Canadian Poetry and American Magazines, 1885-1905

by James Doyle


The literature of the day in America,” wrote Archibald Lampman in “At the Mermaid Inn” in 1892, “as far as fiction, poetry, and criticism are concerned, is concentrated in the magazines. These publications are attracting to them most of our literary and artistic effort. All classes of literary people complain that it is only writing for the magazines that pays. The magazines, therefore, must be exercising a very strong formative influence on contemporary American literature.”1 This influence, as Lampman makes clear in many other of his contributions to the Toronto Globe column, extended to Canadian literature, and especially to Canadian poetry, which in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was being subtly but extensively affected by its dependence on various literary forces emanating from the United States. The economic and cultural ramifications of this situation are particularly deserving of careful study in view of the fact that in the 1880’s and 90’s a new generation of poets of unprecedented literary distinction was emerging in English Canada. Lampman, Wilfred Campbell, Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott all looked southward to the periodicals of Boston and New York for editorial and critical acceptance, and this orientation had an important influence on the kind of poetry they wrote, as well as on their conception of Canadian literature as a whole.

     It is true, of course, as Northrop Frye has observed, that “the American influence on Canadian literature has always been at least as direct and immediate as the British influence, and often more so.”2 By the mid-1880’s, however, the American influence began to take on new importance, particularly as a result of the remarkable boom in magazine publishing in the post-Civil War United States. This boom had many causes, undoubtedly including such cultural factors as the rapid spread of literacy and the voracious appetite for varied reading material in an eclectic society, as well as such economic factors as restrictions against imported publications, and shortages of the more expensive paper needed for books. Harold Innis has suggested that in the 1880’s American publishers turned away from an emphasis on books because of paper restrictions, limited supplies of literary material from the popular British authors, and improvements in the technology of printing. “The basis was laid,” says Innis, “for the supremacy of the periodical, with significant consequences for American and Canadian literature.”3 For American literature the consequences were extensive and complex. Dozens of “family” magazines brought fiction, poetry, and especially formal and informal essays into every literate American household, although much of this reading material was ephemeral and adapted to a narrow range of approved editorial formulas. The best magazines of Boston and New York, such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, and the Century, encouraged comparatively high standards of writing, but these periodicals were also the centres of huge publishing empires and powerful editorial establishments, which became the omnipotent arbiters of American thought and taste. For Canadian literature — especially for its potential development as an autonomous tradition — the results were devastating. “Any newsdealer [in Toronto],” wrote Sara Jeannette Duncan in the Week for January 7, 1887, “will give us startling facts as to the comparative circulation of the American and English magazines. . . . As the great northern magazine phalanx is dictating now to the literary movement in the South its limits and its character, so will it some day dictate to a similar movement in Canada.”4

     By 1887 the American magazines were already a powerful cultural force in Canada, having not only predominated over the British magazines, as Duncan notes, but also effectively prevented the significant development of domestic periodicals. The Week was an unusually durable specimen in the latter category, which managed to survive for all of thirteen years (1883 to 1896), a record unsurpassed among Canadian family magazines established in the late nineteenth century except for the unusually popular Canadian Magazine (1893-1923). The sad fate of most Canadian attempts to compete with Harper’s or Scribner’s is more typically represented by such ventures as the Dominion Illustrated Monthly (1888-95), Massey’s Magazine (1896-97), the Lounger of Ottawa (1896-97), and Our Monthly of Toronto (two issues, in 1896). Without protective tariffs against American competition, and without the extensive financial resources of their American counterparts, the magazines of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal could not hope to attract subscribers, advertisers, or contributors in sufficient numbers to ensure their survival.

     Potential contributors to Canadian magazines, furthermore, almost always looked to the American periodicals before bothering with the homegrown publications. From the point of view of individual ambition, this national disloyalty was understandable: most of the American magazines paid quite handsomely for contributions, whereas their Canadian counterparts were often unable to pay anything at all; the American magazines also held out the possibility of international fame, and in contrast to the rather exclusive British magazines, they were democratically receptive to unknown literary talent. Thus for young English-Canadian poets as for young American poets, literary achievement came to be identified with acceptance by the leading magazines such as the Atlantic, Harper’s, Scribner’s and the Century. Some idea of the extent of this trend is conveyed in a dissertation by A.R. Rogers, “American Recognition of Canadian Authors Writing in English, 1890-1960,” which reports approximately twenty-two hundred “poems, short stories, plays, humorous essays and other pieces of creative writing by [Canadian] authors . . . in American periodicals during the period from 1890 to 1960.” For the five leading representatives of the post-Confederation generation of poets, Rogers reported the following approximate numbers of poems published in American magazines: Lampman, 76; Roberts, 107; Carman, 183; Campbell, 37; Scott, 23. Most of these poems appeared in the four leading American magazines mentioned above, but there were also regular appearances in such less prominent publications as the Overland Monthly, the Outlook, the Living Age, the Bookman, McClure’s, and Munsey’s.5

