 115-16 and Bendey, "Roberts" 85-89). As David Conrad acerbically remarks in "Grand Pre" (1994), "Evangeline's passion frozen in bronze" has "made a spot for bus loads / of the curious and the bored." "And if they read the blurbs / And listen to the tour guide / they might hold hands until they get to Lunenburg" (4l, 43). Only in the minds of a few readers of Canadian literature can Carman be present at the site that inspired one of his most anthologized and memorable poems. But perhaps this is almost as appropriate as it is ironical, for "Low Tide on Grand Pre" is as much about forgetting as remembering — a meditation on the capacity of a particular place at a particular time to conjure up memories of a moment that transcended place, time, and memory:

Was it a year or lives ago,
We took the grasses in our hands, And
caught the summer flying low
Over the waving meadow lands,
And held it there between our hands?

And that we took into our hands
Spirit of life or subtler thing —
Breathed on us there, and loosed the bands
Of death, and taught us, whispering,
The secret of some wonder-thing.

Then all your face grew light, and seemed
To hold the shadow of the sun; The
evening faltered, and I deemed That time was ripe, and years had done
Their wheeling underneath the sun.

So all desire and all regret,
And fear and memory, were naught; One to
remember or forget
The keen delight our hands had caught;
Morrow and yesterday were naught.

(Poems 3-4)

Such lyric utterances are not the inspiration for statues. Indeed — and to adapt a statement by the poet who lies in the background of Carman's poem — "Low Tide on Grand Pre" is itself "tf moments monument, I [A] Memorial from the Soul's eternity I To one dead deathless hour" (Rossetti 74).¹² It neither sanctions nor requires translation into stone.

But despite the transcendental moment at its heart, "Low Tide on Grand Pre" is firmly grounded in the locale announced by its title: the tidal river with which it begins and ends flows through "the fields of Acadie," leaving "barren reaches" on its retreat and "sigh[ing] like driven wind or foam" on its return. Surrounding and sustaining the poem's "mystic" core (Herbin, Marshlands 51) is a specific and specified Canadian landscape. This is the thrust of Herbin's observation that Carman "has ... raised his lyric voice among / The places where the ebb and flood so strong / Fill with red life the veins of Acadie," and it helps to explain the conviction of a later Canadian poet, Douglas Lochhead, that "a heightened sense of place ... is ... [a] powerful element in Carman's poetry" ("Preface" xv). "What captured my admiration, I now see," explains Lochhead, "was Carman's ability to write so convincingly and well about the places I had come to love, the Bay of Fundy, the Saint John River.... Malcolm Ross, who was born and raised in Fredericton, has written with sensitivity about this characteristic of Carman's writing in 'Bliss Carman and the Poetry of Mystery' (1985).... [Since] his ... experience ... so closely resembles mine, I quote it here: 'Carman was the river, the sea, the new air I breathed'" (xv). In the minds of both Ross and Lochhead, Carman had become one with Maritime nature or — to put the matter less metaphorically— the Bay of Fundy area had become for them a "representational space," a literary site ineffaceably associated and connected with the author of "Low Tide on Grand Pre" and other local descriptive poems.

Given Lochhead's willingness to endorse Ross's identification of poet and place, it is almost to be expected that in High Marsh Road (1980), his "lines for a diary" about the Tantramar Marshes, he includes references to that area's best-known author and best-known artist: Charles G.D. Roberts and Alex Colville. Even before Lochhead has wondered "what Acadian sweated and froze in the / ever-wind to make these dykes?" and affirmed that "there is I a sense of history here and all across / this marsh" (September 2), Colville enters the diary through a meditative allusion to his Crow with Silver Spoon (1972): "Colville's crow mounts higher higher. / the silver spoon is fast in the beak. / what behind eye prompts bird to seize / such objects and hide them away?" (September 1). The referral of nature to art and the search for an explanation that are evident here also appear in the two diary entries that mention Roberts. In the first of these (October 9), Lochhead finds in "Tantramar Revisited" a comforting precedent for his own perspective on the marshes:

the total glimpse of it as Roberts took to Tantramar. using his telescope his eye revisited, now I search the same dykes for details of shore-birds. the weirs hold straggler ducks, it is good to have such footsteps

In the second (October 31), the "High Marsh Road" of the volume's tide provides a continuity between die present, the future and die past:

... something will turn up. something will come of it all. the road will remain, echoes of all this picked up. Charles G. D. Roberts, pince-nez and tails, flies like an angel by Stanley Spencer over this place

The comparison between Roberts as he appears on the dust-jacket and frontispiece of E.M. Pomeroy's Biography (1943) and die stylized angels of an English visionary painter who is scarcely known in Canada risks intellectual ostentation in order to create a vivid and surprising visual image of tJhe poet as a bygone but enduring presence in the Tantramar Marshes — the genius loci or tutelary spirit of the place with which Lochhead also wishes to associate and connect himself. In both diary entries, die marshes and die road are reassuringly permanent; "place" is a constant that supports life, inspires writing, and encourages die hope of literary permanence and continuity: "echoes of all / this picked up."

