Boxing the Compass:  Ontario's Geopoetics

The house was a dignified old affair, built of wood and painted white, with wide green varandahs compassing the four sides of it, as they often did in days when the builder had only to turn his hand to the forest.

— Sara Jeanette Duncan, The Imperialist (1904)

As a cultural and poetic entity the "dignified old affair" that is Ontario and the Ontario mentality in Duncan's allegorical novel is seldom discussed in the criticism of Canadian poetry. Outside the province, Ontario is most frequently mentioned in the context of the resistance to all things central which, especially in Alberta and British Columbia, has always been a component of the regionalist catechism. Inside the province, Toronto usually stands in for Ontario as the enemy of regionalism and localism, and the sustaining intellectual and literary environment provided by the province — its geography, its traditions, its institutions — seems largely to be taken for granted. But Ontario is in its own right an important cultural and poetic entity (probably since the middle of the nineteenth century the most important such entity in the country), and it deserves to be discussed with the same geographical and historical awareness that has in recent years been brought to bear in discussions of other Canadian regions such as the Maritimes and the Prairies. Although the 1984 celebrations of Ontario's bi-centenary were to an extent arbitrary and factitious they at least served the function of focusing the attention of many Ontarians, albeit often wryly, on the two centuries of European civilization in the province and, beyond and beside that, on the rich traditions of the area's native peoples. As indicated by its title, "Poetry in Ontario: Diversity, Reappraisal, Continuity," this issue of Canadian Poetry focuses selectively on aspects of the diverse corpus of Ontario poetry in an effort to place on view aspects of it that are either deserving of reappraisal or suggestive, as by their very nature are such works as Margaret Atwood's Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), of relationships and continuities among the province's different regions and historical periods.

     To be sure, Ontario is a diverse province both physically and culturally. It consists of two large geographical regions — Southern Ontario and the Canadian Shield1 — and a number of sub-regions, each with its own distinctive sense of local pride, history and identity. The Ottawa Valley and the Niagara Peninsula are as different as London and Toronto, Kenora and Kapuskasing, Kingston and Orillia. It is probably true that, as James Reaney has repeatedly stated, "there is a Southern Ontario school of writers . . . Northern Ontario has somewhat different cultural perspectives . . . and novels written in Glengarry County differ from those written in Huron County."2  It is certainly true that there are considerable differences (as well as similarities) between Northern and Southern Ontario and that, in typical regionalist form, the inhabitants of the resource-based areas in the Province's north and west view with distrust their fellow Ontarians of the south and east. Indeed (and as already intimated here, and as argued by Elizabeth Waterston later in this issue of Canadian Poetry), there is much the same hinterland-baseland relationship in Ontario between the Shield and the South as there is in the rest of Canada between the West and the Centre. In both cases the hinterlanders tend to regard themselves as a hardy, amiable, independent and open-minded breed that is constantly being victimized by the economic depredation and cultural imperialism of a baseland populated by unfriendly, hyper-civilized milksops. Needless to say, these values and judgements are completely reversed from the perspective of the baselander who, at his most arrogantly confidant, regards himself as the custodian of the culture and know-how that are necessary to bring the hinterland within the circle of civilization. In "The Height of Land" (1916) Duncan Campbell Scott expresses something of the baseland-hinterland duality that characterizes Ontario:

Upon one hand
The lonely North enlaced with lakes and streams,
And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,
Glimmering all night
In the cold arctic light;
On the other hand
The crowded southern land
With all the welter of the lives of men.3

In Al Purdy's "The Country North of Belleville" the "Upon one hand" and "On the other hand" of Scott's poem meet at the disputed border between the hinterrain and the baselandscape:

And where the farms are
          it's as if a man stuck
both thumbs in the stony earth and pulled
                     it apart
                   to make room
enough between the trees
for a wife
                   and maybe some cows and
                    room for some
of the more easily kept illusions —
And where the farms have gone back
to forest
          are only soft outlines and
          shadowy differences — 4

To an extent Ontario is a microcosm of Canada, not merely in its geographical diversity and its regional tensions, but in its sheer, stubborn, self-defining presence between forces that, to the north, conspire to obliterate human life itself and, to the south, conspire to draw mere cultures into the melting-pot of one of the world's most powerful civilizations.

