Trees and Forest: Notes on Variety and Unity in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Writing

D.M.R. Bentley

With the same leave, as the Ancients caa’d that king of body Sylva, or Yhn, in which there workes of divers nature, and matter congested; as the multitude call Timbertrees. Promiscuously growing, a Wood, or Forrest: so am I bold to entitle these lesser Poems, of later growth, …Under-Wood, out of the Analogie they hold to the Forrest, in my former booke…

—Ben Jonson, “To the Reader,” Under-Woods.

Consisting of Divers Poems (1640)

In this paper,¹ I wish to present and explore the idea that Canadian literary writing of the nineteenth century, particularly the poetry and non-fictional prose of the period preceding and following Confederation, is informed by two distinct aesthetics: the aesthetic of variety (or miscellany), which favours “work of divers nature,”² and the aesthetic of unity, which favours works characterized by “similarity of tone” or “a single theme.”³ after elaborating this distinction in relation to a selection of nineteenth-century Canadian texts, and briefly tracing the triumph of unity over variety in the ‘eighties and ‘ nineties, the paper will examine a few of the unfortunate consequences of treating (criticizing, editing) works arising out of one aesthetic with the assumptions of the other. It will be suggested that, on account of the predominance in the academy of high (or classic) Modernist insistence on the unity of works of art, critics and scholars still tend to distort and misconceive early Canadian works that are underpinned by the aesthetic of variety, squeezing such authors as Susanna Moodie and Charles G. D. Roberts into moulds that they do not fit.

     A literary work that arises from the aesthetic of variety will, by definition contain a diversity of elements, which may include miscellaneous genres (blank verse and hymns, for example, or narrative and lyric elements), different media (prose and poetry), dissimilar subjects (contemporary, classical, romance), and even a medley of voices or authors. It is early to thin o examples in each of these categories from nineteenth-century Canada: Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856) and Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie: A Love Story (1884) both combine narrative and lyrical elements, the Spenserian stanzas of the former and the blank verse of the latter being interspersed with a variety of “song” forms, including hymns and lyrics, a madrigal (Sangster), and a couplet poem (Crawford). The different media of poetry and prose are found in such works as Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), which also—and I shall be returning to this – contains three distinct authors or voices: Moodie herself, Dunbar Moodie, and Samuel Strickland. A medley of subjects is evident as well in the pre-Confederation works already mentioned, but is also a major characteristic of Lampman’s Among the Millet, and Other Poems (1888) and Charles G.D. Robert’s In Divers Tones (1886), both of which intentionally contain a variety of literary forms and subjects. The matter of intention can be stated with some certainty, not only in the case of Robert’s volume (where the title is not ironic) but also in the case of Lampman, who elsewhere and explicitly champions the idea of “variety of subjects” and “styles” as a poetic virtue. “The perfect poet,” he writes in his essay on “Poetic Interpretation” (c. 1895), “would have no set style. He would have a different one for everything he would write, a manner exactly suited to the subject…”⁴

     Why, it might be asked, did writers as historically and temperamentally diverse as Moodie, Sangster, Crawford, Roberts, and Lampman deliberately choose to publish works that were marked by some form or other of miscellany? An answer to this question might appear to lie in the realm of models – for instance, in the debt of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and Malcolm’s Katie to such medley poems as Byron’s Childe Harold and Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, or in the debts of Among the Millet and In Divers Tones to Tennyson’s emphasis on the various, fragmentary, and myriadminded in In Memoriam and Maud (the former, of course, the source of Roberts’ title). But the matter of a weak or secondary poet’s reliance on the model of a strong or primary author, though doubtless and important factor in the area of generic choice, skirts and conceals the more interesting question, it seems to me, of why so many writers in nineteenth-century Canada and Britain chose to produce more-or-less miscellaneous works.

