Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

English-Canadian Perspectives of LandscapeThe Wacousta Syndrome is a comparative study of Canadian painting andliterature, but its discussion of visual perspective is not extended to literaryexamples. However, an anti-panoramic orientation in the depiction oflandscape is also discernible in Canadian poetry.Canadian poetry was long indebted to the traditions of 19th-century Britishpoetry; Romanticism reverberates everywhere in the work of theConfederation Poets. Bliss Carman's “Morning in the Hills,” 9 for example,imparts an essentially romantic pose: contemplating a landscape, the personareflects on his life and human existence, and the landscape is perceived in closerelation to his state of mind. The persona is painfully aware of “turmoil anddespair,/The race of men and love and fleeting time,/What life may be, orbeauty.” But the landscape provides a refuge from these existential fears; itbecomes a Wordsworthian source of spiritual consolation: “Surely some Godcontrived so fair a thing/.../ Wondrous and Fair and Wise! It must be so.” In anessentially romantic perspective, the panoramic view, the land reveals thegrandeur of creation from which it derives its power to console. However, acloser look reveals that Carman's handling of this perspective differs in degreefrom that of the European Romantics.The craze for the panoramic view as it emerged in the course of the 18thcentury 10 is characteristic of an age that strove for infinity. “We are flung into apleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightfulStillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension of them,” JosephAddison wrote as early as 1712 in one of his essays (No. 412) on The Pleasuresof the Imagination. He goes on to say:The mind of man naturally hates everything that looks like a restraintupon it, and is apt to fancy itself under a sort of confinement, when thesight is pent up in a narrow compass, and shortened on every side bythe neighbourhood of walls or mountains. On the contrary, a spacioushorizon is an image of liberty, where the eye has room to rangeabroad, to expatiate at large on the immensity of its views, and to loseitself amidst the variety of objects that offer themselves to itsobservation.Numerous English poems exemplify the pervasiveness of this viewthroughout the Romantic period—quite obviously, the English Romanticswere prospect-rather than refuge-oriented. 11In Carman's panorama, however, there is no trace of a boundless horizon; thepoem notes clouds that delimit the view, and the eye is directed towards theground rather than the unlimited sky:How quiet is the morning in the hills!The stealthy shadows of the summer clouds11