Though Lanigan’s Fables in prose were at that time a new and brilliant type of humor, it is in his humorous ballads that he surpasses himself, and because of them he remains unique among Canadian humorists. Some of his humorous ballads have also been included in anthologies of American (!) humor, as, for instance, in Roscoe Johnson’s volume, Playday Poetry. The most famous of Lanigan’s humorous ballads is his egregious piece of persiflage, The Ahkoond of Swat. Really, however, much more humorous are Lanigan’s The Amateur Orlando and The Plumber’s Revenge. Their length prevents quotation here. On account of its notoriety and the absolute egregiousness of its comic irresponsibility we select for quotation Lanigan’s The Ahkoond of Swat. To give it color and setting we note briefly the origin of the verses. According to Mr. Burpee the facts are that ‘one evening, after learning the fact from the English mail just received, Lanigan announced that the Akhoond of Swat was dead and that he was writing a poem about him.’ The verses appeared in the next morning paper. Following is the text of the Ahkoond of Swat:—

In passing we may note another Canadian humorous poem of the same type which has become famous, namely, Hoch de Kaiser, which was composed at a sitting by an émigré Canadian journalist who went sometimes by the name of Rose and sometimes by the name of Gordon.

We have elsewhere noted the fresh quality of the humor of Mrs. Everard Cotes (Sarah Jeanette Duncan) and a whole chapter has been devoted to the poetry of William Henry Drummond as the creator of a new species of Canadian humor. The great warm Irish heart of Drummond was not fitted to create satire or mere fun. His humor is based upon a tender sentiment or what is known as ‘the homely pathetic’ and on a special sense of the humor in genre characters, particularly the old and the adolescent habitant of Quebec.

A man quite by himself as a humorist is George Henry Ham, who has not unfittingly been called ‘the laughing philosopher’ of Canada. Ham’s humor is essentially the humor of the ‘after-dinner’ or ‘the occasional’ speaker, and is for the most part anecdotal. During a long life he had acquired an inexhaustible fund of the most humorous anecdotes about Canadian characters or celebrated men. These were collected and published in his Reminiscences of a Raconteur.

Essentially Ham’s humor is not creative; it is the reproductive humor of the raconteur; but Ham has added to it by a color and settings of his own. It is the humor itself and not the style that counts. But while it is humor and for the most part sheer fun or entertainment, it comes from a man who has seen many vicissitudes in Canadian life and history and institutions and who, in his great age, as human life goes, invites us in his Reminiscences of a Raconteur to look upon life and its vicissitudes of good and ill fortune with courage, serenity, faith and hope—and not to fear death. Ham’s humor is distinguished as pleasant medicine for the soul in the hurly-burly of life and in the contemplation of having some time to depart from a world that is full of dear companions and pleasant places.

The next Canadian systematic humorist, though not Canadian-born, is Stephen Leacock. Haliburton was a creator; he really invented, his method of satiric humor, or if he did not invent the method, he at least originally created his comic characters. Leacock, who is ‘a graft on the Canadian literary tree,’ models his humor considerably after the American manner. It is satiric burlesque deliberately constructing around serious character or events extravagant nonsense which is a sort of criticism of manners and morals of society, but which tends to engage us more as burlesque than as criticism. Mr. Leacock’s first book was entitled Literary Lapses, published at Montreal in 1910. It was, as the author’s Preface states, for the most part a collection of sketches which had before that date appeared in print in various magazines. Two of the sketches gained the distinction of being reprinted in Punch and The Lancet, London. These were respectively Leacock’s Boarding House Geometry and The New Pathology, the latter of which had the further distinction of being reprinted in translations in various German periodicals. His Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town approaches more closely to the unity of a regular novel than any of his other books and is the highest example of his art. His style here is personal and familiar almost to undue flippancy; it is witty and sparkling even to brilliancy; it is less literary than the material of the Mariposa Newspacket; it is surrounded with an exuberant atmosphere of burlesque. Yet in Sunshine Sketches he has achieved an unmistakably true characterization of the average ‘little town’ of Canada—its life and its people—a life which shows the universal touch that makes the whole world akin, and at the same time has those narrow, provincial idiosyncrasies that make it distinctively local and impossible of portrayal except by one who has lived it. There is here revealed much of the usually uncovered side of human nature, lit up with a glow of amusement at the foibles of our fellow-man, but tempered, more than is usual with Leacock, with a good-natured sympathy.