III

On June 10, 1899, exactly four months after Lampman's premature death of pneumonia at his home in Ottawa, the Toronto Globe and the Ottawa Evening Journal printed a commemorative ode by his friend and onetime literary collaborator William Wilfred Campbell. "Bereavement of the Fields (In Memory of Archibald Lampman, who died February 10th, 1899)" is an uneven poem, but it contains a memorable refrain ("Soft fall the February snows..." [SelectedPoetry 66-68]) and several borrowings from Lampman's poems that serve the twofold purpose of displaying Campbell's knowledge and admiration of his colleague's achievements and confirming their continued existence and impact after his death.¹³ Almost certainly thinking of "The Favorites of Pan" and related poems, Campbell likens Lampman to "some rare Pan of those old Grecian days" who was "reborn" in "our hour of deeper stress," and he consoles himself with the thought that his friend's "gentle spirit" now "moves with those whose music filled his ears ... — Wordsworth, Arnold, [and] Keats, [the] high masters of his song" (Poetry 67). Since Lampman regarded poets as the "Children of Pan" (114) and himself as a "faint reincarnation" of Keats (AnnotatedEdition 119), he would probably not have been displeased by Campbell's sentiments.

To mark the ninth anniversary of Lampman's death, excerpts from "Bereavement of the Fields" were printed in the Ottawa Evening Journal on February 8, 1908, and, over eighty years later, Michael Gnarowski would give a commemorative dimension to his Selected Poetry of Archibald Lampman (1990) by dating its substantial Introduction "10 February 1989" (25). But the most ambitious bibliographical monument to Lampman was initiated within months of his death. Conceived by its sponsors, S.E. Dawson, William D. LeSeur, and Duncan Campbell Scott as a "lasting memorial" to the poet, Scott's Poems of Archibald Lampman was published in Toronto in 1900 (and, incidentally, sold directly to subscribers "in order to secure to [his] widow the full and entire return without deduction or discount of any kind whatever" [qtd. in Whitridge xxxiii]).The "memorial edition" of Lampman's poems has been reprinted at least five times between 1900 and the present, most recently in 1974 in Lochhead's Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint series from the University of Toronto Press. As much as the "coins and medals" discussed by Joseph Priesdey in his Lectures on History (1788), the various printings and editions of Lampman's Poems "may be considered a kind deportable monuments" whose advantage over "pillars, edifices, or ... heaps of stones" resides in the fact that, in being "easily multiplied,... they stand a much fairer chance of being seen by posterity" (80, 75-76, 81). They also bear out the finding of Gladys Engel and Kurt Lang that "the remembrance of most... artists ... is highly dependent on survivors with an emotional and/or financial stake in the perpetuation of their reputation" such as "financially strapped widows with young children" or (in Lampman's case) "a circle of friends and admirers" (Lang 326-29).

Tangible evidence that Lampman's Poems were indeed "seen by posterity" is provided by the academic essays and monographs that began to appear shortly after its publication in 1900. As early as 1901, John Marshall used "the complete edition brought out by Morang after the poet's death" as the basis for a full reassessment of Lampman's oeuvre in the Queen s Quarterly that can only have dismayed the book's sponsors by characterizing him as merely "perhaps the least futile of our Canadian writers of verse" and then castigating him for "his lack of originality, his narrow range of thought and feeling and the almost entire absence [in his work] of any evidence of progress towards clearer and more consistent views of life and art" (37). In its rejection of "patriotic feeling" in favour of "disinterested criticism" (33, 37), Marshall's assault on Lampman is proleptic of the sneering attitude to the Confederation poets and their admirers that became commonplace with the arrival of Anglo-American Modernism in Canada after the First World War and achieved its most witty expression on the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation in F.R. Scott's "Canadian Authors Meet" (1927):

The air is heavy with Canadian topics,
And Carman, Lampman, Roberts, Campbell, Scott,
Are measured for their faith and philanthropies,
Their zeal for God and King, their earnest thought. (248)

"Lampman was essentially a dreamer of dreams," Bernard Muddiman had written some twelve years earlier in an essay that "coincides, more or less, with the beginnings of modernism in poetry in the English Language" (Gnarowski, Introduction xviii); "Death ... robbed us of nothing in his early demise"¹⁴ and the "most valuable" aspect of the "collected edition of his works" is Duncan Campbell Scott's introductory "Memoir" in Poems (Muddiman 78-79).

But these were not the only responses generated by Lampman's Poems. In "Archibald Lampman and the Sonnet," published in Poet-Lore (Boston) on the tenth anniversary of the poet's death, Louis Untermeyer judged the "memorial edition of his works" "a noteworthy volume" and, drawing on the ubiquitous spiritualism of the day, expressed the belief that "even if... the inspired music [of his poems] be quite forgotten, the spirit... [or] divine energy that wrought the[m] ... can never die" because it will achieve "reincarnation" in another natural or human entity (56, 61). In A Little Book of Canadian Essays, published in the same year, Lawrence J. Burpee also concedes that Lampman may not achieve lasting fame but argues that this is immaterial since, as Scott's "Memoir" confirms, he lived a life that was "ever true to [the] ideals" expressed in his poems (Burpee 63). And in "The Poetry of Archibald Lampman," written after the complete Poems had gone through "four editions [actually reprintings] within the space often years (1905-1915)," G.H. Unwin proceeds through each of the five sections into which Poems is divided — "Among the Millet," "Lyrics of Earth," "Alcyone," "Sonnets," and "Poems and Ballads" — in an effort to discern the "particular qualities" that might reveal "the secret of his appeal" (82). Even as Lampman's prestige was falling in modernist circles, it was rising among readers and critics who remained sympathetic to the Romantic-Victorian tradition and nationalistic in their affection for its Canadian practitioners. "Both Lampman and Roberts, by the volume of their work and by its general excellence, stand well in the front of Canadian nature poets," concluded Unwin: "They are both truly Canadian, products of the soil" (97).