     Two answers to this larger question come readily to mind, the first an aetiolated off-shoot of post-Romantic ideas about the relation of art to the transcendental and the second a rather more robust and quotidian item—the attempt of nineteenth-century writers to make their work as attractive and engaging as possible to a diverse reading audience or, as it may be, a reader with diverse interests. A full answer of the first sort (which is neither possible nor necessary in the present context) would involve a discussion of the relationship of art or the symbol—the signifier—to the transcendental signified, with special emphasis on the way in which the High Victorians of the Coleridge-Carlyle-Tennyson line viewed the signifier as participating ontologically, but not entirely in the signified—as a real presence or open secret⁵ that is both a part of and a gesture towards a vision that cannot be wholly communicated. The aesthetic consequences of this were various (the operative word) and included a turning towards the fragmentary, incomplete, and multifarious, towards forms which, though predicated on a belief in transcendental wholeness, are nevertheless superficially miscellaneous. Such ideas are important for nineteenth-century Canadian literature, particularly for a full understanding of the frequent tension between variety and unity in the work of the Confederation poets, but they are, I think, less important across the full range of early writing in Canada than the matter of audience or readerly appeal – the attempt of writers and publishers in the Colonial and Confederation periods to address and engage (and, thus, sell books to) a wide (and, therefore, diverse)spectrum of a relatively small readership.

     It is precisely at the juncture of economics and hermeneutics that variety makes its earliest appearances in Colonial Canada, and in a place that indicates one of the origins of the aesthetic in eighteenth-century newspapers like The Rambler and The Spectator. “It is not our intention,” wrote John Howe in his address “To the Pubic” at the beginning of the fourth volume of The Nova-Scotia Magazine in 1791, “to diminish the miscellaneous part of our collection, which is generally admitted to be the most useful and entertaining.” Howe adds that it is part of the magazine’s mandate to compensate for the lack of “extensive Collections of Books” in the Colony: “To adapt this Publication to the taste of all descriptions of our Readers,” he writes, “we have edeavoured so to mix the utile and dulce, that instruction and pleasure might by no means be separated, and that, by the variety of matter, the want of many books might in great measure be supplied.”⁶ In his Introduction to The Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository (1823), David Chisholme approaches approximately the same position by a slightly different route, committing his magazine to the publication for the benefit of “readers of various tastes and feelings,” of all manner of instructive and uplifting items from the philosopher, the poet, the essay is, the historian …the traveler.”⁷ The aims and programs are much the same in John Gibson’s Introduction to the New Series of the Literary Garland (1843) and in George Stewart’s “Introductory” to Stewart’s Literary Quarterly Magazine (1870), though with decreasing emphasis in these and other publications on an attempt to appeal to “all classes of society”⁸ and an increasing insistence on avoiding the supposedly corrupting influence of cheap novels, works in which the focus shifted away from instruction and entertainment towards mere stimulation⁹ and ― pace Bakhtin ― the valuable richness of miscellany gave way to a potentially unbalancing, because unbalanced, singularity.

     Since the typical reader, publisher, and by extension, writer implied by the remarks of Howe, Chisholme, Gibson, Stewart, and others in the period 1790-1870 was an “all-rounder” ― someone with broadly varied interests and gifts ― the arrival of specialization in Canadian literature in the 1880s and 1890s (specialization being, ironically, one of the hallmarks of bourgeois, industrial society)¹⁰ was regarded with considerable hostility by middle-class critics and reviewers. To Gordon Waldron, writing in The Canadian Magazine in 1896, contemporary Canadian poetry was lamentably “narrow” in its “range of feeling” by comparison with the “wide and varied’ poetry of the “past.”¹¹ From this perspective, Waldron censures Roberts’ Songs of the Common Day (1893) as a “series of sonnets dealing with aspects of common outdoor life,”¹² and thus lacking variety in both form and content, but finds the Lampman of Among the Millet to be redeemed by an “earnest tone” that “wins on sympathy” and partly compensates for a “range of ideas [that]…is not very wide. Waldron reserves his harshest censure, however, for Bliss Carman, a poet who is all the more reprehensible for squandering gifts greater than those of Roberts in a diminutive monotony:

