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Vallance Review 51. November 2005 The Canadian Maritime Documentary Poem:
Halifax Explosion 1. 1917 Across the vast Atlantic, guns blaze on. Eric Linden 2003 Maritime poetry as such has flourished in all great Western literatures ever since Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" ca. 800 B.C. While "sea" poetry bounds in English literature, perhaps some of the most famous of English poems in the genre include the dramatic translation of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" (1616) by George Chapman (ca. 1560-1634), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798) and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867). All of these poems, and practically all other "sea" poems published outside the sphere of Canadian literature are either epic or lyric. None is cast in a "documentary" style, a style which, as we shall soon see, is more or less distinctively Canadian. Dorothy Livesay, herself a well-known Canadian poet who actually wrote a few documentary poems (albeit not in the maritime tradition), first defined the genre in its own right in her seminal essay of 1971, "The Documentary Poem: a Canadian Genre" [1]. Although this poetic genre in particular occasionally appears in English literature of other nations, it has played a major, even central role, in the evolution of Canadian poetry ever since the early twentieth century. And so the "definition" and the genre have both tenaciously stuck in Canlit. Our review will take the Canadian historical documentary poem a step further, by illustrating at least two major kingpin poems in the subset genre of the Canadian maritime documentary poem, notably, E.J. Pratt's now justly renowned mini-epic, "Titanic" (1935) and Eric Linden's garland of sonnets, the "Halifax Explosion 1917", the most destructive manmade explosion in the history of humankind prior to the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. For particulars on the massive destructive impact of the Halifax Explosion on the morning of December 6 1917, please refer back to the concluding section of Vallance Review 50, October 2005. The Canadian "Documentary Poem": Historical Precedents As recent Canadian critical studies have evidenced, while the documentary poem is not prima facie uniquely a Canadian genre, Robert Browning, for instance, having written his long poem, "The Ring and the Book" (1868) in the same vein [2], nevertheless it remains quintessentially a Canadian genre. More documentary poems have been composed by Canadian poets than the combined efforts of all other poets in the genre from all other English speaking nations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canada was by and large an uninhabited vast country almost exclusively comprised of millions of square kilometres of wilderness. Its uninterrupted shoreline, the largest on earth at just shy of 244,000 km. long (or 6 times the earth's circumference), bounds the nation on the East, West and North with the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Then as now, Canada is still largely a nation where the wilderness and the sea play a decisive role in our national psyche. As I myself have already pointed out in previous Vallance Reviews, both the wilderness and the sea are core conceptual concerns in a huge proportion of the literature of Canadian poetry, regardless of genres, right on down from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Even our nation's official motto, A Mari Usque Ad Mare "From sea to shining sea" [3] speaks volumes to our well nigh obsessive preoccupation with the raw forces of nature on the high seas, and with the harsh wilderness between the Atlantic and Pacific, not to mention the even more forbidding tundra and polar icecap in the high Arctic. Even the most cursory of historical reviews of Canadian poetic literature in this vein makes this all too transpicuous. Several well-known nineteenth and early twentieth century Canadian poets were adept at the historical poem as such. Allow me to illustrate with just a few of the more notable poems in the genre from that period. One of the earliest examples of "Canadian" poetry in the genre is the "Canadian Boat Song" variously attributed to John Galt (1779-1839) or to the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852). This poem was first published in the September 1829 issue of Blackwood's Magazine in the UK [4]. Note too that this poem is already in the tradition not only of historical but of maritime poetry, soon to become a major genre in its own right in the annals of Canlit. Later on in the nineteenth century, Archibald Lampman's conspicuous historical poem "At the Long Sault" (1860) [5] is yet another shining example of the Canadian historical documentary style poem. Bliss Carman (1851-1929), a contemporary of Archibald Lampman, is also noted for having composed several poems in the same vein, such as "Low Tide on Grande Pré" (1894), "Ballads of Lost Haven: A Book Of The Sea" (1897) and "Songs Of The Sea Children" (1904) [6]. Without exception, all of the aforementioned poems deal with either the wilderness or the sea. By the early twentieth century, the