By the late 1920s, the trajectory of admiration that passed from writers such as Agnes Maule Machar, William Dean Howells,¹⁵ and Arthur Stringer who admired Lampman's work during his lifetime to those who embraced his collected Poems as, in Unwin's words, the work of "[a] native genius" (83) had yielded the first (and, until 1986, the only) critical monographs on Lampman — Norman Guthrie's The Poetry of Archibald Lampman (1927) and Carl Y. Connor's Archibald Lampman: Canadian Poet of Nature (1929). Both of these books were written and published in the glow of Canada's Diamond Jubilee, as was the selection of Lampman's poems that Scott published under the tide Lyrics of Earth: Sonnets and Ballads in 1925 and the article entitled "The Poetry of Archibald Lampman" that Raymond Knister published in the Dalhousie Review in October 1927. Like Unwin, both Scott and Knister identify Lampman closely with Canada: "The nature and the life he saw was the Canadian scene and it may well be said of him as was said long ago of Theocritus 'His Muse is the Muse of his native land"' (Scott, Introduction 47). "He passed 'with creative eye' over the country which the farmer and the lumberman and the railway-builder had possessed, and reaped another, more enduring harvest. What he left as heritage will long mean 'Canada' in the minds of his countrymen, as surely as her fields and lakes were Canada to him" (Knister 118).¹⁶ After such sentiments, could a national monument be long in the offing? The campaign to erect a memorial cairn to Lampman was initiated in 1928 by Arthur Stringer, a Chatham, Ontario-born novelist who had met the poet in 1898 and regarded him as "the greatest apostle of beauty who ever drew ... breath ... in ... Canada" (qtd. in Connor 192).¹⁷ With an initial donation from Stringer and the enthusiastic support of Scott, the Western Ontario Branch of the Canadian Authors Association set about the task of financing and designing "a permanent and attractive memorial to ... Lampman at or near his birthplace, the village of Morpeth" on the north shore of Lake Erie (Fox 5). The site of the memorial — "a eminence on one of the King's busy highways" close to the "picturesque steeple ... [of] the Church of which Lampman's father was the rector" (Fox 6) — was carefully chosen in accordance with three criteria: its "association" with Lampman, its "attractive[ness]," and its visibility (Fox 6). "One standing on this site looks over such scenes as inspired Lampman's heart of lyric measures," observed William Sherwood Fox (the President of the Western Ontario Branch of the C.A.A.) at the dedication of the Lampman Memorial Cairn on September 13,1930; "It also affords a vision of a great inland sea ... that is in concert with the words" from Lampman's "Outlook" (1988) that appear on a bronze tablet on the Cairn's east face (Fox 6):

... yet, patience — there shall come
Many great voices from life's outer sea,
Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed,
Murmurs and glimpses of eternity.
(Poems 108)

Like Fox, Stringer mentions the beautiful surroundings of the memorial in his dedicatory address, but with an emphasis on his own connection to the area and, more important, an appreciation of Lampman's role in shaping Canadian landscape perceptions: "Because of him, every bloodroot that blooms in early spring, every maple that reddens with autumn, every sheaf of grain that stands golden amid its stubble, every orchard and millet-field, every stream and valley and woodland, has more beauty and meaning for us. Because of what he has given us, every sunrise and sunset is brought closer and made more poignant and memorable to us" (10-11). Lampman is a literary "pioneer" who has "not altogether died and shall never altogether die" because, in Lefebvre's terms, he has transformed parts of Canada into "representational spaces" — spaces "overlay[ed]" and "redolent" with the "associated" and "imaginary... elements" of his poems (39, 41). If he has not quite, as Stringer fulsomely suggests, planted the "affective kernel" of Canada, he has certainly helped to do so for Ontario.

As interesting as Stringer's address at the dedication of the Lampman Memorial Cairn (and more so than Scott's ensuing rehearsal of the poet's life and philosophy) are the remarks on "The National Importance of Monuments" that were delivered on the occasion by Brigadier-General E.A. Cruikshank, the Chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. Cruikshank begins his address by stressing the universality of the commemorative urge: "From the dawn of civilization, all nations, and ... all races, have evinced their longing to commemorate the great events of their history and the notable deeds of distinguished persons by some durable monument or work of their hands, usually of stone or some form of metal. This natural impulse ... much preceded the art of pictorial or sculptural representation and that of recording such events or deeds by writing" (7). He then proceeds to make the Burkean point that "a people who have no pride or veneration for their past can have little confidence or hope for their future" and to argue for the "practical use of local association" as a means of putting "the youth of the country in touch with the great citizens and noble deeds of the past, and inspiring] them with a direct personal interest" in their "heritage" (7). Aligning the creation of "memorials" and "monuments" with "national advancement" and the "resolute ... patriotism" that is "indispensable in performing the duties of good citizens" (7-8), Cruikshank concludes with the observation that the dedication of the Lampman Memorial Cairn is "an act of what ... Wordsworth ... term[s] 'natural piety,' by which the present becomes spiritually linked with the past" (8). This last point is, of course, an extension into the sphere of nationhood of Wordsworth's near-proverbial expression of desire for continuity in his own life — "The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety" (1: 226); if Canada is to grow and mature in an integrated, organic, and humanistic manner, it must affirm the continuity between the present, the past, and the future. A disconcertingly prophetic dimension is lent to "The National Importance of Monuments" by an admiring paragraph on the "racial continuity and solidarity" displayed by the Japanese ceremonies of thanksgiving after their "successful war with Russia" in 1904-05 (7), but Cruikshank's fundamental argument is not negated by his soldierly glances towards a portentously aggressive nation. Even — perhaps especially — countries that eschew militarism and imperialism need to venerate their cultural and national achievements if they are to maintain and foster the identity and independence of their citizens.