From 1910 onwards to 1922, when Leacock’s My Discovery of England was published, the humorist produced a dozen volumes of his special species of humor and attained a vogue which places him first amongst Canadian humorists of the 20th century. He works at it brilliantly, sometimes in the extreme burlesque manner of Mark Twain and sometimes in the quiet, humble and drier manner of the characteristic English humor which appears in Punch in its department of ‘Charivaria.’ Unlike Haliburton, Leacock rather makes the reader behold the humorist himself figuring away bravely and sometimes futilely, to divert and amuse or entertain. That is to say, unlike Haliburton’s humor, which had an easy method of attack and drew attention to itself, Leacock’s humor gives the reader an impression of its being strained, an effort on the humorist’s part deliberately to make people smile or laugh, whether they will or not. It is ‘smart,’ as the word is used in Yankee slang, rather than human and profound. It ‘tickles’ the fancy and sensibility rather than illuminates the imagination and informs the moral reason. It is clever; but like all things that are merely clever it is ephemerally engaging or pleasing, and it is all a case of the half being greater than the whole. In short, Leacock’s humor is for a day, whereas Haliburton’s humor is for all time.

Peter Donovan is a promising later humorist. His first book was Imperfectly Proper. After a short residence in England since the war, he published Over ‘Ere and Back Home (1922). Mr. Donovan is a critic of society. He is not, however, a critic of constructive social thought but of conventional thinking and conventional manners. The arrows of his humor, which are neither sharp-pointed nor poisonous, are directed against what Matthew Arnold used to call ‘Philistines’—the ‘nice’ people who outwardly conform to all the conventionalities of the law of the land and of the church but who inwardly—when no one is looking—break these laws. Donovan directs his humor against shams in society—not the great shams but those shams which have become acquired habits, or against all that is the ‘fashion’ or the ‘rage’ of the year or day. What he really achieves, from the point of view of vision, is to make us see ourselves as others see us, and to cause us to ‘chuckle’ over his polite—for he is never rude or coarse—revealments. Norris Hodgins works much within the same range as Donovan—Why Don’t You Get Married? (1923)—and is not often quite so hilariously funny, but he comes closer to the daily experiences of every man and every woman, and there is just a bit more solidity to his underlying structure of everyday philosophy.

In another vein is the humor of Peter McArthur, who has been sometimes called ‘The Sage of Ekfrid.’ McArthur writes as one who, living a pastoral and serious life, actually looks around upon his neighbors in other spheres of life and on their striving after wealth and material goods, and who freshly reflects the thought, as old as the ancient hills, that a serious and contented mind, satisfied with the gifts of nature and of God, with pure friendships and sufficient sustenance for body, possesses the only permanent satisfactions of life. He presents this view, not with any originality in thought, but with a manner or style that is pleasant reading and causes us to fall in love with life and laughter and simple joys and to look with charity upon our fellows, and to promote peace.

A new type of Canadian humor, with a new quality of style, is the humor of Newton MacTavish, Editor of The Canadian Magazine, in which periodical Mr. MacTavish first gave to the public his fresh and piquant humor, under the title Thrown In. The sketches were collected in a volume and published with the same title in 1923. The aim of MacTavish’s humor is definitively social—to disclose the hidden humanity of commonplace souls and their essential unity with their more magnificent fellows. When his humor is amusing or entertaining, it achieves this quality not so much by depicting grotesque or ludicrous situations as by revealing the natural attitudes of pioneer people towards the common things of life, and the elementally human idiosyncrasies of the so-called common people. When it is wit rather than mere humor, MacTavish turns the light of truth upon human psychology and character, by way of situation and character-drawing, in terms of commonplace humanity expressed and colored by homely speech and anecdote. So that the effect of his humor is two-fold. For while the reader is being entertained his mind is also receiving new insight into our common heritage, our genuine humanity, whatever be our culture or social status. In short, MacTavish’s humor is philosophical.