The poems in [Low Tide on Grand Pré. A Book of Lyrics (1893)]…have been collected with reference to their similarity of tone. They are variations on a single theme. They are in the same key…the tone of [these] poems is weird. The feelings excited are subdued feelings of gloom and foreboding…[T]hey are of a very limited range and afford a very slight foundation for a treat reputation. It is possible, of course, to produce a masterpiece in a minor key. An ambitious composer one would expect to play upon a wider range of feeling.¹³

When Waldron observes a few sentences further on that Carman’s “narrative” in Low Tide on Grand Pré must be largely supplied by the reader, and with painful effort,” he emerges clearly as one of those readers whom writers of the aesthetic-decadent-Modern tradition deliberately ignored or targeted as an audience—a man who expects to be effortlessly entertained by poetry, who wants art to remain the uncomplicated handmaiden of society, who, like Ralph Connor’s muscularly Christian heroes, prefers action to thought, manliness to mysticism. Waldron does not level the charge of decadence at Roberts, Carman, and William Wilfred Campbell (whose Dread Voyage [1893] volume also causes him great imaginative pain), but the thought was probably not far from his mind when towards the end of his essay he accuses contemporary Canadian poets of lacking “moral enthusiasm [and] the inspiring energy of new ideas and large hopes of human progress…”¹⁴

     To the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, Canadian critics continued to stress the need for variety in the reading materials of the great Dominion. More perceptive and telling than most is John A. Cooper, who in “The Strength and the Weakness of current Books” (1899), proceeds from the observation that “the steam-driven ocean carriage” has created a broader base of knowledge than ever before upon which “to reerect our thought and action” to argue that the modern reader has access, not merely to “new lands and new peoples,” but also to the accumulated books of the centuries in addition to the works of his contemporaries.”¹⁵ All this and, in addition, the prodigality of contemporary publishers (who, it may be noted, were increasingly at this time restricting themselves to specialized fields and subjects under a single masthead) would satisfy the burgeoning demands from a “variety of tastes” for a “variety of books.” What once was supplied within the covers of a single magazine, or anthology, or year-book, or volume of poetry and/or prose would now be supplied by a miscellany of books―a library compiled from the offerings of a variety of publishers or, as anyone who has inherited a collection of books from a late Victorian or Edwardian ancestor knows very well, assembled by a single publisher from among the great works of the past and present. One result of this, of course, is that poetry, once prominent among the offerings even of newspapers in Canada, could easily be avoided entirely by the average reader—relegated to the narrow province of the specialist in favour of genres such as the historical novel which combine romance and realism, escapism and verisimilitude, ease of reading and access to information, in proportions that appealed to the expanding middle classes.

     It is in the nature of Modernism as both a reaction against and an aspect of modern life that the aesthetic f unity which begins seriously to challenge the dominance of variety in Canada in the eighteenth-eighties looks very like a mirror- image of its culture: a reflection and reversal of the individualism, the “earnest tone,” the “inspiring energy” (to quote Waldron) of the post-Romantic and late –Victorian period. There is hardly time in a short paper such as this to examine the aetiology of Modernism in the nineteenth century, let alone to place on view the components of the Modernist quest for wholeness and authenticity of self and vision outside the geographical and historical perimeters of Europe after the Renaissance. Yet it may be said, by way of introducing in abbreviated form issues central to the next stage of the discussion, that the Modernist constellation of reflection and reaction first becomes strikingly apparent in England around 1850 with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (and notice the implied rejection of the Renaissance in the group’s title), a cénacle of poets and artists, complete with little magazine (The Germ), whose reactionary, aristocratic, recondite, and absolutely Modern anti-modernism had such a far-reaching impact (think merely of the early work of Joyce, Pound and Eliot). Not fortuitously, the Pre-Raphaelites and their literary associates and followers—Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Meredith, Swinburne, and others—also pioneered the enclosed, self-contained, and, as the century progressed, increasingly unified series or volume of poems—the sonnet-sequence (The House of Life), the medieval or mythic heterocosm (The Defense of Guenevere, The Earthly Paradise), the book organized about a single idea or mood (Modern Love, Poems of the Roadside, Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth). These are the works that lie, together with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and a handful of other books, behind what Sally Gall and M.L. Rosenthal call The Genius of Modern Poetry—The Modern Poetic Sequence—and the their influence begins to be strongly felt in Canada in the early ‘nineties when, as at roughly the same time in Europe and the United States, the unified volume of poetry became almost de rigeur in advances artistic circles. It was at this time that Lampman—a poet schooled in the classics and thus, it could be argued, initially disposed towards the aesthetic of variety (varietas)—moved as far away as he ever would from miscellany with Lyrics of Earth (1895), as did Roberts (another classically-educated poet) with the Songs of the Common Day (1893) “series” and, later, with the New York Nocturnes (1898) and Book of the Rose (1903) sequences. It was also at this time that Carman, as has been seen, published Low Tide on Grand Pré and began working on other unified groups of poems, including Songs of Vagabondia (1894), with Richard Hovey (though the authorship of the individual poems is not given), which as has been argued elsewhere, exerted a noticeable influence on Pound, Stevens and other Modernists.¹⁶