The two literary site poems so far generated by the Lampman Memorial Cairn date from before its dedication on September 13,1930. The earlier of these, Nathaniel A. Benson's "The Lampman Cairn at Morpeth" (1930), was written in 1928 when "the erection of [the] memorial ... was first proposed" and, despite ample opportunity for revision before its inclusion among the Addresses Delivered at the Dedication of the Archibald Lampman Memorial Cairn (1930), remains a dismaying combination of good intentions, rhythmic ineptitude, and metaphorical infelicity. Apart from anything else, the sonnet's opening lines — "Build high this cairn, for here was Lampman born, / Here fell that silver seed of high endeavor" — render his birth and survival unlikely by indicting his father with Onanism and his mother (or her midwife) with carelessness. Scott must have cringed on hearing his friend described as "a Croesus of pure song, whose arts / To poets' hands the wandering winds resign," but, of course, this is Benson's flatulent way of expressing his feelings of admiration and continuity.

The second literary site poem generated by the Lampman Memorial Cairn is not much better. Dated "Wednesday, September 10th, 1930" and published in the Toronto Mail and Empire on the morning of the dedication ceremony, Wilson MacDonald's "The Cairn at Morpeth" (1931) begins with a bitter attack on the promoters of the Cairn as "tardy mortals" and "Ironic Jesters" whose erection of "great towers" to dead "bards" in no way compensates for their "indifference" to "yet-living poets" such as (if not principally) MacDonald himself. After three lengthy stanzas in this vein, MacDonald turns his attention briefly to the dedication ceremony, proclaiming imperiously that two "well-loved poets of our time" should be "heard" beside the "monument": "Charles Roberts of the half-sea Tantramar" who "stirred" "in the bard of Morpeth's spirit... / The first fine flowing of his youthful rhyme" and "Duncan Scott who loved him well and long / And... / Kept the white brilliance of a comrade star" (85). Was it perhaps anger at being assigned no part in the ceremony by its organizers that prompted MacDonald, not only to write his bilious poem, but also to send it to Fox in advance of the ceremony, to arrange for its publication on the same day as the event, and to absent himself from the proceedings on the pretext of an unbreakable "engagement"?¹⁸ Be this as it may, Roberts did indeed join Scott "beside th[e] monument,"¹⁹ albeit not as a speaker, and Fox found space in the program to read aloud one of two apposite stanzas of MacDonald's poem, a description of the landscape surrounding the Cairn that nicely incorporates a reference to Lampman's beloved "goldenrod":

There is an autumn haze on Erie's hills,
And Beauty is descending from the trees. And,
like an afterthought of daffodils,
The goldenrod blows down the yellow breeze. And
in the burning fury of this flame,
While purple's royal hand is on the grass, A
white cairn rises, that all men who pass
May know the eternal beauty of one name. (85)

In the other apposite stanza in "The Cairn at Morpeth," MacDonald acknowledges his enduring debt to Lampman through allusions to three of his poems — "Heat" (1888), "June" (1895), and, appropriately, "September" (1895):

That beauty came to me while yet a boy;
And still in Heat, untempered by a breeze, I
watch the plodding farmers move, with joy,
And breathe the "white dust puffing to their
knees." And near the heels of June I see great Pan,
With "hot blown cheeks"; and at the
summer's close Between the purple aster and the rose
I've climbed, in song, September's caravan. (85)

Because of Lampman, Stringer might have observed, every Canadian summer and fall "had more beauty and more meaning" for MacDonald. The psychological and cultural implications of what he is recording remain personal for MacDonald, however, and "The Cairn at Morpeth" concludes with the egotistical and ill-tempered suggestion that, if Lampman "could ... gaze from his far bourne / His eyes would see no cairn or gathered throng, / But, for those souls who loved in life his song, / Beyond his cloudy frontiers would he mourn" (85).

In the decades following the dedication of the Lampman Memorial Cairn, Lampman's critical reputation continued to be affected by fluctuations of nationalism in Canada and by the ascendancy of modernism in Canadian poetry and criticism. While modernists such as Leo Kennedy, W.E. Collin, John Sutherland, and Louis Dudek wrote essays marked by varying degrees of negativity in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, poets and critics more sympathetic to writing in the Romantic-Victorian tradition, most notably E.K. Brown, produced appreciative essays and scholarly editions that enhanced Lampman's reputation as Canada's most accomplished nineteenth-century poet. Nor is it any coincidence that Brown and Scott published At the Long Sault and Other New Poems in 1943, for the subject of the title poem in this selection of Lampman's thereto unpublished work— Dollard des Ormeaux's supposed saving of Quebec from destruction by the Iroquois in May 1666 — perfectly suited the nationalistic tenor of the war years. Whether positive or negative, however, the attention given to Lampman before, during, and after the Second World War consolidated his position as a Canadian literary icon, as a writer whose work had to be reckoned with because it seemed to be an authentic representation and integral part of Canada. As Brown put it in On Canadian Poetry (1943): "In Canada Lampman is the nearest approach to a national classic in verse, and the passing of decades has confirmed his status if it has not very much widened the circle of his readers" (88).

