Confederation Poets

Roberts, Lampman, Carman, and Scott were among the first critically acclaimed poets to be published after the formation of the Dominion of Canada".

[citation needed] Lampman wrote about his excitement in encountering Roberts's work: One May evening somebody lent me Orion and Other Poems, then recently published.

In the early 1890s, when Carman worked on the editorial staffs of The Independent and The Chapbook, and other American magazines, he published poems by the other three.

"Lampman and Scott were close friends; with Wilfred Campbell they began the column "At the Mermaid Inn" [8] in the Toronto Globe, in 1892.

"[citation needed] Originally they wrote the column in order to raise some money for Campbell, who was in financial difficulty.

Partly in order to help his pockets a little Mr. Scott and I decided to see if we could get the Toronto "Globe" to give us space for a couple of columns of paragraphs & short articles, at whatever pay we could get for them.

His intention was to conjure up a vision of The Mermaid Inn Tavern in old London where Sir Walter Raleigh founded the famous club whose members included Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other literary lights.

The Confederation writers' poetry, while including some Canadian elements of style and content, showed the strong influence of English Victorian verse.

Regardless of their explicit statements about nationalism, in terms of their aesthetics, the Confederation Poets were not Canadian nationalists, but thorough-going cosmopolitans.

All were serious craftsmen who assimilated their borrowings from English and American writing in a personal mode of expression, treating the important subjects and themes of their day, often in a Canadian setting.

In 1883 Roberts's friend Edmund Collins published his biography, The Life and Times of Sir John A. MacDonald, which devoted a lengthy chapter to "Thought and Literature in Canada."

"Collins allots Heavysege only one paragraph, dismisses Sangster’s verse as 'not worth a brass farthing,' and ignores Mair completely."

"[15] Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, the Scotts, and George Frederick Cameron are the male poets represented.

That would be the pattern repeated in subsequent anthologies, with minor variations: Campbell boycotted being published in A Treasury of Canadian Verse (1900).

Since that standard was Romantic and Victorian, the Confederation Poets have since been "blamed" by some for retarding the development of Modernist poetry in Canada.

For example, the Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary says of them that: "Their legacy of Realism, Romanticism, and nationalism was so powerful that it lasted well into the first decades of the 20th century, beyond when much of their best work had been published.

"[15] "In various editorials, Smith argued that Canadian poets must go beyond the ‘maple-leaf school’ of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G.D. Roberts in favour of free verse, imagistic treatment, displacement, complexity, and a leaner diction free of Victorian mannerisms.

"[citation needed] The term "Maple Leaf School" was picked up from the progressive magazine Canadian Forum, which was waging a similar crusade for literary modernism.

One of its six stanzas lampooned the attention given to the Confederation Poets":[15] The air is heavy with Canadian topics, And Carman, Lampman, Roberts, Campbell, Scott, Are measured for their faith and philanthropics, Their zeal for God and King, their earnest thought.

"[1] Ross de-emphasized, but did not question, the modernist debunking of the Confederation Poets: "It is natural enough that our recent writers have abandoned and disparaged 'The Maple Leaf School' of Canadian poetry.

"A proper recognition of his nineteenth-century contexts can enhance our appreciation of Carman, and of his Confederation peers," Tracy Ware wrote in Canadian Poetry in 1984.

He argued that "What James Reaney has recently written of Crawford, Lampman and Roberts can be extended to Carman, Scott, Campbell, Sherman, Pickthall and others: they 'wrote well and were of note.