     With the entrenchment of Modernism both as an artistic movement and as a critical school (New Criticism) in Canada and elsewhere in the middle decades of the present century, the aesthetic of unity, together with its extensive verbal and conceptual support system (coherence, ambiguity, pattern, underlying myth, structuralism, and so on), were firmly ensconced in the Canadian academy, as was the Modernist hostility to the Romantics and the Victorians, an attitude that changed somewhat with the discovery that, with the help of such redemptive devices as irony and persona, many poems of these periods could be rendered respectably unified, and their authors forgivably schizoid—that is, detached from at least part of themselves and thief culture and, in this sense if not others, partly authentic and partly Modern precursors of the kinds of teasing fragmentation and mythic coherence valued by the high Modernists. Works that and authors who were not easily amenable to high Modern/New Critical retrieval were (and, in some instances, continue to be) denigrated and undervalued or—and Moodie, Crawford, or Lampman are cases in point here—made to appear more unified in their vision or more alienated from their culture, and thus more acceptable from a Modern perspective, than their (at least partial) adherence to the aesthetic of variety would suggest that they actually were. It would be invidious to single out the pillory individual writers and critics for accepting and applying assumptions that until very recently were ubiquitous in Canadian literary studies, not least because all of us here, I suspect (and certainly myself), must be conscious of living in a very fragile glass house when it comes to the matter f projecting our own preoccupation s onto works of art. (Of course, the notion of a “Literary Institution” is as much a preoccupation as anything else, and a means, too , by which specialists trained in the Modernist academy continue to sustain themselves professionally by finding “new ways to address the complexity, social realism and underlying patterns of various works and cultures.) with t the pillory thus universally applied, perhaps a couple of instances of the high Modern/New Critical distortion of nineteenth-century writing and writers may be gently” mentioned for the purpose of illustration—James Reaney’s seminal article on “Isabella Valancy Crawford in Our Living, Tradition (1959)as a mythopoeic poet whose work, when viewed as an oeuvre, constitutes a “Cosmos” rather than a “miscellany”¹⁷ Margaret Atwood’s brilliant recreation in the Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) of the nineteenth-century author as at once an alienated schizophrenic and the personality at the centre of a tightly unified sequence of poems; and—what to me is now the central issue in Lampman criticism—the debate among Barrie Davies, L.R. Early, and others (those who know the debate will now be able to hear the crash of falling glass), about whether Canada’s finest nineteenth-century poet is to be credited with possessing a unified vision or castigated for his “diverse impulses,” for lacking a drive towards ultimate synthesis.”¹⁸

     In the little time that remains to me, I would like briefly to present two examples in the realm, not of Modernist criticism or creative(re-) writing, but of academic editing in order to show that the failure to honour variety has led to the partial or complete disappearance of particular pieces of writing in certain scholarly or popular editions. The two examples that I have in mind are The Collected Poems of Charles G. D. (1985) and the New Canadian Library edition of Roughing It in the Bush (1962), a book that has problems in common with its recent successor in the Virago Travellers series (1986).