By way of establishing a context for Lampman's work in On Canadian Poetry, Brown quotes at length from the now well-known passage in "Two Canadian Poets[:] a Lecture" (1891) in which he describes his reaction to reading Roberts's Orion, and Other Poems (1880) while a student at Trinity College, Toronto in the early 1880s:

It seemed to me a wonderful thing that such work could be done by a Canadian, by a young man, one of ourselves. It was like a voice from some new paradise of art, calling to us to be up and doing. A litde after sunrise I got up and went out into the college grounds. The air, I remember, was full of the odour and cool sunshine of the spring morning. The dew was thick upon the grass, all the birds of our Maytime seemed to be singing in the oaks, and there were even a few adder tongues and miliums blooming on the slope of the litde ravine. But everything was transfigured for me beyond description, bathed in an old world radiance and beauty, (qtd. in Brown 92)

"Could a nation's poetic history begin with a more charming freshness?" asks Brown, adding pensively:

It is delightful to look back across the years to that bright spring morning in the semi-wild meadows about the old Trinity building, to evoke the delicate, young Ontario poet destined to die long before he had grown to his full power, reading from the slim booklet of the young man from New Brunswick who was so recently, after the passing of more than sixty years, shaping verses in the city where so long ago Lampman caught from him the assurance that a Canadian literature was waiting to be born.²⁰ (92)

No doubt, it was the combination of Lampman's description and Brown's commentary that provided the primary inspiration for Verna Loveday Harden's "At the Gates of Old Trinity" (1946), a charming, if slight, literary site poem first published in Saturday Night on April 19, 1944.²¹ Prefaced by a note explaining that "it was in May 1881 that... Lampman,... then a student at Old Trinity College, Toronto (whose buildings are now used for other purposes) read Orion and Other Poems ... and knew that this was the birth of a distinctly Canadian literature," Harden's poem reflects its war-time context in its forthright and sanctified nationalism: not only are the gates of Old Trinity "holy" because of their literary associations but Roberts and Lampman were a "choir" from which "a newly-wakened people / Would hear the call to conscious nationhood" (1). "These old gates adorning / A shabby street, in proud remembrance stand," the poem concludes, because "This is where Lampman walked on that May morning / With Roberts' Orion in his hand" (2).

Lampman's status as a literary icon and a "national classic" was further confirmed by the attention devoted to him by scholars and poets after the War, especially in the nationalistic 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps on the basis of articles by Ralph Gustafson in The Fiddlehead (1945) and Northern Review (1947),²² Margaret Avison conceives of Lampman in "The Iconoclasts" (1947) as a Romantic primitive who "prowled the Gatineau" in search of sensual and transcendental experiences (320). Perhaps in response to Desmond Pacey's new-critical analysis of "Heat" in Ten Canadian Poets (1958), Al Purdy writes jocularly in "Lampman in Heat" of a poet who "gave [him] standards about heat" but, unaccountably, preferred "Fahrenheit" to "girls" (64). And perhaps drawing upon the material in the proceedings of the Lampman Symposium (1976) that was held at the University of Ottawa in 1975, Raymond Souster addresses him in "A Letter to Archibald Lampman" (1977) as a major poet in a "minor" country whose "verse — / let's face it,... is the best we have" (4: 177). But by far the most extended and engaging response to Lampman in Canadian poetry is D.G. Jones's "Kate, these flowers... (The Lampman Poems)" (1977), a sequence of thirteen acrostics that takes as its point of departure the love affair with Kate Waddell that Margaret Coulby Whitridge first publicized in her Introduction to the facsimile edition of Lampman's Poems (1900) and At the Long Sault (1943) in the University of Toronto Press's Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint series (1974). Memory had once again become, as in classical mythology, the mother of the Muses.²³ In the wake of the Jubilee and Centennial celebrations that did so much to make Lampman a "national classic," memory was also the mother of two works that constitute the apogee of interest in Canadian literary sites: William Arthur Deacon's Literary Map of Canada (1936) and John Robert Colombo's Canadian Literary Landmarks (1984). By his own description, "a splendid opportunity for education about the native literature," Deacon's Literary Map assumes a connection between creative works and "places," particularly the "location" in which they are set (Deacon 178-79). Probably because the settings of the "essential" materials that Deacon wished to include did not cooperate with his aim of preserving "graphic harmony" by avoiding "a whole mass [of information] in one spot," A Literary Map of Canada includes two insets entitled "The Land of Evangeline" and "Some Books of the St. Lawrence Basin," the former, a confirmation of Roberts's authorship of the region and the latter, an itemization of what S. I. Hayakawa had already called the "'Victorian, Neo-Victorian, Quasi-Victorian, and Pseudo-Victorian" literature of central Canada (qtd. in Kennedy 36). More grandiose in its ambitions, Colombo's Canadian Literary Landmarks was written "to suggest some answers to the Zen-like riddle 'Where is here?'" with which Northrop Frye concluded the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965) and, true to its mythopoeic inspiration, aspires to be not only "an imaginative cartography" and the "groundwork for a mythography," but also "something of a 'native odyssey,'" as well as a compendium of "imaginative signposts that summarize our hopes and fears" (12, 9). In his entry on Sainte-Anne-de-Belleville, Colombo notes that the house in which Moore is supposed to have composed "A Canadian Boat Song" is now operated by the Victorian Order of Nurses as a restaurant, Au P'tit Cafe, and quotes from Sir Arthur Co nan Doyle's account of his visit to the site in Our Second American Adventure (1923): "We drove up the beautiful shores of the St. Lawrence, and saw the villages and villas which adorn them.... One small house of stone was pointed out in which Tom Moore dwelt and where he wrote the 'Canadian Boat Song.' No medallion marks it. This I have endeavoured to amend by a letter to the press. I must confess that I never knew before that Moore had been to Canada" (99).