     The Confederation group of Canadian poets began to publish in the major American magazines fairly early in the 1880’s: Roberts’ “A Breathing Time” was in the Century for July 1883, Lampman’s “Bird Voices” was in the same magazine in May 1885, and Wilfred Campbell’s “Canadian Folk Song” appeared in the July 1885 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. The most frequently cited event in the record of American recognition of Canadian poetry, however, is William Dean Howells’ review of Lampman’s Among the Millet in the April 1889 Harper’s, a review which is often credited with initiating a widespread receptiveness to Canadian poetry among American editors. Howells’ sympathy and generosity toward Canada and Canadian culture was perhaps unique among nineteenth-century American literary figures, and was partly attributable to his personal circumstances: his father had held a consular post in Canada for several years, one of his sisters was married to a Canadian and living in Ottawa, and Howells’ own travels in the northern country had inspired him to use Canadian settings in his first two novels. In spite of these Canadian interests and experiences, however, Howells’ brief notice of Lampman’s poems suggests that he looked on Canadian literature, as most literary Americans subsequently did, not as a potentially autonomous national tradition, but as a regional or “local colour” extension of the literature of the United States. This assumption is underscored by Howells’ comparison between Lampman’s work and the Kentucky verse of Madison Cawein. Similarly, in another favourable review in the January 1892 Harper’s, Howells associates Wilfred Campbell’s Lake Lyrics with the work of four American regional nature poets, Orin Cedesman, Meredith Nelson, J.P. Irvine, and Denton J. Snider.6

     The almost total obscurity which now envelops the names of Cawein and the other four poets indicates some essential features of the American literary world into whose orbit Canadian poets were being drawn. The burgeoning economic and cultural circumstances of the United States following the Civil War brought a proliferation of literary magazines, together with a tremendous increase in the number of published “magazine poets” who specialized in providing the kind of poetry which editors demanded. The form and content of this poetry, like the general form and content of the magazines themselves, were derived from the so-called “genteel tradition” of New England literature, the tradition led by Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes. It is a critical commonplace now, and from all perspectives a justifiable one, to denigrate these “schoolroom poets,” to place them very substantially behind experimentalists like Dickinson, Poe, Melville, and especially Whitman, and to ridicule or ignore their many disciples and imitators. Certainly it is difficult now to take seriously the typical efforts of the most frequently featured magazine poets of the 1880’s and 90’s, authors like Thomas Bailey Aldrich, James Whitcomb Riley, Richard Watson Gilder, or Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose poetical pomposity often seems ludicrously reflected in their sonorous triple-barreled signatures. The artistic defects of these poets can be overstated: they were by no means as bad, for instance, as the horrendous sweet songstresses of the regional newspapers whom Mark Twain often satirized. They were, however, generally committed to an imitative and dogmatic conception of poetry. In form, the typical magazine poetry was relentlessly traditional: there was a general avoidance of free verse, and even of blank verse, in favour of strongly accented rhythm and regular patterns of rhyme. Attempts at experimentation were limited to adapting features from foreign poetic traditions, especially from German and Scandinavian verse, as Longfellow and other scholarly New England poets had done. In content, the magazine poets concentrated on a relatively few basic themes, most of them derived from early nineteenth-century British and German romantic poetry, and sometimes arbitrarily adapted to the North American context. The celebration of nature, of course, was the pervasive and supreme subject: nature benevolent, sublime, and sometimes mysterious, but always with inspirational and restorative powers, as American romantics like Emerson and Bryant had conceived it. The landscape was almost always North American, although travellers and scholars like Longfellow gave authority to the occasional use of European settings; toward the end of the century there was a noticeable increase of interest in local colour, especially of the midwest, reflecting one of the few direct links with the regionalism of realist fiction. Besides nature, these poets celebrated history, especially North American and United States history. Domestic sentimentalism was popular: dramatic poetry emphasized scenes of courtship, married love, family problems, maternal feelings, and so on. Related to the sentimentalism were occasional touches of Gothic: deathbed scenes, graveyards, and sometimes, ghosts, especially of mothers and children. And finally, there was infrequent humour, often of the heavy-handed dialect kind, such as James Russell Lowell had made popular.