     In a country where hyphens often point to existential anxieties (French-Canadian, cross-cultural, East-West dialogue), Ontario is perhaps the biggest hyphen of all. On its eastern border lies French-Canada, a partly incomprehensible solitude whose main urban centres are neverthe less joined to the "crowded southern land" of Ontario by a vast ribbon of road whose very name is classically Canadian in its combination of anxious hyphenation and — strange bedfellows indeed — American usage: the MacDonald-Cartier Freeway. And on the Western side of the Province, linked to the heartland of Ontario through the bottle-neck of the Lakehead, lie the Prairies — areas populated to a considerable extent by people who still in many cases have roots in places like Smiths Falls, Mount Forest, and Owen Sound. Nor should it be forgotten (an almost impossible feat at the University of Western Ontario, with its Mustangs and its archaic name) that Ontario was once Canada West, and that its south-western corner was once congenial in a variety of ways, including pragmatically and poetically, to frontier types from both Britain and America — the "uncouth"5 Desborough of John Richardson's The Canadian Brothers (1840), for example, and the itinerant narrator of Adam Kidd's The Huron Chief (1830).6  More consistent through history, however, has been the hospitality shown by Ontario and its institutions to such baseland-oriented writers and thinkers as Adam Hood Burwell, Susanna Moodie, William Kirby, Daniel Wilson, John Watson, George Grant, Robertson Davies and Northrop Frye. It may even be significant that, in addition to the obvious hinterland and baseland types, Ontario has hosted such writers as Isabella Valancy Crawford and Michael Ondaatje whose works — mention need only be made of the dialogues of Max and Arthur in Malcolm's Katie (1884) and of Bellocq and Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter (1976) — derive some of the energy from a tension that may always have been characteristic of the Ontario of hyphens, regional dualities, and communicating borders: the tension between the baseland attributes of rationality, teleology, and structure and the hinterland attributes of experience, chance, and process.

     No doubt, Ontario's position between Eastern and Western Canada has been a potent factor, not only in the Province's cultural development, but also in its relationship of give-and-take with the rest of the country. Some of the consequences of the Jacob's-ladder effect of this relationship for Ontario and for Canada as a whole are described by Stanley E. McMullin:

The heartland does not celebrate its distinctive regional existence, it celebrates its imperial identity. Thus Ontario's mythology has generally been clothed in the rhetoric of Canadian nationalism. Literary criticism often takes on the national themes. Sometimes, as was the case with Margaret Atwood's Survival, Ontario's concerns become nationalized in an alarming fashion. The power of a critic of Frye's stature to place a phrase like "garrison mentality" in the national vocabulary gives some indication of the power of the heartland.7

Although the centrifugal aspects of the Jacob's-ladder effect have been significant in the overall development of Canadian culture (one thinks also of the many writers — Earle Birney, Ernest Buckler, A.G. Bailey, Roy Daniells, Hugh Hood, Charles G.D. Roberts, Malcolm Ross, Sheila Watson — who have passed through or from Ontario to other parts of the country), more significant in terms of Ontario's own culture is the centripetal force that has in the past drawn such writers as E.J. Pratt, Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, Frank Davey and bp Nichol more-or-less permanently into the centre of Canada. It is probably sufficient merely to mention the so-called Frye school of poets (Reaney, MacPherson, Mandel) to make the point that immigrants to Ontario from elsewhere in Canada have had a very considerable impact on the Province's poetic life.

     But while the East-West dialectic has been enormously significant in the development both of Canadian and Ontario culture, it must not be allowed to obscure from view another axis that has been at least as significant for Ontario: the South-North axis that has, with only minor exceptions, cast Ontario as the receiver of ideas from the United States. As a simple contrast between Ontario's Loyalist origins in the eighteenth century and the Republican ideas that surfaced in the Province in 1837 crisply indicates, this axis has had at different times very different social and cultural ramifications. A constant characteristic of Ontario's relationship with her southern neighbour since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, however, has been the flow of ideas northward, not so much from areas of the United States that are relatively remote from the Province (and even New England can be included in this category, except as regards Eastern Ontario), but more from those States that lie immediately to the South at the tips and narrows of the Great Lakes: Illinois, Michigan and, especially, New York. It is no more fortuitous that Lampman's only poem in the Whitman long line ("To Chicago"8) is a tribute to the famous White City at the Chicago Exhibition of 1893 than that Whitman's most enthusiastic (not to say homoerotic) disciple in Canada was Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke of London, Ontario.9  Nor is it fortuitous that two of Ontario's early Modern poets, W.W.E. Ross and Raymond Knister felt respectively the influence of Marianne Moore and Carl Sandberg, or that both writers published extensively in Poetry (Chicago). At the risk of pressing the point, it may also be observed that when the compass lines are followed north from literary locales deeper in the United States some intriguing geopoetical connections become apparent — between the Georgia of Flannery O'Connor and the Ontario Gothic of Alice Munro, for one instance, and, for another, between Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the open-ended Ontario of Raymond Souster.