In the final paragraph of Ten Canadian Poets (1958), Desmond Pacey praises Early Birney for sharing the interest of the Confederation poets "in the landscape of Canada" and suggests that, although Birney had neither "the musical gifts of Carman nor quite the patient fidelity of description of Roberts and Lampman, he approache[d] them in these respects and ... described far more areas of his country" (326). "In prose and poetry alike," Pacey concludes, Birney "has provided us with an indispensable literary chronicle of our Canadian time and place." Sadly, in the forty years since the publication of Pacey's book "poetry" has become anything but "indispensable" to Canadians — indeed, it sometimes seems that, like the drowned poet of A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" (1948), poetry has all but "disappeared" from "our real society" (2: 634), taking with it the patient and lyrical attention to "areas of [t]his country" that Pacey so much admired in the Confederation poets and some of their successors. Whatever the reasons for this disappearance — and surely few parents and educators can entirely escape blame — it is a very great loss, for now more than ever the socially homogenizing and environmentally damaging forces of globalization indicate the dire and urgent need for the sense of belonging to a particular place and a particular culture that has always been a gift of Canadian poetry. When Roberts, Carman, Lampman, and their numerous precursors and successors used their intellect and imagination to plant "affective kernels" and to cultivate literary properties in their native land they did more than generate associations and poems: they provided themselves, their contemporaries, and future generations with a potent means of making connections, establishing continuities, and even experiencing identity with a place, a history, and a culture. So it is that this essay closes with the hope that Canadian poetry will not be the mortal victim of the cultural amnesia of postmodernity but continue to make the places and species of Canada resonant with life-preserving meaning and affection.

NOTES

I am grateful to the University of Western Ontario and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of my teaching and research, and to John C. Ball, Louis P. Visentin, Demetres Tryphonopoulos and their colleagues at the University of New Brunswick who extended their hospitality to me as the 1997-98 W.C. Desmond Pacey Memorial Lecturer.

¹In "Lockerbie Street. For the Birthday of James Whitcomb Riley, October 7, 1914" (1916), Bliss Carman puts die matter succinctly: Lockerbie Street in Indianapolis is special because "there a poet has lived and sung" (April Airs 30). Riley died on July 22, 1916. For discussions of houses and trees as, in Pierre Nora's phrase, "lieux de mdmoire" see D.M.R. Bentley, "Historied Trees" (1994) and "The Politics and Poetics of Old Houses" (1996).

²In his undated Emigrant's Guide (34), George Henry also mentions Moore's poem in connection with St. Anne's Rapids, and it figures repeatedly in the work of tourists in pre- Confederation Canada, particularly and predictably those of a literary disposition such as Alfred Domett (a friend of Robert Browning) and Caroline Howard Gilman (a poet in her own right); see The Canadian Journal of'Alfred Dommett(1955), 19, Gilman's The Poetry of Travelling in the United States (1838), 118, and, for a discussion of touristic responses to the poem and the site that inspired it, Patricia Jasen's Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790-1914(1995), 64-66. Quoting Gilman's remarks after she and her companions had sung "A Canadian Boat Song" on the deck of their steamer ("It was pure romance to sit by that 'trembling moon,' perhaps on the very spot where Moore conceived the ... song, and hear the beautiful melody swell forrh on the silent air"), Jasen suggests that the poem may have "served as a sort of romantic shorthand, an item of musical kitsh, known to all, evoking easy associations with the Canadian wilderness, making people feel as if they had been there before — as though they were remembering it themselves" (66).

³The first use of this phrase recorded in the OED is in a letter of April 23, 1787 in which Burns mentions having made "a few pilgrimages over some of the classic ground of Caledonia." The source of Moore's "green spots upon memory's waste" later in the quota tion has yet to be identified.

⁴See also A Course of Lectures on Modern History (1811; trans. 1849), where Schlegel singles out poetry as the "one thing decisive as to the higher or lower degree of culture of an cient and simple nations" or "races living in closer communion with nature" because it "con tains their history, their faith, the sum of their limited knowledge, their whole views of this world and the next... the joy and soul of their life, the universal mind of a whole generation" (21). This being so, he continues, "it is to be regarded as a great advance in historical science, that we have begun in recent times thoroughly to combine the examination of poetical monu ments ... with historical investigation, and to consider poetry as one of the sources, whence a knowledge of times and nations is derived" (21-22). McGee's roots in Young Ireland and, thence, in German Romanticism are discussed by Michele J. Holmgren in "Native Muses and National Poetry: Nineteenth-Century Irish-Canadian Poetry" (1997), 139-209.

