While poetry would eventually enable Québécois literature, and subsequently Acadian, Franco-Ontarian, and Franco-Manitoban writing, to make the transition to modernity, it had first to pass through a long period of uncertainty and obscurity. Even in 1981, Laurent Mailhot and Pierre Nepveu maintained that up until the end of the nineteenth century, “les rimeurs franais d’Amérique imitent, racontent, prêchent, se plaignent, décrivent, chantent mais n’écrivent guère.” Nonetheless, the sheer bulk of the Textes poétiques du Canada français (TPCF) remains striking: twelve volumes covering the period from 1606 to 1867 (10,000 pages, 3,857 poems, 227,175 lines), published between 1987 and 2000. Furthermore, the prefaces accompanying the poetry identify and define the development of two and a half centuries of a literary life which had, so far, never been considered as autonomous, but rather as a tributary of other historical, political, and social domains. Who would have thought that French Canada produced so many poems? While the TPCF may not represent a fundamental shift of the milestones in the history of French-Canadian poetry that have been established over the course of several centuries, the collection is a vitally important achievement. Functioning within both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, it uncovers, classifies, and puts into context thousands of compositions in verse.

We have come to view the First World War as a pointless bloodbath, a “monstrous and futile Valley of Death.” Yet during the war years and indeed for decades after, many Canadians thought otherwise. In September 1914, two Methodist clergymen, Samuel Chown and A. Carman, described the good that had already come from the “crushing evil” of the war: “There has been such a manifestation of the patriotism of our people as to enkindle our souls to ardor and admiration. We are aroused to emulate heroic sacrifices and valiant deeds. We come all of us to feel we have a country, a land we call our own, and to unite in its protection and service. In these seven-fold hotter fires, our varied elements are fused to beauty and to strength.” After just a month of war, the hottest fires were yet to come – the Second Battle of Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele – but already, in Chown and Carman’s prescient address, Canada’s war was taking on a mythic dimension as a nation-forging crucible. The victory at Vimy Ridge in 1917 – when the four Canadian divisions, composed of men from across the country, advanced over a height of land that neither British nor French troops had been able to take – is still identified as “the key to making Canada a nation.”

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.

This view of modernism’s arrival in Canada by a talented contemporary writer can be corroborated by a glance at the introductions of two major anthologies of Canadian poetry at the time of the First World War. In The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), after anxiously taking up most of his Preface considering at least five different sets of criteria to define Canadian poetry, Wilfred Campbell gives up and concedes that “the true British-Canadian verse, if it has any real root and lasting influence, must necessarily be but an offshoot of the great tree of British literature, as the American school also is, though less obviously.” Campbell then goes on to justify the inclusion of poems by the Duke of Argyll, Governor General of Canada from 1878 to 1883. In a similar vein, John W. Garvin, in his “Editor’s Foreword” to Canadian Poets (1916), gives a soaring characterization of poetry which, “at its height, implies beauty and the driving force of passion.”