     From earlier times to the present day in Ontario's literature, art, architecture, religion and philosophy, the South-North flow of people and ideas has been channeled especially through such intersections as Windsor and Buffalo. Joyce Carol Oates's somewhat tempestuous relationship with the University of Windsor comes to mind in this regard, as, of course, does the seminal trip in 1913 of Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald to Buffalo to see a touring Exhibition of Contemporary Scandanavian Art. As this last example again suggests, the most important South-North movement for Ontario culture has been the movement of ideas and people into the Province from upper New York State through the hour-glass formed by Lakes Erie and Ontario. In this regard, there comes to mind — to take the field of architecture alone — a number of figures who have altered the appearance and shaped the heritage of Ontario — David Willson, the builder of the Sharon Temple in Newmarket,10 Levi Boughton, the stonemason who made "Paris the cobblestone centre of Ontario,"11 and Orson Squire Fowler, the eccentric architect of numerous octagonal houses like the one in Marian Engel's Bear (1976).12  Perhaps the most eloquent acknowledgement in recent years of the power of the New York-Ontario axis has been the localism of the London regionalists, Murray Favro, Greg Curnoe and others, whose programme is grounded in a rejection of the International Style that came to Toronto primarily via New York City.

     Nowhere is the special relationship that exists between Ontario and New York more evident and, in terms of Ontario poetry, more significant than in the realm of the more-or-less heterodox religious ideas that are usually subsumed under such blanket terms as mysticism, hermeticism or simply, the occult. The historian Ramsay Cook has recently published in The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (1985) a valuable study in part of the importance for Canadian social and political thinking of two influential occult movements that emanated from New York State: Spiritualism and Theosophy. A full study of the impact of Spiritualism on Ontario literature from Susanna Moodie to E.J. Pratt (and beyond) will have to await the completion of research currently underway by Stanley E. McMullin at the University of Waterloo. In the meantime, Cook's study, coupled with other scholarly and suggestive pieces by such writers as Carl Ballstadt13 and Pratt himself,14 provide tantalizing evidence of the involvement of Ontario writers with a movement that might possibly have begnn in the Belleville area and moved in the late 'forties to upstate New York.15 As tantalizing as any evidence regarding the occult element in the province that produced William Lyon Mackenzie King are these lines from near the end of Al Purdy's "Wilderness Gothic":

A sign of fire and brimstone? A two-headed calf
born in the barn last night? A sharp female agony?
An age and a faith moving into transition,
the dinner cold and new-baked bread a failure,
deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant,
double yolked eggs and the house creaks a little —
Something is about to happen.16

A partial sense of the importance of Theosophy for Ontario art can be gleaned from The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America 1890-1940 (1984) where Roald Nasgaard discusses (not of course for the first time) the impact on the Group of Seven in general and Harris in particular of theosophical ideas. It is worth quoting here from Harris's article entitled "Revelation of Art in Canada" in the Canadian Theosophist for 1925 for the light that it sheds on the role of the Northern hinterland in southern Ontario art:

. . . in Canada . . . the psychic atmosphere is comparatively clean . . . . We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignation and release, its call and answer — its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow . . . and we Canadians being closest to this source seem destined to produce an art somewhat different from our Southern fellows — an art more spacious, of a greater living quiet, perhaps of a more certain conviction of eternal values.17

As has been suggested elsewhere,18 the resonances between the northern work of Harris and the D.C. Scott of such poems as "The Height of Land" may well be explicable in terms of the interest of both men in the hermetic ideas that were to a considerable extent brought into Ontario through theosophical channels. That Harris' s one volume of poetry, Contrasts (1922), contains poems in the "spacious" form of the Whitman long line suggests once again the importance of the North-South axis in the development of Ontario culture.