     American magazine poetry of the last two decades of the nineteenth century had thus entered into what must be described as a decadent stage, when conventions and styles which had already been stale and derivative thirty or forty years earlier were taken as unassailable ideals. There were slight winds of change here and there: a few Emily Dickinson poems were published, unfortunately with editorial “improvements,” Harper’s and the Century occasionally accepted a few brief and morally innocuous free verse poems on old age by Walt Whitman, and toward the end of the century there appeared more experimental pieces by young authors like Edith Wharton and William Vaughan Moody. But on the whole the disciples and imitators of the genteel tradition dominated the magazine poetry scene. This situation, obviously unhealthy for poetry in general, was particularly unfortunate for Canadian poetry, since the first generation of genuinely distinctive and potentially original artists was just emerging in the northern country at a time when American literature — or at least one of its most important media — was in a state of decline. The modern historian of American magazines has referred to the period 1885-1905 as the “twilight of poetry,” a time when post-Civil War cultural exuberance was rapidly waning, and the widespread popular interest in poetry previously stimulated by such flamboyant figures as Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller was giving way to indifference. The Atlantic Monthly and other influential magazines were beginning to decrease the relative amount of space devoted to verse, ironically at a time when they were being inundated by more poetic contributions than ever.7

     Into this difficult cultural scene the post-Confederation group of Canadian poets made their entrance, with a remarkable degree of success. Their success was achieved, however, by the whole-hearted acceptance of the standards of American poets and editors. Roberts, Carman, Lampman, Campbell and Scott all admired the older New England genteel poets, and among the moderns their preferences inclined toward the triple-named magazinists. In “At the Mermaid Inn” Scott, Campbell, and Lampman all lavishly praised Thomas Bailey Aldrich and James Whitcomb Riley, and Lampman went so far as to place these two figures at the head of American poetry.8 Lampman and Campbell both acknowleged Whitman’s largeness of vision and nationalistic energy in separate eulogies on the American, but neither could entirely forgive what they considered his crudities of technique and subject matter.9 If Whitman influenced them at all, the influence is obscured by the much more obvious affinities with the genteel tradition. Many years later Duncan Campbell Scott insisted that “Walt Whitman must be counted as an influence on my general outlook on life,” but he was obviously speaking of personal attitudes rather than of literary techniques or themes.10 Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, in a reminiscence of late nineteenth-century Canadian poetry, stated conclusively that “Whitman’s influence both in thought and in form upon our poetry of this period is entirely negligible.”11

     Roberts also recalled in the same reminiscence that among late nineteenth-century Canadian poets unlike their English counterparts, “there was singuarly little confusion of purpose, or casting about for themes. In the main it was Nature poetry, of one sort or another.”12 This is certainly true of the bulk of poetry published by Roberts, Carman, Lampman, Campbell and Scott in the 1880’s and early 90’s. In his brief notice of Among the Millet, Howells stressed Lampman’s “intimate friendship with Nature,” and it was as nature poets that the Canadians mainly interested American editors and critics. “Canada is in herself an inspiration for the poet,” wrote a journalist named Joseph Dana Miller in the May 1895 Munsey’s Magazine, and his brief, superficial survey of the work of fifteen Canadian poets called attention to how these authors had “all imbibed something of the haunting spirit of her woods and inland seas.”13 Another American commentator similarly insisted that Roberts and Carman, who were living at the time in Boston and New York respectively, expressed in their poetry a longing “for the country and the forest--not so much for Nature in her more majestic aspects of mountain and ocean, as for the woods, streams, and winds of Canada.”14 And Howells, in an 1899 survey of what he called “the new poetry,” declared that “the first thing to be said of [the Canadian poets] is that they are all naturalists. . . . They are pictorial rather than dramatic; the characteristic which they have most in common is that love of nature in which each of them appears a sort of solitary.”15

