English 222

Sir John Franklin & his men went searching for the NW Passage; none made it back alive
HMS Erebus & Terror
-lifeboat full of skeletons (Inuit testimony); had been eating each other
-cause of death: lead poisoning from tins of food?
-Lady Franklin's Lament

8 lines (2 quatrains) / 6 lines
-before final 6 lines ther is a turn: volta: reflect on first 8 lines then reflex on what came before

12 lines (3 quatrains) / 2 lines (couplet)
-volta before the couplet

Wrote "Indian Poems"
-Deputy Minister of Native Affairs
-ornate diction, ballad form
-paternalistic view of First Nations
-The Onondanga Madonna
-The Forsaken

-written by British immigrants, sent back to Britain for their amusement
-writers had other jobs: pioneer, explorerers etc.
-topics: difficultuy of pioneering/living in Canada; Canadians as victims of weather, natives, land etc.
-struggle to characterize Canadian landscape
-put Canadian reality into old forms (eg. Sonnets)

-result of conflict between two styles (attempting to describe rough Canadian landscape through Romantic forms)
-convey Canadian experience but deeply influenced by Romantics; use their traditions, but manipulate them

Patriotism towards Canada instead of Britain
Poetry overtaking epitolatery (letters) & explorer novels
-emotional rather than intellectual involvemet (Romantic)

Nature very important ot Canadian experience
-did not have history of wars to draw from
-First Nations big part of mythopoetics: used to establish stories for Canada
-CPR
-RCMP

1920s: Modernism
-reject rhyme & meter, reject the Romantic view
-experiemtn with free verse & social orientation

Transitional figure between the Romantics & the Modernists
-wrote about CPR & good vs. evil
-The Truant

1930s
-poets at McGill
-AGM Smith
-started the first little poetry magazine in Canada (McGill fornightly review)
-idependent journal with opinions & manifestos
-protest against previous literary standards
-influence by British verse & imagism
-more socially conscious poetry in Canada
-break out of Victorian confines

Wrote during/after the Depression (when assembly line manufacturing was developed
-socialist/Marxist
Machinery key to modernism; oppression of people b factories
"Day and Night"
"Green Rain"
"Bartok and the Geranium"

Child narrator (boy) tells story of his father being tricked by "Old Luke" to trade for diamond horses. Horses are balky, ultimately burn down Old Luke's barn, killing Old Luke in the process.

Divine retribution vs. individual agency
-corruption from temptation due to hubris
-ability to make decisions
-why would God kill the horses?
-reversal of Adam & Eve (man falls prey to temptation)

Hard drinking, womanizing, larger-than-life, hard living, almost romantic intensity

1967: Centennial
-regional concerns; regionalism mattered
-ecological concerns
-feminist, queer poetry
-local history & documentary
-working towards nationalism
1970s & 1980s: period of consolidation after experimentation of 60s