     So ubiquitous are hermetic ideas and their cognates in Ontario literature and art of the Victorian and Modern periods that they virtually provide the basis for what might fashionably be called an Ontario hermeneutic. In addition to Moodie and Pratt, Harris and Scott, Ontario artists and writers who were centrally influenced by various aspects of the occult include W.W.E. Ross and Bertram Brooker. The former was deeply interested, not merely in Spiritualism, but also in various hermetic themes such as palengenesis and the Pythagorean underground.19  And the latter was greatly influenced, not simply by Theosophy,20 but also by fourth-dimensional physics21 and by the same colour theories of C.W. Leadbeater that lie behind much of Harris's work. (The author of the seminal Man Visible and Invisible [1902], Leadbeater was a Theosophist who brought a touch of Wildean scandal to Toronto in 1906 when a compromising note was found in an apartment that he had shared there with a pubescent boy.22) On either side of Ross and Brooker chronologically lie several major Ontario poets whose debts to hermetic ideas have yet to be assessed: the later Archibald Lampman, who refers in a letter of November 22, 1893 to the theosophical notion of an " 'Astral plane' ";23 the early Margaret Avison who alludes to the Eleusinian Mysteries (Persephone) in the "pomegranate seed . . . and winter sun"24 passage of "The Agnes Cleves Papers" (1960); and, of course, the Jay MacPherson of The Boatman (1957) and Welcoming Disaster (1975) and the Gwendolyn MacEwen of such works as Breakfast for Barbarians (1966), The Shadow-Maker (1969), The Armies of the Moon (1972) and Magic Animals (1974).25  Texts that suggest the existence of an anterior and mysterious meaning that is available only to the initiated are particularly common in Ontario writing of the Modernist tradition. In addition to authors and works already mentioned, Atwood's Double Persephone (1961) and Surfacing (1972) come to mind, as do Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947) and The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), both of which have roots, by way of Blake and (possibly) Jung, deep in the dark soil of hermeticism and its hermeneutics.

     These last examples of Atwood and Frye — the first suggesting a native Indian component (Shamanism) to the Ontario occult and the second revealing the English and European origins and orientation that is still a considerable aspect of Ontario culture — point the way once again to a recognition of the complex mixture of elements, that exists in the Province. Although Ontario poets since the Second World War have been drawing increasingly on American (and in many cases South American) poetics for inspiration, they have also — as the Toronto Pataphysical poets illustrate — remained open to ideas from Europe, most notably the France of the Surrealists and the Deconstructionists but also — as witness Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies (1968) and Don Cole's Prinzhorn Collection (1982) — the Germany of Rilke and others. Nor has the English connection, so evident in both the Colonial and the Confederation periods (when Sangster was regarded as a "religious . . . Wordsworth of Canada"26 and Lampman conceived of himself as a "faint reincarnation"27 of Keats) entirely disappeared from contemporary Ontario: Richard Outram continues unobtrusively to write poetry that is English in orientation, as does Christopher Levenson; in fact, Levenson has recently gone so far as to urge Canadian poets to attend to the formality of English verse as "an antidote to the self-indulgent sloppiness. . . that sometimes characterizes Canadian poetry."28 "Loyal it began, loyal it remains"? The future in Ontario poetry is uncertain, but if the Province's past and present are anything to go by, its poets will continue, like that four-sided house in The Imperialist, to be open to influences from all points of the compass. And like Eph Wheeler's pocket in the same novel, Ontario will probably continue to contain at least three mediums of exchange: an indigenous "twenty-five cents, an' a English sixpence, an' a Yankee nickel."29

Notes

I am grateful to several friends and colleagues, particularly Brian Dedora, Don McKay, R.M. Stingle, Leon Surette and J.M. Zezulka, for discussing and sharing with me ideas that have been important in the development of this Preface.

  1. See J. Lewis Robinson, Concepts and Themes in the Regional Geography of Canada (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1983), pp. 149-224 for illuminating discussions of Ontario's various regions.[back]

  2. The University of Western Ontario: Graduate Studies in English: Courses Offered, 1983-84, 1984-85 ([London: University of Western Ontario, 1983]), n.p.[back]

  3. The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1926), p. 47.[back]

  4. Selected Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), p. 118; see also "Boundaries," p. 112.[back]

  5. The Canadian Brothers; or The Prophecy Fulfilled, with an Introduction by Carl F. Klinck (1840; rpt. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), I, 83.[back]

  6. See " 'From the Hollow, Blasted Pine': Centrifugal Tendencies in Adam Kidd's The Huron Chief," Long-liners Conference Issue, Open Letter, 6th sev., 2-3 (Summer-Fall, 1985), pp. 233-256.[back]

  7. "Adam's Mad in Eden: Magic Realism in Hinterland Experience," Unpub. paper dated May 13, 1985, p. 6.[back]

  8. See James Doyle, "Archibald Lampman and Hamlin Garland," Canadian Poetry, 16 (Spring/Summer, 1985), pp. 42-44.[back]

  9. See "Walt Whitman," Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, with an Introduction by George Moreby Acklom (1901; rpt. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969), pp. 215-237.[back]

