Post-Confederation poetry

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521868761.009

7 - Post-Confederation poetry

from PART TWO - THE POST-CONFEDERATION PERIOD

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2010

D. M. R. Bentley

Edited by

Coral Ann Howells and

Eva-Marie Kröller

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Coral Ann Howells: Affiliation:
University of Reading; University of London
Eva-Marie Kröller: Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver

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Prelude and the precursors of the Confederation group

“Whereas the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their Desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. …” When the British North America Act, of which these are the opening words, came into effect on July 1, 1867, the ground was prepared for the growth of what many expected would be a robustly northern national culture. Some seeds had already been sown and more were expected quickly to follow. While Confederation was barely a gleam in its fathers’ eyes, one of its most eloquent proponents, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, published a collection of Canadian Ballads (1858). During the Dominion’s infancy even one of its most vehement opponents, Joseph Howe, was persuaded to assemble for publication a selection of the verses that would appear posthumously in 1874 in his Poems and Essays. In that year, “the Canadian Burns,” Alexander McLachlan, followed The Emigrant, and Other Poems (1861) with Poems and Songs (1874), and in 1877 the arch-Tory William Kirby followed The U. E.: A Tale of Upper Canada in XII Cantos (1859) with The Golden Dog (Le Chien d’or: A Legend) of Quebec (1877). An English translation of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé’s racially conciliatory historical romance Les Anciens Canadiens (1863) had preceded Confederation and another would follow, albeit not until 1890, by which time Edward Hartley Dewart’s anticipatory Selections from Canadian Poets (1864) had given way to William Douw Lighthall’s stridently Canadian Songs of the Great Dominion (1889). In the interim, Louis Honoré Fréchette’s Les Fleurs boréales (1879) had won the prestigious Prix Montyon of the Académie Française.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature , pp. 125 - 143

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521868761.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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7 - Post-Confederation poetry

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