Roberts' Review of Among the Millet

Introduced by Tracy Ware

Elsie M. Pomeroy pointed out long ago that Charles G.D. Roberts reviewed Archibald Lampman's Among the Millet (1888) in the Saint John Progress.1  After Laurel Boone provided the bibliographical details in a note in The Collected Letters of Charles G.D. Roberts, the review was easy to track down.  It appeared in the January 26, 1889 issue of the Progress.  Roberts had promised a favourable review even before he saw Among the Millet.  After receiving a copy, Roberts excitedly sent his praise to Lampman: "It seems to me one of the finest first vols. ever issued by a poet.  The genius of it is utterly beyond question.  Among the poets across the line there are none of the like age to compare at all with you and Carman.  We will make this a glorious epoch in our country's history . . . ."2  The review contains similar, if more reserved, appreciation.  In addition to its perceptive comments on Lampman, the review is also of interest as a revelation of Roberts' own values, and as one of many instances of the impressive solidarity among the Confederation poets at this time.  Carman and Roberts in particular tirelessly supported their Canadian peers.  At the time, all four of the major Confederation poets felt that they served a "spirit of the age" that burned within the words of their contemporaries.  As Roberts states in his review, "There have been [in 1888] manifestations, unmistakable enough to the heedful observer, of an approaching harvest for these acres which so long we have been tilling almost in vain.

     The most important part of the review is Roberts' discussion of literary influence.   After perceptively noting that the major influences on Lampman are Keats ("that shaper of poets"), Emerson ("the consummate flower of the genius of New England"), and Swinburne (of "the matchless rhythms"), Roberts states his approval: "Surely this is a promising choice of masters.  It shows a right appreciation of values."  If we have heard more about Keats than about Emerson and Swinburne, that may be because discussions of influence, anxious or otherwise, tend to focus on a dominant predecessor.  Like A.J.M. Smith after him, Roberts asks for a more generous understanding of influence.  Indeed, he is close to Smith's concept of "eclectic detachment": for Smith,

We have the benefit of being able to draw both upon British and American sources in language and tradition and at the same time to have a certain freedom and detachment that enable us to evaluate and select from these sources what is useful.  This is the characteristic Canadian element — an eclectic detachment.3

For Roberts, "Each one of [Lampman's] masters supplies some splendid excellence which the others partly lack.  Hence the admirable completeness which we find in Mr. Lampman's work is the less surprising to us."  That completeness is not "surprising" to Roberts because he shares his understand ing of influence with Lampman.

     For the most part, Roberts clearly feels that Lampman's poems thor oughly succeed.   His one complaint is that some poems "do not quite escape the charge of diffuseness, or at least of over-elaboration."  Here he resembles Coleridge, who criticized Wordsworth for "matter-of-factness."4  Roberts would later elaborate on this matter in "The Poetry of Nature" (1897), where he divides nature poetry "into two main classes: that which deals with pure description, and that which treats of nature in some one of its many relations with humanity." "The former class," he continues, "has but a slender claim to recognition as poetry."5  Roberts would agree with Coleridge that an excess of detail prevents the ideal fusion of powers: "the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination."6  Similarly, Roberts praises Lampman's nature poetry both for its "fidelity" to nature and for the modifying light it adds: "His every description is transfused with human feeling and flooded with 'The light that never was on sea or land,' yet minute in its fidelity and accurate in its interpretations." Roberts is also quite Coleridgean in his interpretation of the line from Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle."  For Roberts as for Coleridge, though not for all critics of the poem, Wordsworth's reference to "The light that never was, on sea or land" is not a farewell but a tribute to the poetic imagination.7

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All quotations from Among the Millet are preserved as they are printed in the review.  Any inaccuracies are identified in the notes following the text.  I am grateful to W.J. Keith for his helpful adivce, and to Richard Prymus for permission to republish this review.

Review of Among the Millet (not posted yet)

Notes

  1. Sir Charles G.D. Roberts: A Biography, introd. Lorne Pierce (Toronto: Ryerson, 1943), p. 99.  For Boone's note, see The Collected Letters, ed.  Boone, introd. Fred Cogswell (Frederiction: Goose Lane Editions, 1989), p. 94. [back]

  2. 18 December 1888, Letters, p. 97.  Roberts' promise occurs in a letter of 16 November 1888, Letters, p. 93. [back]

  3. "Poet," in Writing in Canada: Proceedings of the Canadian Writers' Conference, Queen's University, 28-31 July, 1955, ed. George Whalley, introd. F.R. Scott (Toronto: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 23-24.  See also "Eclectic Detachment: Aspects of Identity in Canadian Poetry," rpt. from Canadian Literature (1961) in Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays 1928-71 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973), pp. 22-30. [back]

  4. In Chapter XXII of the Biographia Literaria.  See the J. Shawcross edition (1907; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1973), II, 101.[back]

  5. Rpt. from Forum (1897) in Roberts, Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, ed.  and introd. W.J. Keith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), pp. 276-77. [back]

  6. From Chapter XIV of the Biographia (II, 5)[back]

  7. Coleridge discusses the passage in Chapter XXII of the Biographia (II, 124).   Roberts also cites the passage in 'The Outlook for Literature: Acadia's Field for Poetry, History, and Romance," rpt. from the Halifax Herald (1886) in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, p. 262. [back]