  10. See Thomas Martin Farr Gerry, "David Willson (1778-1866): Canadian Visionary Writer and Hymnodist," diss. Univ. of Western Ontario, 1983.[back]

  11. Mary Byers and Margaret McBurney, The Governor's Road: Early Buildings and Families from Mississauga to London (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 220.[back]

  12. See Michelle Gadpaille, "A Note on 'Bear'," Canadian Literature, 92 (Spring, 1982), pp. 151-154.[back]

  13. See Carl Ballstadt, Michael Peterman and Elizabeth Hopkins "'A Glorious Madness': Susanna Moodie and the Spiritualist Movement," Journal of Canadian Studies, 17 (Winter, 1982-83), pp. 88-100.[back]

  14. See "Foreword," Hidden Springs: A Narrative Poem of Old Upper Canada and Other Poems by Jenny O'Hara Pincock (n.p., 1949), pp. vii-viii where Pratt writes: "The reader [of 'Hidden Springs'] must assume a belief in psychic manifestations to overcome any sense of incredibility. With that assumption the tale becomes not just an account of a dream, but a description as natural as that of a search in daytime told by a friend in whose sincerity and truthfulness one absolutely believes." Jenny Pincock's papers are in the library at the University of Waterloo.[back]

  15. See Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1985), p. 66, Ballstadt et al, pp. 88-89, and Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), p. 15 for brief accounts of the origins of Spiritualism in the home of the Fox family, which had moved from Upper Canada in 1847, in upstate New York.[back]

  16. Selected Poems, p. 87.[back]

  17. Quoted in Roald Nasgaard, The Mystic North (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 167.[back]

  18. See "Alchemical Transmutation in Duncan Campbell Scott's 'At Gull Lake: August, 1810,' and Some Contingent Speculations," Studies in Canadian Literature, 10 (1985), 1-23.[back]

  19. See "Mystery Initiation" (an unmistakably Eleusiian poem) and "The Pythagorean Basilica," Shapes and Sounds: Poems of W.W.E. Ross, ed. by Raymond Souster and John Robert Colombo (Don Mills: Longmans, 1968), pp. 79 and 85. See also A Literary Friendship: The Correspondence of Ralph Gustafson and W.W.E. Ross, ed., and with an Introduction, by Bruce Whiteman (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984), letters 17 and 28, and of course Al Kizuk's article on Ross in the present issue of Canadian Poetry.[back]

  20. See Dennis Reid, Bertram Brooker, 1888-1955 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1973), pp. 10-12, and also Brooker's novel Think of the Earth (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, [1936]) passim.[back]

  21. See Sounds Assembling: The Poetry of Bertram Brooker, ed., and with an Introduction, by Birk Sproxton (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1980), pp. 59 and pp. 68-69 for explicit references to the "fourth dimension."[back]

  22. See Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revealed, p. 115. Leadbeater's work lies behind Wassily Kandinsky's, The Art of Spiritual Harmony or Concerning the Spiritual in Art (trans. 1914), a germinal work for Abstract Expressionalism, that was known to both Canadian artists; see Reid, p. 12 and Campbell, p. 169. [back]

  23. An Annotated Edition of the Correspondence Between Archibald Lampman and Edward William Thomson (1890-1898), ed., and with an Introduction, by Helen Lynn (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980), p. 102; hereafter cited as Correspondence.[back]

  24. The Winter Sun (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1960), p. 78. It may also be noted that Avison gave the title The Pom Seed — an allusion to Persephone s pomegranate seed — to the student poetry magazine at the University of Western Ontario.[back]

  25. MacEwen's early novels (Julian the Magician [1963] and King of Egypt, King of Dreams [1971]) could, of course, be mentioned here, as could many of the novels of Robertson Davies, notably Fifth Business (1970), World of Wonders (1975) and The Rebel Angels (1981).[back]

  26. See "Through Endless Landscapes: Notes on Charles Sangster's The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay," Essays on Canadian Writing, 27 (Winter, 1983-84), p. 2.[back]

  27. Correspondence, p. 119.[back]

  28. Quoted in Peter Robinson, "A Finger Up George Bowering's Nose," Poetry Canada Review, 6 (Summer, 1985), p. 43.[back]

  29. Sara Jeanette Duncan, The Imperialist (1904; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), p. 18. The epigraph to this paper is quoted from p. 28 of this edition of The Imperialist.[back]