In Roy Davis’ long satiric poem, Flying Rumors, published in booklet form at Boston, 1922, we discover a recrudescence of the satiric spirit of Haliburton. Davis was born in Nova Scotia, and was educated at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Harvard University. He is Professor of English in the School of Business Administration, Boston University, of which he is also Assistant Dean.

With the same intent as Haliburton, namely, to correct certain centrifugal tendencies in society, Davis employs satire, not, as did Haliburton, in prose, but in verse, which was the traditional medium of the satire of Haliburton’s and Davis’ Loyalist ancestors in Pre-Revolutionary days in the Old Colonies. The form of Davis’ ‘essay on man and society’ in verse adds, on the side of novelty, a fresh contribution to the satiric literature of Canada. The poet has avoided going back to the traditional rhymed couplet of the Loyalist satirists in Nova Scotia, but has used an octavo stanzaic form in which the first six lines are rhymed alternately, and the last two are rhymed as a couplet. This effects a pleasant sense of finality and rest. Besides, Davis has invented a considerable number of lines which are musical, and arresting or startling in novelty of imagery, as, for instance, this ingenious and daring couplet:—

When, therefore, we survey the history of Canadian humor from Haliburton to Leacock, and from Leacock to MacTavish and Davis, the humorists who have remained salient and popular, and whose work seems to have the inherent qualities which make for permanent appeal, are Haliburton and Lanigan. And when we survey and note the variety and distinction of Canadian humor—that it is, in many ways, a humor quite by itself, and that it is of considerable quantity—we may reply to certain literary historians and critics that Canadians are not, as they are superstitiously believed to be, a humorless people and quite without a literature of humor. For Canada has produced several notable humorists, an admirable literature of humor; and the work of one of Canada’s humorists, Haliburton, has long possessed international renown—a place in permanent world literature.

National Stage Drama

Although Canada is relatively rich in Poetic Drama, there is no evidence of a developed Stage Drama. Part of the literary future of the country lies in the development of native and national stage drama. A significant beginning in native production of the acted drama was inaugurated by Mr. Carroll Aikins who established in the Okanagan Valley, at a centre named Naramata, a ‘Little Theatre,’ which he named The Home Theatre. It was formally opened in November 1920 by the Rt. Hon. Mr. Meighen, then Prime Minister. Mr. Aikins’ aims were to produce a national drama, staged according to artistic conceptions of simplicity and beauty, and to teach the people to appreciate good plays produced with simple and beautiful properties, stage sets, and lighting.

In order to realize these ideals it was necessary to choose good plays that had already been standardized and to train his actors directly in the Home Theatre. Mr. Aikins’ belief was that by developing in the people a love of good plays produced in a Canadian theatre under Canadian direction, the people sooner or later would demand the production of Canadian plays and that this demand would lead to the creation of plays on Canadian subjects by Canadian playwrights. That is to say, Mr. Aikins believed that the movement he started in the Home Theatre would at length result in the creating of Canadian Native and National Stage Drama.

In 1921 Mr. Aikins produced on the stage of the Home Theatre an acted version of The Trojan Women by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides. In 1922 he produced his own Passion Play, Victory in Defeat, a beautifully staged pantomime of moving pictures against a sky of changing light, interpreted with the aid of a reader and expressive music—the first experiment of its kind attempted in Canada.

The ‘Little Theatre’ movement has also achieved something for the appreciation of good Canadian plays in the cities of Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. At Hart House in Toronto, there has been considerable activity concerned with the production of Canadian plays. In April, 1921, Merrill Denison’s Brothers in Arms was produced at that theatre; and in April 1922 another of his plays, From Their Own Place, was produced. These, with two others, were published in book form in 1923 under the title The Unheroic North.