     Begun by Desmond Pacey and completed by Graham Adams, The Collected Poems of Charles G. D. Roberts could be said to manifest in its editorial policy the curious relationship between Modernism and modern culture. In order to allow the reader to discern the trajectory of the poet’s oeuvre, to trace “Roberts’ changing tastes or interests,” the poems are “arranged chronologically”¹⁹ in an implicitly developmental pattern that is the editorial equivalent of the Bildungsroman, itself a reflection, albeit sometimes a rather unenthusiastic (not to say, ironical) one of the Victorian idea of―to quote Waldron― “human progress.” Since, as Ed Jewinski has pointed out, only about a third of Roberts; poems can “properly be dated,” the “chronological method”²⁰ of arranging them poses problems whose very extent can only reinforce our sense of his editors’ commitment to presenting individual works as― to borrow another word from Waldron—a “narrative” of the poet’s creative life. But in choosing to place on view the overall shape of Roberts’ canon, the editors of The Collected Poems ignore the unity of the various series and sequences that the poet constructed around the turn of the century especially and thus dismember, for example, the Songs of the Common Day sonnets and the New York Nocturnes group. As a result of this failure to honour the aesthetic of unity, the “Prologue” to the former series (as Roberts came to call “Across the fog the moon lies fair…”) appears on page 167 of the volume, well after the build of poems to which it proved what the pet evidently regards as the key. It is as if William Michael Rossetti, in editing his brother’s poems for his various Collected and Complete Works, had decided to print the sonnets in The House of Life in the chronological order of their composition or as if, on the same logic, Christopher Ricks had dismembered In Memoriam in the Annotated English Poets edition of Tennyson’s Poems, thus obliterating the careful structuring of these long poems by their respective authors. It can only be hoped that those responsible for the Lampman and Carman (not to mention Pratt and Klein) editions that are now in progress and, in some instances, nearing completion or publication, will prove to have been more sensitive to manifestations of the aesthetics of unity and variety in their author’s works.²¹

     The fact that the publisher of the original two-volume edition of Roughing it in the Bush was also the publisher of Bentley’s Miscellany is a conjunction that, at the very least, should alert us to the possibility that Moodie’s work is less unified and more various than Modernist criticism, with its emphasis on “design,”²² coherence and single (albeit split) personality and voice, has sought to demonstrate. Both the NCL and the Virago editions of Roughing It in the Bush are based on Bentley’s two volumes of 1852, but neither respects the miscellaneous features of a work that contains, as already noted, material by two other writers. Indeed, not only does the NCL edition, adjusted to the needs and specifications of that series with the best of intentions by Carl F. Klinck, omit the portions of the book that are by Dunbar Moodie and Samuel Strickland, but it also deletes sections by Moodie herself, calling them, not a little dismissively, “reports of pleasant excursions, and…pathetic experiences.” Klinck’s rationale for “dropping miscellany that was the original Roughing It in the Bush criteria that seem to stem ultimately and quite inappropriately from Poe’s famous (and, in Modernist circles, very influential) definition of the short story in terms of its unity of effect and required reading time:

Our paperback era calls for…smaller books, if they are to bread from cover to cover. In this edition, therefore, no room has been found for Mr. Moodie’s “The ‘Ould Dhragoon,” nor for certain chapters, or portions of chapters, actually written by his wife. The omissions bear the titles of “Phoebe H—, [sic] “A Journey to the Woods,” “Our Indian Friends,” “Burning the Fallow,” “A Trip to Stony Lake,” “The Whirlwind,” and “The Walk to Dummer”…Care has been taken to maintain the balance of the original, and to enhance the unique effect by concentration.”²³

