Date of Award

1984

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Abstract

Much of the work of Canada's first school of poets, the Confederation group of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Duncan Campbell Scott, has yet to receive the close critical attention that it deserves. A study of the often-noted but never thoroughly-examined influence of the English Romantics on these poets, this dissertation is organized in terms of the genres that best reflect both the Romantic influence and the achievements of the four poets: the commemorative poem, the return poem, and the greater Romantic lyric. Attention is paid to the integrity of individual volumes of Confederation poetry, to the critical writings of the poets, to the history of critical responses to their work, and, above all, to the individual poems in terms of their generic relations to English Romanticism. Taken collectively, these poems show that the Confederation poets were conscious of their positions in both space and time, and that the critical notion of the inapplicability of Romanticism to the Canadian landscape should be reconsidered.

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