Denison’s plays are Canadian by virtue of the author’s parentage and family traditions (his mother being the late Flora McD. Denison), and by the plays themselves being on Canadian themes, with Canadian characters moving in Canadian surroundings. They are realistic satiric dramas of life and thought in Canadian ‘backwoods’ and rural settlements. The dramatist presents the life and speech and conduct of these characters with such broad realism that the plays themselves are a mordant satire on existence and society in isolated Canadian communities. But Denison’s plays are also a satire within a satire. It is not life in certain Canadian communities that he is really satirizing, but an attitude of the Canadian people themselves.

The people of Canada dearly love ‘high’ romance and spurious sentimentality. They find this spurious sentimentality in some Canadian fiction, and the romance in the poetic dramas of Mair, Mrs. Curzon, Wilfred Campbell, Dr. Dollard, Robert Norwood, and others. Boldly, therefore, and with evident sincerity, Merrill Denison conceived the idea of satirizing the lovers of spurious sentimentality by presenting them with plays which would be the antithesis of ‘high’ romance and affected sentimentality—with life so broadly or coarsely realistic that the people of Canada would not like the life or the plays.

Two of the plays—Brothers in Arms and the Weather Breeder—portray life in the Canadian backwoods districts as Mr. Denison has observed that life. Two of the plays—From Their Own Place and Marsh Hay—portray, according to Mr. Denison, life in the poorer or more sordid farming districts of Canada. The dramatist has explained his motive and aim. He says: ‘These plays have their origin in the needs of a theatre—not the theatre. Brothers in Arms was written because a Canadian comedy was needed to fill a bill and none could be found. In writing it as an innovation, I wrote of a part of Canada I knew, and introduced as characters actual Canadians. The result was new, but, as might have been expected, Canadian. It must be remembered that these plays were written for a Canadian theatre, not Broadway, and that any literature of the theatre in Canada must follow the same course—be written for Canadian production.’

It may be regretted that Denison went to sordid and vulgar society in Canada for his dramatic subjects or material. But he had just cause to satire Canadian life by means of realistic Canadian plays. For the intellectual dishonesty, and the ‘immoral moral psychology,’ which creates the spurious or hectic sentimentality in certain Canadian fiction would compel a sane-minded man to show the other side of the picture, and to show it with pervasive and vivid realism. Denison perceived and felt the profound untruth or falsity of certain forms of 20th century Canadian fiction. In his view, it was all too ‘nice’ and saccharine as art; it had neither truth nor strength. Denison felt that no such men and women as appear in many of the novels of the Realistic Romances exist in Canada. In his opinion, the substance of these novels is puerile and vain invention. He, therefore, decided to present to the Canadian public real men and women as they really live, move and have their being in Canada—even if they are, as indeed they are, sordid and vulgarized men and women. Denison’s plays, then, are a Protest; they are also a Satire. What the dramatist is protesting against is not the life that he presents in his plays. What he is satirizing is not Canadian life as such. He is protesting against intellectual dishonesty and spurious sentimentality in Canadian fiction. He is satirizing the life and characters which these Canadian fictionists have presented in their romances.

Denison presents his material in three one-act plays with four to six characters, and in one four-act play with fourteen characters. It is the business of the dramatic critic to estimate Denison’s success in dramaturgy, to determine whether they are well-constructed and actable plays. On the strictly literary side, his plays in The Unheroic North, despite their sordid or vulgarized characters, and despite the sections of society and life presented in them, intrigue the attention and make interesting and diverting reading. As satires on the methods and ideals of certain Canadian romantic fictionists, on the social life at least of certain Canadian communities Denison’s realistic dramas are a significant beginning of creative Stage Drama in Canada.

Part III.

Special and Miscellaneous
Literature
(1760-1924)

The War Poetry of Canada

I. THE POETRY OF THE CIVIL REBELLION
AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR

It is a literary phenomenon by itself that the best or most popular of the inspirational and the commemorative war verse by permanently resident émigrés or native-born Canadians was the work of the country’s women poets. No samples of martial verse inspired by the War of 1812-14 seem to be extant. The records of martial verse produced in Canada begin with the Civil War of 1837-38 and the inspirational war lyrics of Mrs. Susanna Moodie.