     This was all valuable promotion for Canadian poets as far as one aspect of their work was concerned, an aspect in which they themselves took considerable pride. But the more ambitious and venturesome poets, particularly Lampman and Campbell, began to recognize fairly early in their careers that the relative narrowness of American editorial receptivity and critical praise could impose stringent limitations on Canadian poetry, and reduce American (not to mention Canadian) perceptions of Canada to a string of romantic and pastoral cliches. By 1890, Lampman was known primarily as the author of a series of sensuous and meditative landscape poems which had been appearing regularly in Scribner’s Magazine, poems such as “The Loons” (September 1887), “Midsummer Night” (August 1888), “Evening” (September 1889) and “To the Cricket” (July 1890). Even a Canadian-born editor of a Boston magazine contributed to this narrow exposure of Lampman’s talents. Edward William Thomson, editor of the Youth’s Companion from 1891 to 1901, stretched the supposedly juvenile scope of his periodical to print about thirty Lampman pieces, all but one or two of which were descriptive nature poems. Bliss Carman and Charles G.D. Roberts were familiar to American readers mainly as descriptive poets specializing in the landscape of Evangeline country, through such works as Carman’s famous “Low Tide on Grand Pré” (originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, March 1887), and Roberts’ “Tides” (Century, August 1885) or “Blomidon” (Century, February 1890). Even before he published Lake Lyrics (1889) Wilfred Campbell was establishing himself as the poet of the Laurentian highlands of Ontario and Quebec — a region almost as familiar to late nineteenth-century American tourists as Evangeline’s Acadia — by his appearance in the Century with such poems as “A Lake Memory” (November 1888), and “The Winter Lakes” (January 1889).

     From time to time Canadian poets were able to break out of the patterns which American expectations were creating for them, but such ventures were usually confined within the narrow thematic and technical range of conventional American magazine verse. Thus if Campbell’s “Pan the Fallen” (in the Atlantic Monthly, December 1890) is not in the familiar nature-worship vein of Canadian poetry, it is still characterized mainly by sentimental-Gothic conventions, as is his gruesome tour de force “The Mother” (Harper’s, April 1891). Sir Charles G.D. Roberts’ brief poetic narrative “How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec” (Century, June 1888), dealing with what the Americans called the “French and Indian War,” was of interest to readers on both sides of the border, and Duncan Campbell Scott’s poems and stories of Indians and adventurers in the Northwest, appearing regularly in Scribners’ Magazine, were part of an increasingly familiar mythology of the northern frontier popularized in the United States by historian Francis Parkman and others.16

     If Canadian poets ventured to address American readers on political subjects, editors apparently insisted that the sentiments should at least be not inconsistent with republican assumptions and ideals. This is the inference to be drawn from what may be the only poem explicitly about Canadian patriotism published in a late nineteenth-century American magazine, Roberts’ “Collect for Dominion Day” (Century, July 1886). In this pious call for peace and unity addressed to the “Father of Nations” there are no political ideals to which nineteenth-century Americans would not readily assent, from the emphasis on stern-visaged individualism to the suggestion of violent struggle and bloodshed as necessary elements in the making of new nations. Roberts’ poem is in fact virtually indistinguishable except in its title (which might as well have been “Collect for Independence Day”) from hundreds of similar American poetic effusions.

     It might be argued, of course, that by 1886 Americans and Canadians were essentially agreed on basic questions concerning the nature of individual freedom and national sovereignty. On at least one point, however, the two countries were virtually irreconcilable, and this was the matter of the British connection. At the turn of the century Canada’s historical tie with Britain and the continuing development of the Empire as a partnership of nations were among the most eagerly discussed political and economic questions in the Dominion, questions which provided Canadian poets and novelists with some of their most essential and most distinctive matter. But poems expressing imperialist sentiments or debating the imperialist question were of no interest to American editors and critics, and had to be reserved for such Canadian collections as W.D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889) or the few fledgling literary magazines of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Americans found the subject of imperialism not so much offensive as incomprehensible, since it went against what they took to be self-evident propositions about the New World. Wilfred Campbell’s poem “The Lazarus of Empire” was published in the Living Age for July 28,1900, but this complaint about the mother country’s neglect of the dominions was read by Americans as a reflection of the Canadian desire for republican-style independence, rather than as one element in the complex dialectic of imperialism. When this poem was collected with several other imperialist pieces in Campbell’s Beyond the Hills of Dream (1899), it confused at least one eminent American literary figure, whose response to the volume was undoubtedly typical of editors and readers in the United States. “The patriotic poems also I have admired,” wrote Boston critic and poet Thomas Wentworth Higginson in a letter to Campbell, “although with a little bewilderment of mind when I read ‘The Lazarus of Empire’ which seems inconsistent with the poems entitled ‘Victoria’ and ‘England.’”17

