An English Canadian Poetics

All born in the 1860s, The Confederation Poets reflects their Romantic preoccupation with Nature, the ideals of Beauty and Truth, and the Victorian notions of formal structures in the arts. They believed the task of poetry was to create and express a distinctive national identity, an assumption rooted in the defining characteristic of their age - nineteenth - century European nationalism of which Young Ireland, Young England, Young Italy, and Young Germany were an offshoot. As the First World War was drawing to a close, they knew an era had ended. Bliss Carman wrote on April 5, 1917: 'I doubt if any of the men who came to maturity before the great war will be able to find the new key, the new mode, the new tune'.