Fifteen years after the war opened, Mrs. Moodie’s martial lyrics were published in her Roughing It In The Bush (1852, two vols.). In ‘The Advertisement’ (which is a sort of publisher’s Preface) to this work, the publisher recounts the origin and effect of Mrs. Moodie’s inspirational war verse. ‘During the rebellion,’ he says, ‘her loyal lyrics, prompted by strong affection for her native country [England], were circulated and sung throughout the colony [Ontario], and produced a great effect in rousing an enthusiastic feeling in favor of public order.’ But Mrs. Moodie herself modestly remarks (op. cit. sup., Vol. 2):—

It will suffice to quote the first and last stanzas of her Address to the Freemen of Canada (op. cit. sup., p. 191) in order to show that Mrs. Moodie wrote no mediocre martial verse of the inspirational type:—

In a footnote Mrs. Moodie explains that ‘the vilest rag’ is the tri-colored flag assumed by the rebels. The use of the phrase has, of course, both psychological and aesthetic warrant. The thought of the tri-colored flag, of its earlier bloody history in the French Revolution, revolted her sense of nobility and righteousness, and, like Homer’s, her diction and imagery sank in correspondence with the fall in the spiritual dignity of her subject. Aesthetically viewed, she was quite justified in sinking and rising with the emotional dignity of her subject. She sinks in the third stanza, but rises magniloquently in the fifth (final) stanza. Thus:—

Compared with standard martial songs, such as Burns’ Scots Wha’ Hae wi’ Wallace Bled, or The March of the Men of Harlech, the first three lines of the foregoing stanza are really excellent. The vocables are mouth filling, the rhythm moves rapidly and carries one with it, and though the third line might be improved by the use of the word ‘fling’ for the word ‘spread’ in the text, still ‘To the free winds her standard spread’ increases respiration, and stimulates ideated sensations of free movement and expanding personality. Altogether, it is a vigorous—a ‘breezy’ line. No Canadian need feel ashamed of it. And what magnificent energy is in the last two lines of the stanza! The reader no sooner reaches ‘God and Victoria’ than he shifts back the accent to the word ‘God,’ emphasizes it with a full burst of breath and with a change in pitch, and then impulsively spurts out the utterance of the remaining syllables in the same changed pitch until he attacks the word ‘cry,’ which is both oxytoned and emphasized. Thus the line becomes a veritable battle-shout and inspiriting slogan. After this ringing, rousing, energizing oxytone line comes the barytone cadence, ‘And crush the traitors to the dust.’ The reader braces himself for action—takes in a full breath, fronts his eyes, sets his jaws, and all his muscles, and lunges forward to the fray. Both are brave lines; both are energizing, impelling; and the whole stanza is a magnificent sample of inspiriting martial verse. No Canadian need feel ashamed to recite it before the admirers of Robert Burns or William Duthie.

Mrs. Moodie’s modest estimate of her martial lyrics is not just to the poet. They are better than mere ‘loyal staves,’ fitted solely to ‘amuse’ casual readers. That they were widely circulated and sung throughout Canada at the time when they were needed, is proof that they possessed lyrical eloquence and the inspirational power to stir the heart and impel the will to honorable action. They are good singing verse, but they are not genuine poetry. All that is required in an inspirational war lyric is that it come warm from the heart and hand; that it be human, manly, direct in thought; that it be ringing in lilt and swinging in rhythm; and that it be respectable technically as verse. To write martial verse that fulfils all these requirements and to write it immediately on demand is no easy task. Judged by these standards Mrs. Moodie excelled in inspirational war lyricism. It is true that Harriet A. Wilkins, Mrs. Curzon, Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie, Valancy Crawford, and Agnes Machar surpassed her in poetic war lyricism. But this was due to the fact that their best martial verse was commemorative, and was written after the deeds or events celebrated by them, and at a time when they could compose in peace and at leisure.