     But if American critics and editors misunderstood or rejected Canadian political poems, the loss is perhaps not great from an aesthetic point of view, since Canadians could be as pompously rhetorical as any other people when it came to expressing nationalism in verse. Certainly the limited exposure of Campbell’s “vaster Britain” lyrics is much less regrettable than the neglect of Archibald Lampman’s poems of the city and society. Stereotyped by editors as the poet of suburban and rural fields, Lampman met with little encouragement when he turned to poems expressing his impatience with the stifling world of Ottawa and the civil service bureaucracy, and with the decadence of capitalism and industrial technology. Lampman’s reasonable but perhaps naive response to his situation, which he saw mainly in representative terms as typical of the plight of the artist in Canada, was to appeal for the development of more and better Canadian magazines. His confidence in the ultimate development of an autonomous Canadian literature was thus expressed in “At the Mermaid Inn”:

There can be no doubt that a great deal of talent for every kind of writing lies dormant in the youth of Canada simply for the want of some attractive and stimulating vehicle of publication. We can have no literature of any consequence where there is no interested public, no publishing facilities, no journals or magazines, to whose pages it is a matter of profit and pride to win admission. But when these are found we shall have plenty of literature, I believe the best on the continent. . . . Much could be done now to draw out the naturally abundant talent of our people by the establishment and endowment of a great and attractive magazine.18

     Other Canadian authors were less inclined to be so optimistic, or so patient with their continuing dependence on American publishing outlets. In 1891 Edward William Thomson lamented to Wilfred Campbell after having received a number of rejections from American editors:

We Canadians are a good deal hampered by the lack of iiterary publications in our own country, for in appealing . . . to foreign audiences we are required not only . . . to refrain from merely allusive remarks that would be instantly understood in Canada, but also to place ourselves mentally in the place ofthe foreign reader. It is writing in hobbles.19

Campbell also chafed under this situation, especially after he was stereotyped by editors as the poet of the Laurentian lake country. Besides seeing himself as the poetic spokesman for imperialism, Campbell was anxious to emulate Tennyson and other moderns in the use of Arthurian materials and in the writing of poetic drama. In 1895 he managed to get published in Ottawa Mordred and Hildebrand: A Book of Tragedies, but American editors who admired his lake lyrics were no more interested in his Arthurian work than in his imperialism. The Atlantic Monthly declined to print any of his Arthurian poems, a refusal which Campbell angrily attributed to “discrimination.” When Boston scholar and editor E.C. Stedman included Campbell in a section of “Colonial Poets” in his Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895, he passed over the Canadian poet’s most recent efforts in favour of reprinting two of the familiar lake lyrics, a “Canadian Folk Song,” and a northern Gothic piece, “The Werewolves.” Campbell immediately got off an impetuous complaint to Stedman, to which the New Englander tactfully replied,

. . . The reason that I did not, finally, take anything from your “Mordred” was that, first, I chose Iyrical rather than dramatic verse, when an author had written both; second, I chose fresh and “local” themes in preference to Arthurian plays. Again, your “Lake Lyrics” is unusually rich in just what I was seeking — poetry charged with the Canadian landscape, atmosphere, and feeling.20

     Stedman might also have said, if we were not aware of Campbell’s sensitivity and short temper, that the Arthurian verse was both derivative and bombastic, and from any reasoned critical perspective vastly inferior to the nature poems. But if Campbell was a poor judge of his own talents, his complaints against the Atlantic and Stedman involve at least an abstractly valid point. It is obvious that American editors and critics were extremely reluctant to allow Canadian poets to move beyond the narrow bounds of local colour into any kind of experimental or unusual idiom, except for an occasional venture into sentimental, Gothic, or other familiar conventions of magazine verse.

     After about 1905, Canadian poets of the Lampman-Campbell-Scott generation published in the American magazines with diminishing frequency. There were a number of reasons for this change: Lampman, of course, was dead; Campbell had become an even more committed imperialist and was spending longer periods in Britain; Roberts was devoting more of his attention to fiction and wildlife essays; Duncan Campbell Scott was spending more of his time preparing editions of his poems and offering his work to Canadian periodicals. Of the Confederation poets only Bliss Carman, who had close ties of blood and long residence in New England, continued to appear regularly in American magazines, until his death in 1929. Conversely, changes were taking place in the American magazines which made them no longer quite so accessible to an aging generation of Victorian Canadian local colour poets. Older editors such as Richard Watson Gilder of the Century and Henry Mills Alden of Harper’s were giving way to younger, more progressive men who were breaking with the genteel tradition by giving space to upcoming young modern American poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. Along with a rapidly changing literary climate were new economic circumstances, in which very soon the old-fashioned literary periodical would give way to the roto-gravure and news magazine. Finally, it might be suggested that with the decline in influence of William Dean Howells, who had always been an important friend to Canadian poets, there was a noticeable falling offof interest in Canada and Canadians on the part of American editors and writers.

