Weighing Delight and Dole in Canadian Poetry

Abstract

The analysis of the relationship between man and nature in Canadian poetry  written in English shows that Canadian artists have traditionally been both  attracted and repelled by the vastness and savage beauty of the Canadian  landscape and, consequently, have described their land as both heaven and  hell, a matrix of life and a source of terror and death.

This article highlights this dialectic of opposites by opening an angle on  the work of well-known Canadian writers such as the Confederation poets,  who are treated as a group with similar concerns and ways of writing, Edwin  John Pratt (1882-1964), and John Newlove (1938-).

All of them have incorporated the tension inherent to the Canadian  experience to their poetry though they have articulated it in a different way  as each age has its own rendering of the same idea.