⁵See Bentley, "Parading Past" (1995) for a discussion of parades as sites of memory and Peter G. Goheen's Plate on "Parades and Processions" in the second volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada (1993) for the constitution and route of McGee's funeral procession in Montreal on April 13, 1868. "McGee's funeral was planned and conducted as a formal public event," writes Goheen; "Governments — federal, provincial, and municipal — sent repre sentatives of their executive and legislative branches. The professions marched along with members of national, religious, and social organizations. The ritual incorporated services in the leading parish churches of both the Irish-and-French-Carholic communities of Montreal. The procession passed rhrough the principal central streets, proclaiming symbolically McGee's status as a leading public figure. In contrast, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Parade of 24 June 1872 ... lacked such general official participation and moved beyond French Montreal only briefly."

⁶McGee may have been partly responsible for the fact that, as Jasen notes, "one of the highlights" of the excursions between Ottawa and Montreal on the Ottawa River in the 1860s was "a visit to the rapids and the village of St. Anne, where stood the very house where Moore was supposed to have written his boat song" (74, on the evidence of The Canadian Handbook and Tourist's Guide [1867], 21). In addition to "A Canadian Boat Song," McGee's note also mentions "'the Woodpecker,'" and the ballad 'Written on passing Dead-man's Island' [as] poems which must certainly be included in any further Canadian Anthology" (Canadian Ballads 63).

⁷In The Emigrant's Informant, "A Canadian Settler" is prompted by the "picturesque" scenery on the Bay of Quinte near Kingston to recall a literary site in Scodand: "A sail down this bay reminds me strongly of... the ... sublime and enchanting scenery on the borders of die waters of Ayre — the recollection of which, induces a train of reveries, rhat I turn ... ro pon der ... when I ... wandered alone on the banks ... of Ayre, and ... gazed on the humble cottage of Burns, and thought on the beautiful simplicity of his mountain daisy.... when ... I paused on die tablet [in the church-yard of Dumfries], that points out his cold bed to the eye of the passing stranger.... How often in farcy's vision ... have I loitered on diat spot of en dearment, where sleeps in peace, the remains of the once famed Robert Burns But my read ers will say, I am rambling on the banks of the waters of Ayre ... when I ought to be prosecuting my journey on the shore of Lake Ontario" (131-33).

⁸If only in Francis B. Gummere's Handbook of Poetics for Students (1885), Roberts would have known Coleridge's "In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; / In the pentameter aye falling in melody back" (qtd. in Gummere 232; see Roberts, Collected Let ters 59). In Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics (1929; rev. 1963; trans. 1984), Mikhail Bakhtin articulates a notion of genre memory that is also applicable to poetic forms such as the "Ovidian elegiac metre": "A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old and new simultaneously. Genre is reborn and renewed at every new stage in die development of literature and in every individual work of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre. Therefore even the archaic elements preserved in a genre are not dead but eternally alive; that is, archaic elements are capable of renewing themselves. A genre lives in the present, but al ways remembers its past, its beginnings. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development" (106, and see 121-22 and 135). See also Bentley, "The Poetics of Roberts' Tantramar Space" (1984) and The Gay] Grey Moose (1992), 39-40 for a discussion of the fit between the long lines of "Tantramar Revisited" and the "outroll[ing]" horizontality of the Tantramar Marshes, and both the photographs and the design of Thaddeus Holownia and Douglas Lochhead's Dykelands (1989) for their pic torial and bibliographic equivalents.

⁹ "The Emigration of the Fairies" (1888) by John Hunter-Duvar (1830-1899) is a scarcely less fanciful variation on the theme of "The Pipes of Pan" and "The Favorites of Pan." Its (not entirely) "original and happy" conception is that "a bit of earrh on which fairies still exist is washed from its native England during a storm, drifts across the Atlantic, and comes to rest at Hernewood" on Prince Edward Island where Hunter-Duvar, himself an emigrant from Scotland, lived during the last decade of his life (Cogswell 123).

¹⁰"It is with human beings as with birds," observes Frye (with perhaps an eye on the work of Robert Ardrey and other anthrozoologists) in The Bush Garden: "the creative instinct has a great deal to do with the assertion ofterritorial rights Even in the ... British Isles we find few writers who are simply British: Hardy belongs to 'Wessex,' Dylan Thomas to South Wales, Beckett to the Dublin-Paris axis, and so on" (i). See also Margaret Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market (1994), 35-55 for a brilliant discussion of the relationship between the Romantic view of the writer as an "original genius" and the emergence of the concepts of copyright and intellectual property in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If, as Wordsworth argued in 1815, "genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, ... the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or rhe employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown" (qtd. in Woodmansee 39; emphasis added), then, by extension, even actual "objects" such as landscapes are susceptible to being considered in some sense the property of the "original genius" who transforms them or, in popular (and sexist) parlance, "makes them his own."

¹¹" Scott quotes Keats's Fall of Hyperion 1:149-50 in arguing that, because all poets "strivfe] for perfection," "the most fragile lyric is a factor in human progress": "The poets have felt their obligation to aid in this progress and many of them have expressed it. The 'miseries of the world are their misery and will not let them rest'" ("Poetry and Progress" 26).