     For all these reasons and probably many more, Canadian poetry ceased to be so closely linked with American periodicals. For about twenty years, however, the involvement had been extensive and important. Whether it had been beneficial is an ultimately unanswerable question. It is perhaps an oversimplification to say with Harold Innis that the economic and cultural hegemony of the United States publishing industry in English-speaking North America was “fatal” to Canadian cultural interests by imposing a narrowly materialistic concept of literature on writers and readers.21 For all their limitations, the best American periodicals did not merely cater to the lowest common denominator of the reading public. If in literary ideals they were derivative and even decadent, they also helped to preserve some valuable traditions of English-language poetry, and they offered young authors the opportunity of international exposure, even if this exposure was sometimes gained at the expense of genuine self expression and nationalistic consciousness. If Lampman, Campbell, Scott, and the others had not had the encouragement and prestige of American publication, they might not have written so much or so well. If, on the other hand, Canadian poets had not chosen to depend so heavily on American editors and critics, they might have more readily developed an autonomous, distinctively national tradition. In the long run, they were confronted by the perennial cultural dilemma of English Canadians, who must pursue an elusive compromise between the recognition of their affinities with the United States, and their urge to create an autonomous society and culture. The situation of the Confederation poets with regard to American magazines ultimately reflects the insolubility of this dilemma, as well as the variety of individual responses to it.


Notes

  1. Lampman, At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in “The Globe” 1892-3, introduced by Barrie Davies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1979), p.96.[back]

  2. Frye, “National Consiousness in Canadian Culture,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Series IV, Vol. XIV (1976) p. 59. [back]

  3. Innis, “The Strategy of Culture” (i952), rpt. in Contexts of Canadian Criticism, ed. Eli Mandel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p.77. [back]

  4. Duncan, “American Influence on Canadian Thought,” rpt. in The Search for English Canadian Literature, ed. Carl Ballstadt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 39,41.[back]

  5. Rogers, “American Recognition of Canadian Authors Writing in English, 1890-1960,” Diss. University of Michigan, 1964, I, 84, also chapter 6, “Poems, Short Stories and Other Works of Belles Lettres in American Magazines,” and corresponding bibliographical appendix.[back]

  6. Howells, “The Editor’s Study,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 78 (April, 1889), 821; and 84 (January, 1892), 315-20.[back]

  7. See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1957), III,229-31, and IV,120-21.[back]

  8. At the Mermaid Inn, p. 145. [back]

  9. Ibid., pp.50,60.[back]

  10. L.W. Brockington, “Duncan Campbell Scott’s Eightieth Birthday” [interview with Scott], Saturday Night, August 1, 1942.[back]

  11. Roberts, “Canadian Poetry in its Relation to the Poetry of England and America,” introduced by D.M.R. Bentley, Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, 3 (Fall/Winter, 1978), 82. [back]

  12. Ibid., 81.[back]

  13. Miller, “The Singers of Canada,” Munsey’s Magazine, 13 (May, 1895), 136.[back]

  14. Greenough White, “A Pair of Canadian Poets,” Sewanee Review, 7 (January, 1899), 49.[back]

  15. Howells, “The New Poetry,” North American Review, 168 (May, 1899), 590-91.[back]

  16. I have discussed in detail the American analogues and influences in Scott’s writing in “Duncan Campbell Scott and American Literature,” forthcoming in the proceedings of the 1979 University of Ottawa Symposium on Scott. [back]

  17. T.W. Higginson to Wilfred Campbell, December 28, 1899, Lorne Pierce Collection, Queen’s University.[back]

  18. At the Mermaid Inn, pp. 84-85.[back]

  19. E.W. Thomson to Wilfred Campbell, April 27, 1891, Lorne Pierce Collection, Queen’s University.[back]

  20. E.C. Stedman to Wilfred Campbell, January 30, 1896, Lorne Pierce Collection, Queen’s University. Stedman also refers to Campbell’s complaints about the “discrimination” of the Atlantic.[back]

  21. Innis, “The Strategy of Culture,” p.72.[back]