The modern reader (student) with limited powers of concentration and little time for “pleasant” and “pathetic” Victorian “experiences,” will have his needs met by a condensed version of Roughing It in the Bush, a version which, moreover, “enhance[s]” the unity (“unique effect”) of the work by silencing all but Moodie’s own voice and then shaping that voice into a thoroughly modern one—a voice emanating from a speaker who achieves “partial) salvation” in a Bush that sounds very like a Waste Land. The “unity” (or “essential canon”) of Roughing It in the Bush, writes Klinck,

is found in terms satisfactory in its own time and allowable in ours—one character is central, and that is the author herself.” “Genuine romance” [ as the book had been called by its nineteenth-century American editor] is a controversial classification, and an alternate phrase like “apprentice novel” may not be better: but a certain core of meaning is there. Middle-class England and America had found as substitute for chivalric romances: the modern knight could be any person seeking a way to live in the midst of social dislocation, philosophical nullity, economic slavery decline of wealth, or impending deterioration… Sharing in all the actions, and progressively enlarging the image of herself, [Mrs. Moodie] gave a pattern of movement to the whole book.²⁴

For the “public of the 1960s”²⁵ to whom the NCL edition of Roughing It in the Bush was ostensibly directed, Moodie’s miscellaneous work became a condensed book, a Bildungsroman, a displaced romance, and a quasi-novel of one (contradictory) character—a partial answer, it might be said, for one of the most insistent generic cravings of Canadian modernists: the craving for great works—indeed, the great work – of Canadian fiction.

In the study of nineteenth-century American literature, writes Atwood towards the end of her “Introduction” to the Virago edition of Roughing It in the Bush, “Attention focuses on the ‘great’ and overwhelmingly male American writers of the period: Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Throreau. English Canada produced no such classics at this time―it was settled later―but if you study the literature at all, you cannot ignore the women.”²⁶ Much is stated and implied here (and later in Atwood’s brief references to the letters and journals of literate women) that is by no means irrelevant to the concern of the present discussion with the favoured genres of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such issues must be bypassed for now, however, in order for the more pertinent point to be made that if you study Roughing It in the Bush in the Virago edition introduced by Atwood it would be entirely possible to ignore the men who contributed to the 1852 book on which the edition is based. The only material not included in this edition,” states a “Publisher’s note” to Moodie’s original “Introduction,” is the chapters and poems written Mrs. Moodie’s husband, J. W. Dunbar Moodie. Otherwise this is the complete edition of 1852.”²⁷ The reason for the placement of this note at the conclusion of Moodie’s “Introduction” becomes clear when a comparison of the Virago and 1852 editions reveals that, with some none-too-dextrous cutting and pasting, the note has replaced the second of Moodie’s two concluding paragraphs, which in the original read as follows:

In order to diversify my subject, and make it as amusing as possible, I have between the sketches introduced a few small poems, all written during my residence in Canada, and descriptive of the country. In this pleasing task I have been assisted by my husband, J.W. Dunbar Moodie, author of “Ten Years in South Africa.”²⁸

With the virtual deletion of Dunbar Moodie’s voice from the Virago edition of Roughing It in the Bush, and, with it, of Mrs. Moodie’s gracious acknowledgement of her husband’s assistance and achievements, there emerges from her Victorian camouflage a thoroughly modern, and feminist Moodie, Moodie whose cracked voice speaks almost alone in the wilderness, independent of authorial help from her husband, and, thus, more amenable than would otherwise be the case to the facile, decontextualized strain of feminist criticism that still emerges occasionally from undergraduates. As was the case with the NCL edition , the Virago edition of Roughing It in the Bush scants the miscellany of Moodie’s work in favour of an ideological programme that, embodied as it then becomes in a widely available paperback, almost inevitably ensures that one distortive misreading will give rise to others and yet others.

To trace the fates of the aesthetics of variety and unity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to see operative in different works the urge “to diversify [a] subject” and to concentrate upon a “single theme,” is to study a small but significant part of some widespread shifts in the definitions and social purposes assigned to art by publishers, reviewers, critics, and the artists themselves. It has been a principal aim of this paper to suggest some of the functions and origins of the aesthetics of variety and unity, and to indicate some of the distortions that can emerge when critics and scholars fail to recognize the manifestations of either one or the other. If, in addition, this paper has suggested that editors of Canadian writing should honour the original shape of works and intentions of their authors (which need not be discerned in detail, if at all), then it has succeeded in another of its aims.