Of these later Canadian women poets of martial verse the supreme artist was Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie. The verse of the others, even Isabella Valancy Crawford’s novel The Rose of a Nation’s Thanks, and Agnes Maule Machar’s swinging Our Lads to the Front, though choicer in diction and imagery than Mrs. Moodie’s, hardly rise above the quality of good verse. Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie’s commemorative martial verse on the other hand, attains to the dignity and beauty of pure poetry. We do not need the statement of the English poet Sir Edwin Arnold, that ‘the best war songs of the Half-breed Rebellion were written by Annie Rothwell-Christie.’ Dignity, beauty, melody and compelling pathos are in every line she wrote. These qualities can be observed in the lines we quote from her After the Battle and Welcome Home, selecting, first, two stanzas from After the Battle:—

The extraordinary imagery of the last line of the first stanza (couplet)—‘the shout of the savage their requiem, the hiss of the rifle their knell’ and the novel beauty of the similitude in the first line of the second stanza are enough to raise these verses to the dignity of pure poetry. Besides, there is a spiritual militancy in the rhythm that soothes or solaces, while its cadences solemnize the soul, begetting resignation to the Will of the Universe. Or listen to the triumphant, sonorous verbal music of these lines from Welcome Home:—

We hear drum beats, bugle calls, and the tramp of armed men on the march in those first two spondaic phrases—‘war-worn, sun-scorched.’ A new emotional experience comes to us with the quicker moving syllables in the next two lines; the rhythm is fitted to exultation. Also we are treated to a new but brilliant alliterative metaphor—‘cleave the sky with cheers.’ We are in the realm of poetry. But fine as are the preceding examples of Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie’s commemorative martial verse, the pathos of the following, from The Woman’s Part, is overwhelmingly human and moving and ennobling. The inspiration is derived from reflecting whether to those who, fired by love of adventure or country, have gone to war, and fallen, the mothers, sisters, and sweethearts shall give regrets, prayers, or tears. The poet disparages all these, and turns to solace the mother or wife, whose son or husband had died on the battlefield:—

After reading that noble poem of love and pathos, and being moved to emotion too deep for tears, one knows that all distinctions for sex are man-made and ephemeral and abortive—that only ‘soul,’ whatever be its form of earthly tenement, is real. For Annie Rothwell-Christie who wrote that poem was altogether soul—superman, superwoman—gifted with the speech of angels. Her martial verse is absolutely unique, and a distinct contribution to perduring war poetry.

II. THE POETRY OF THE WORLD WAR

The Canadian Poetry of the World War is, as was previous martial verse by Canadian poets, both inspirational and commemorative. What is significant for literary history, is, first, that there is a distinct advance in the excellence both of the ideas and of the artistic form of the Canadian poetry of the world war; and, secondly, that both the activity in poetic composition occasioned by the late war and the quality of the poetry became an inspiration to other poets whose genius was dormant and unawakened, and caused a genuine Renascence of the Poetic Spirit and of Poetry in Canada.

In what respect may the Canadian Poetry of the world war be said to be excellent, or even unexcelled by the martial poetry of the United States, if excelled by that of England and France? It is relatively great in noble ideas. In it we see clearly and vividly what Canadian men and women, at home and in the field of war, really thought and felt about war and death, love and home and country, self-sacrifice, and the good green earth, and peace.

Truth, beauty and splendor of ideas—these are the three supreme excellences of the Canadian poetry written by the soldier-poets in active service on the fighting field, and by the professional or amateur non-combatant poets at home, during the war.