Canadian poet Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton (1849-1937), who was himself a Maritimer hailing from Nova Scotia, was to compose his vividly evocative sea ballad, "The Phantom Light of the Baie des Chaleurs", which was published in 1916 [7]. You would scarcely be remiss if you were to discern a distinct pattern beginning to emerge in the historical genesis of Canadian maritime poetry. The Canadian Maritime Documentary Poem Comes of Age: Sir Charles G.D. Roberts', "The Iceberg" (1931) Perhaps the most significant of Canadian maritime poems prior to the publication of Edwin John Pratt's justly famous "Titanic" (1935) is an uncannily similar poem by Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943), "The Iceberg", first published in 1931 [8], a mere 4 years before the release of Pratt's masterpiece. E.J. Pratt must surely have been familiar with Roberts' own poem, because the style, the tone and even the very language Pratt uses to describe the iceberg in "The Titanic" (1935) all hauntingly echo Roberts' description of his monolithic berg, also destined to sink a ship. If the dramatic tension conveyed in the woof and warp of these two gripping maritime poems strikes you as more than just coincidental, you are not imagining things. The most astonishing coincidence, if coincidence it indeed is, lies in the fact that both of these lengthy descriptive poems are maritime documentary poems. I dare say we may safely conclude that Roberts' "Iceberg" (1931) is probably the first ever truly Canadian maritime documentary poem ever written. All of the earlier poems I have cited were either historical documentary poems, often focused on the forbidding Canadian wilderness, or maritime lyrics or ballads, but none could be definitively stamped with the identifier, a "Canadian maritime documentary poem". Both Roberts' and Pratt's poems are just exactly that. Let's set the tone for E.J. Pratt's taut dramatic poem, "Titanic", by first briefly visiting Roberts' "Iceberg" [15], where we find the poet describing his immense carved iceberg in these bone chilling terms: Shearing the giant floes aside, And then I heard Roberts brings several ingenious poetic techniques into play here. Not only has he personified the iceberg itself, he has even gone so far as to endow it with consciousness. The iceberg speaks in the first person. This is a very bold poetic manouevre. By endowing the iceberg with a personal identity, Roberts has effectively set the stage for its tragic confrontation with its nemesis, the ship that unerringly bears down on it in thick fog. Irony comes into play here too, and in droves. The ship is not the Titanic, but she might just as well have been. Why so?... because the manoeuvres this "lone tanker groping on her course" (verse 137) resorts to in order to dodge the iceberg are precisely the same ones the Titanic uses to try and evade the iceberg she strikes. What's more, this iceberg rips open the hull of the doomed tanker in almost exactly the same way the iceberg pops apart the brittle, frozen hull plates of the RMS Titanic at 11:45 p.m., April 14 1912. Co-incidence. I hardly think so. Conclusion? – while Roberts' poem "The Iceberg" is perhaps not quite on the same tragic scale as Pratt's "Titanic", it sends chills up and down our spines. It sets the tone and the stage once and for all for the enormous impact Pratt's masterpiece is to have on the literary world of English poetry a mere four years hence. On that note, let us now turn our undivided attention to Pratt's "Titanic" (1935). The Masterpiece of the Genre: "Titanic" (1935) by E. J. Pratt (1882-1964) While all of the other poems we have cited so far waver between the wilderness and the sea, it is only when we come to Sir Charles G.D. Roberts' "Iceberg" (1931) and E.J. Pratt's even more viscerally tragic poem, "Titanic" (1935) that we find ourselves faced with the emergence of an even more thematically focused subset of the Canadian documentary poem as genre, namely; the Canadian maritime documentary poem. Small wonder. E.J. Pratt, who was born in Newfoundland, Canada's only large island province, lived out his childhood, adolescence and much of his adult life hard by the cold ocean, in a harsh wilderness environment where the maritime climate is almost always unforgiving and where wild North Atlantic storms rage at least 3 of 4 seasons round. Throughout the province's chequered history, Newfoundlanders have all too often had to toil for a subsistence livelihood from fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, a region of the North Atlantic famed for the huge number of shipwrecks it has claimed. Situated almost due South West of Newfoundland, Anticosti Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence has alone wrecked over 3,000 ships since 1600! Not the least amongst the horrific maritime tragedies to plague the region is none other than the nightmare of the sinking of the world's then largest ocean liner, the ill-fated RMS Titanic, on the night of April 14-15 1912, a tragedy which claimed 1,503 lives. Lest we forget the number of lives lost here, this frightful statistic will haunt us again in Eric Linden's garland of sonnets.