University of Western Ontario

Notes

1	I am grateful to various students and colleagues at the University of Western Ontario, especially S. J. Adams, R.M. Stingle, T.E. Tausky and J. M. Zezulka, for valuable discussions of ideas contained in this paper. I am also grateful to I.S. Mac Laren for sending me HOIC/HILAC materials necessary for the development of the paer, and to Mary Lu MacDonald, E.W. Pitcher, Germaine Warkentin and the others who commented constructively on the paper at the Conference on Literary Genres. [back]
2	Ben Jonson, Vol. VIII: The Poems; The Prose Works, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947) 126. [back]
3	Bliss Carman, “Prefatory Note,” Low Tide on Grand Pré. A Book of Lyrics (New York: Webster, 1893). [back]
4	Selected Prose, ed. Barrie Davies (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1975) 88. [back]
5	See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833-34), ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1937) 218 ff. [back]
6	Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestors, ed. Douglas M. Daymond and Leslie G. Monkman (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1984) I 13-14. [back]
7	Ibid. I 18-20. [back]
8	Ibid. I 20. [back]
9	See Ibid. I 91. [back]
10	See Ibid. I 157. [back]
11	Ibid. I 146, 156. [back]
12	“Prefatory Note, “Songs of the Common Day and Ave: An Ode for the Shelley Centenary (Toronto: William Briggs, 1893). [back]
13	Towards a Canadian Literature I 150-151. [back]
14	Ibid. I 151-155. [back]
15	Ibid. I 160. [back]
16	See “Preface: Minor Poets of a Superior Order,” Canadian Poetry 14 (Spring/Smmer 1984):[v-viii]. See also The Letters of Carl Sandburg, ed. Herbert Mitgang (New York: Harcurst, Barance and World, 1968) 85. [back]
17	The allusion here is to Jay Macpherson , The Boatman (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1968) 7. [back]
18	L.R. Early, Archibald Lampman, Twayne World Authors Series: Canadian Literature 770 (Boston: Twayne-G.K. Hall,1986) 29. [back]
19	The Collected Poems of Sir Charles G. D. Roeberts, ed. Desmond Pacey and Graham Adams (Wolfville, N. S.: Wombat, 1985) 358. [back]
20	“An Unfinished Monument for Sir Charles G.D. Roberts,” rev. of The Collected Poems, Canadian Poetry 19 (Fall/Winter 1986): 106. [back]
21	See “A New Brunswick Roberts,” rev. of The Collected Poems, Canadian Literature, 112 (Spring 1987): 133-136 and “The Achievement of Charles G. D. Roberts,” The Sir Charles G. D. Roberts symposium, ed. Glenn Clever, Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 10 (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P. 1984 213-218 for further discussion of the specific and general issues raised in this paragraph. [back]
22	See R.D. MacDonald, “Design and Purpose,” Canadian Literature 51 (Winter 1972): 20-31. [back]
23	“Editor’s Introduction,” Roughing It in the Bush, New Canadian Library, No 31(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962) x. Klinck does not mention the omission of poems by Dunbar Moodie and Samuel Strickland, one of which, “The Magic Spell” by Dunbar, precedes Susanna’s “Adieu to the Woods” at the head of the final chapter (XIV) in the original edition, altering somewhat the tone of the book’s conclusion. Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinois (New York: Pnatheson, 1974) 101-120 provides an interesting commentary on the sort of editing practiced by Klinck and others in the NCL Series. [back]
24	“Editor’s Introduction” xiii-xiv. [back]
25	Ibid. x. [back]
26	“Introduction,” Roughing It in the Bush (1825); rpt. Virago Travellers Series (London: Virago, 1986) xiv. [back]
27	Ibid. xxi. In fact, the Virago “Publishers” do not delete all the poems by Strickland and Dunbar Moodie (see 434, 499), though they do excise the bulk of the contributions of Moodie’s husband to the volume. [back]
28	Roughing It in the Bush (London: Richard Bentley 1852) I xiii. It is worth notig that in the second Bentley edition of 1857, the reference to the “diversity” of the book is deleted but the acknowledgement of Dunbar remains. [back]