As to the artistic form of this poetry, considering all the conditions of distraction and perturbance under which it was written, the wonder is that it has any formal finish at all. As a matter of fact, however, the Canadian poetry inspired by the world war cannot be depreciated as ‘twinkling trivialities’ either in substance or in form. All the best of it is good poetry—originally conceived, winningly suffused with beauty of sentiment, rich in noble ideas and spiritual imagery, engaging in verbal music, and technically well-wrought. If the formal finish of Canadian Poetry of the world war is not always quite the equal of the British and American poetry similarly occasioned, still the altogether most famous and most popular poem of the war and most likely to perdure in the popular memory, is neither the sonnet of the English soldier-poet, Rupert Brooke, The Soldier, nor the poem of the American soldier-poet, Alan Seeger, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, but the lyric of the Canadian soldier-poet, John McCrae, In Flanders Fields. Further, special circumstances, special sentiments, and special color and form went to making the poem by McCrae the supreme lyric of the world war, and the popularity of In Flanders Fields affected the appreciation of other Canadian poetry of the late war to such a degree as to cause the popular imagination, as well as the critical sense of the cultured, to estimate all other Canadian poetry of the world war as so far below McCrae’s exquisite lyric as to be second-rate in substance and form. This is not so. Save that they do not embody a special form and are not as musically insinuating as McCrae’s, the best of other Canadian poems of the world war are as nobly conceived, as spiritually subduing or exalting, and as technically finished as In Flanders Fields.

During the world war, as in previous wars, the women poets of Canada were to the fore in writing inspirational and commemorative martial verse. In Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War about one third (26) of the total number (73) of poets represented are women, and their war verse, especially the verse of Katherine Hale (whose poetry has been already dealt with), Helena Coleman, Frances Harrison, Isabel Graham, Agnes Maule Machar, Gertrude Bartlett, Grace Blackburn, Jean Blewett, Minnie Hallowell Bowen, Louise Morey Bowman, Isabelle Ecclestone Mackay, Lilian Leveridge, Lucy Montgomery, Beatrice Redpath, Sheila Rand, Florence Randal Livesay, Richard Scrace (Mrs. J. B. Williamson), Virna Sheard, Eloise Street, Ruth Strong, is not a whit below the level of the war verse by Canadian men and in some instances surpasses the latter’s.

Dr. O’Hagan’s Songs of Heroic Days (1916) is a popular volume, in which, for the most part, the poet recrudesces, in good newspaper verse, the traditional war spirit of bloodshed, retaliation and revenge. The poems, however, are made engaging by a ready humor and an Irish jeu d’esprit in the thought of ‘squaring things’ with an enemy guilty of ‘dhirty thricks’ in war. Several other volumes of war verse appeared during and shortly after the close of the war—The Fighting Men of Canada by Douglas Durkin; Over the Hills of Home and Other Poems by Lilian Leveridge; Sea Dogs and Men at Arms by Jesse Edgar Middleton; A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems (posthumous) by Lieutenant Bernard Freeman Trotter; Laurentian Lyrics and Other Poems (1915) by Lieutenant Arthur S. Bourinot; Insulters of Death and The New Apocalyse by Sergeant J. D. Logan, and several other volumes by returned men. The only comprehensive anthology of verse of the Great War, written by Canadians, is J. W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918). This volume furnishes adequate proof that, as foreign critics have said, ‘the war poetry written by Canadian civilians and Canadian poets on active service is as excellent as that written by the poets of the older Allied Nations.’

For the purpose of just appreciation we remark the fine, spirited, and imaginatively impressive qualities, as well as the artistic finish, of selected Canadian war poems that are really worthy to stand beside the best verse of English and American poets who were inspired by the late war. Aside from McCrae’s In Flanders Fields the most celebrated commemorative war poem by a Canadian is Dr. J. B. Dollard’s sonnet to the memory of Rupert Brooke—a sonnet in which, as English and American critics observed, Dr. Dollard made beautiful use of the supposed cause of Brooke’s death (sunstroke, ‘arrows of Apollo’) and the place of burial in the Aegean. Brooke’s grave is on the island of Scyros, not Lemnos. But the error in fact only enhances the beauty of the poem:—

Almost as celebrated as Dr. Dollard’s sonnet to Brooke is Lieutenant Arthur Bourinot’s sonnet to the dead poet-soldier. For the sake of variety in forms we quote Immortality—a most winsome, tender lyric; simple, sincere, and convincing—from Lieutenant Bourinot’s Laurentian Lyrics (1915):—