The Beginnings of Duncan Campbell Scott’s Poetic Career

Abstract

THE BEGINNINGS OF DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT’S POETIC CAREER T R A C Y W A R E B ish op ’s U niversity Every successful poetic initiation occurs only once. When the poet arrives at the innermost shrine, what he finds there is no special wisdom or community but his own beginning work. (Lipking x) .A m ong the events that made 1893 a remarkable year in the history of Canadian poetry were the publications of William Wilfred Campbell’s The Dread Voyage and Other Poems, Bliss Carman’s Low Tide on Grand Pre: A Book of Lyrics, and Charles G.D. Roberts’s Songs of the Common Day — for many readers, the best volumes ever produced by these poets (Pacey 145). In the same year appeared Duncan Campbell Scott’s first book, The Magic House and Other Poems. Overshadowed by the work of oth­ ers when published, it would soon be overshadowed by Scott’s own later work. Yet The Magic House has fared surprisingly well with Scott’s best critics: E.K. Brown finds it “more original” than Low Tide on Grand Pre ( “Scott” 77); DesmonduPacey calls it “the best first volume by any member of the Group of the Sixties” (147); and A.J.M. Smith notes “the sureness with which it takes its place in the tradition of English poetry . . . ( “Scott” 117). In the one recent detailed survey of Scott’s career, Gordon Johnston has only this brief comment on The Magic House: “If much of it sounds like the ventriloquism of an apprentice writer, there is evidence of a re­ markable gift and already versions of the themes and points of view which characterized all his writing” (237). A fuller examination is now needed in order better to understand both the apprenticeship and the emergence of the characteristic themes and techniques. By discussing the poems dedi­ cated to the other Confederation poets, the title poem, and “In the Country Churchyard,” the crucial poem in the volume, I hope to align The Magic House with Scott’s pervasive concerns: the status of dreams and the imag­ ination, and the artist’s relations to tradition and society. As Gary Geddes argues, before we can properly appreciate Scott’s “versatility,” Scott must be “re-classified” (165). The Magic House affords an ideal starting point for that task, precisely because it lacks any of the Indian poems that have so disproportionately dominated critical discussion. Brown’s comments on The Magic House are striking for what they reveal E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , x v i , 2 , J u n e 1990 about those assumptions also held by many later Canadian critics. Af­ ter noting “the predominance of the dark and the powerful” in The Magic House ( “Scott” 77), Brown quotes from “Lines in Memory of Edmund Mor­ ris,” written twenty years later (see McDougall for dates of composition). His rationale is that, while Scott’s “strongest pictures” of a “harsh and violent nature” do not come until later, such a vision is implicit in the early poems. For Brown, this vision enabled Scott to surpass his Canadian contemporaries: “By his choice of the wilds he has won an immense ad­ vantage over his contemporaries. They usually write of Canada . . . as if it were a large English county. . . . Imitation almost imposes itself upon them. The path to originality is wide before Scott” ( “Scott” 77). Johnston echoes Brown when he argues that, “In some respects, he [Scott] was able to move beyond Lampman, to consider a wider range of human response to a Canadian present. He did this chiefly by moving north imaginatively and by writing narratives” (244). One of the virtues of The Magic House is that Scott makes no such contention; rather, he accepts a dependence on tradition as an enabling condition of his art. His “path to originality” could never be unimpeded, for as Northrop Frye argues, When a poet is confronted by a new life or environment, the new life may suggest a new content, but obviously cannot provide him with a new form. The forms of poetry can be derived only...