¹²In "Poetry and Piracy" (1895), Campbell cites several parallels between "Low Tide on Grand Pre" and various poems by Rossetti (see 30-32). Among numerous other parallels, he also notes the similarity between a line in Carman's "The Eavesdropper" (1893) — "With small innumerable sound" — and a line in Lampman's "Heat" — "A small innumerable sound" (35; Lampman, Poems 13). Carman's response to this last charge is interesting: "The reappearance of [Lampman's] line in ... [my] poem was due, I must believe, to what one may call unconscious (or, better, subconscious) appropriation. 'Subconscious appropriation' is a mild term that does not imply theft or anything like it. It means diat those little imps of the brain who wait upon imagination had played me a scurvy trick, and while I was diligendy searching for some new expression to convey my idea up they popped with this old line, which they had stored away in die treasure-chest of memory, quite with [out] my knowledge. And when one of my friends, on the appearance of Low Tide on Grand Pre, in 1893, pointed out die identity of the line witli Mr. Lampman's I was the saddest man in New York, not because I feared a charge of plagiarism, but because I must lose such a good line. In the second edition of Low Tide, published in April 1894, die line is amended (for the worse), and a note of die alteration is made on one of the prefatory leaves of the book" ("The War Among the Poets" 91).

¹³For example, Campbell's statement that Lampman will "No more ... Greet his fa miliar fields" "widi eyes a dream and a soul aloft, / In those high moods where love and beauty reign" (66) remembers forward die opening stanzas of "Among the Timothy" (1888), particularly and appropriately part of Lampman's description of the deadening effect of die city on his imagination:

And those high moods of mine diat sometime made
My heart a heaven, opening like a flower
A sweeter world where I in wonder strayed,
Begirt widi shapes of beauty and the power
Of dreams that moved dirough that enchanted clime
With changing breadis of rhyme,
Were all gone lifeless
(Poems 14)

¹⁴Lampman's early death may well have enhanced the appeal and durability of his work among his contemporaries and even his later critics, however, for as Gary Taylor, draw ing on the work of Gladys Engel and Kurt Lang, observes in Cultural Selection (1996), a medi tation on "Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time — And Others Don't" (dust-jacket), "Makers must... survive long enough to produce something that seems to oth ers memorable.... If makers live a long time, diey may produce more memorable works. On the other hand, if they die young, the works diey do produce may be especially cherished by survivors. The deadi itself, by its unexpectedness or unfairness, may intensify the stimulus created by die work; die sense of bereavement may be sharpened or prolonged by an aware ness of promise unfulfilled, of what might have been achieved if the gifted victim had lived longer"(73). That Keats, Byron, and Shelley make up a third of Taylor's subsequent list of the "makers" whose reputations may have been enhanced by early death indicates that Lampman was die posdiumous beneficiary of the Romantic cult of die prematurely dead or "slain" artist diat found its first hero in Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), "die marvellous boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride" (2:236) of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" (1807). Keats dedicated Endymion (1818) to Chatterton's memory and Henry Wallis made him a cultural icon for die Victorians in his much-reproduced painting entided The Death of Chatterton (1856).

¹⁵Burpee begins his essay with a lengthy quotation from Howell's very positive review of Among the Millet, and Other Poems in the April 1889 issue of Harper's (New York).

¹⁶Knister, of course, is alluding to "The Poet's Possession."

¹⁷See William Sherwood Fox 5-6 and, for the suggestion that Stringer got the idea from J.M. Elson, Nathaniel A. Benson's "The Lampman Cairn at Morpeth" and "Unveiling the Lampman Caitn at Morpeth." See also Papers of Archibald Lampman, Poet, Relating to the Lampman Memorial Cairn.

¹⁸Several letters from and to Fox in the Papers of Archibald Lampman, Poet, Relating to the Lampman Memorial Cairn indicate that Wilson was not among those personally invited to attend the ceremony, a group apparently restricted to "the literary contemporaries of Lampman, Charles G.D. Roberts, W.D. Lighthall, Frederic George Scott, and odiers" (Fox to George Patton on June 26, 1930). In a letter of September 15 to MacDonald, Fox regrets the poet's absence from die dedication and describes "The Cairn at Morpeth" as "very fine." A typescript entitled "Dedication Cetemonies" confirms that "a stanza of Wilson MacDonald's ... 'The Cairn at Morpeth'" was read on September 13 and pencil markings on the typescript of the poem indicate that the stanza chosen is the one beginning "There is an autumn haze."

¹⁹A litde over a month later, Roberts was in the Maritimes to attend the unveiling on October 18 of "a memorial to ... Carman in Forest Hill Cemetery, Fredericton, by Premier J.B.M. Baxter. Roberts's brodier Theodore Goodridge, and his son, Lloyd, also attended the ceremony and the former read his memorial poem, 'To Bliss Carman" (Pomeroy 311; and see Roberts, Collected Letters 395).

²⁰After spending many years in the United States and Europe, Roberts returned to Canada in 1925, settling in Toronto, where he lived until his death in 1943.

²¹Brown published an edition of "Two Canadian Poets[:]a Lecture" in the University of Toronto Quarterly, but not until July 1944. Knister quotes a portion of Lampman's account in his 1927 essay (103), but does not see die event that it describes as an Archimedean point in Canadian literature.

²²In "Among the Millet" (1947), Gustafson asserts that "the essence of Lampman's nature was one with the Romantic Revival, the Return to Nature The 'uncivilized' land scape of Ontario provided him with material without which he would have been poetically bankrupt" (147).

²³Whitridge also presents the evidence for Lampman's love affair with Kate Waddell in Lampman's Kate: Late Love Poems of Archibald Lampman (1975) and in her contribution to The Lampman Symposium.

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