RMS Titanic down at the head fires her first flare rocket Nor should we be the least bit surprised to learn that E.J. Pratt's most ambitious maritime documentary poem, "Titanic" (1935) is also his masterpiece. His highly dramatic recounting of the brief, brilliant career and tragic sinking of the elegant White Star liner is, bar none, the greatest poem that has ever been conceived about the Titanic. And it is Canadian. But it is more than just that. Not only is it a documentary poem, true to the sometimes rather morose Canadian poetic esprit so prone to solitude, but it is the first major Canadian maritime documentary poem of its kind. This point cannot be stressed too much. While several minor maritime poems had been composed by such Canadian luminaries as Archibald Lampman and Bliss Carman before him, E.J. Pratt's masterpiece, "Titanic" stands out head and shoulders over all Canadian maritime poems, lyric or documentary, before or since, with the possible exception of just one other very recent opus of the early third millennium, Eric Linden's garland of sonnets, "Halifax Explosion 1917", of which more momentarily. For his magnificent quasi epic documentary and others like it, also maritime poems, such as his "Newfoundland Verse" (1923) and "Verses of the Sea" (1930), E.J. Pratt was awarded the prestigious Governor General's Award for Literature in 1937, 1940 and yet again in 1952 [9]. To my knowledge, no other Canadian poet has ever won this highest of Canadian literary awards so many times. That E.J. Pratt should have speaks volumes to his genius as our Canadian maritime poet par excellence. E.J. Pratt's "Titanic" (1935) Sets Historical Precedence once and for all Without a shadow of a doubt, E.J. Pratt's "Titanic" (1935) has set the tone for virtually all Canadian maritime documentary poetry since then, notwithstanding, including Eric Linden's own rather ambitious project on the one other great Canadian maritime tragedy, "Halifax Explosion 1917", composed by the latter poet in 2003. As we shall shortly see for ourselves, the parallels between E.J. Pratt's "Titanic" and Eric Linden's garland of sonnets are far more than merely incidental, co-incidental or even passingly similar: in some respects, they are startling. But first, in order to be able to draw these parallels in poetic style, diction and thematic treatment, as well as in the very tone of the these two great maritime documentary oeuvres, we really need to take a good close look at the techniques E.J. Pratt so skillfully brought to bear on the composition and execution of his own masterpiece, "Titanic" (1935). To this end, let us turn our immediate attention to the proemium of Pratt's poem. Pratt leaps in medias res into the fray with the launch of the world's hugest ocean liner, the RMS Titanic, on the lovely day of May 31 1911: "Titanic" (1935) Harland and Wolff Works, Belfast, May 31 1911 The hammers silent and the derricks still,And high-tide in the harbour! Mind and will In open test with time and steel had run The first lap of a schedule and had won. Although a shell of what was yet to be Before another year was over, she, Poised for the launching signal, had surpassed The dreams of builder or of navigator. [10.1] Now, the shamefaced hubris expressed in man's almost unbounded faith in the progress of technology at the outset of the twentieth century could not have been more emphatically voiced than E.J. Pratt has done so here with these 8 introductory lines to his chef d'oeuvre. The ship's builders (see verse 8 above), Harland and Wolff Shipyards, Belfast, and her owners, the International Mercantile Marine Co. and the prestigious White Star Line, boastfully claim: here is a liner that, for all intents and purposes, is (in their own words, ironically mimicked by Pratt) virtually unsinkable. Such gall!
No wave could sweep those upper decks - unthinkable! And yet – and yet, through all this blithe confidence in the muscle of technology, our poet ever so subtly drops a hint of uncertainty here and there. He quietly inserts this telling phrase right at the outset of the poem, "... a shell of what was yet to be/Before another year was over...", "a shell" (!), sad prognostication of the fate that was to befall her in less than a year from the date of her auspicious launch. Then, with barely a blip, Pratt raises the spectre of his own doubts in the question (hardly rhetorical after all), "The perfect ship at last - the first unsinkable,... - had not the folders read so?" The newspapers had said so; Pratt seems rather more doubtful. Here we have a noteworthy example of the deployment of that poetic technique John Keats (1795-1821) intuitively identified as "negative capability". As Pratt's tragic documentary gradually unravels, his doubts trickle more and more openly to the surface, until at the tail end of his apparently objective account of Titanic's horrific demise, he flatly declares his awe at, not the hollow technological "miracle" the Titanic symbolizes, embodied the vainglorious self-confidence of the Edwardian upper class, but at the far more awesome elemental destructive power of the iceberg, And out there in the starlight, with no trace Pratt, just as Roberts 4 years earlier, incisively personifies the terrible indomitable power of nature as envisioned in the grossly impassive lineaments of the iceberg, monstrous offspring of the North Atlantic – an ocean which is all but freezing cold even in summer, capable of the most vicious gales, and which spawns massive icebergs in droves year in and year out. Unfortunately for the Titanic, 1912 was one of the coldest years in a long time, and there were far more "growlers" lurking in the icy waters than usual. Pratt is at pains to set us up for the shattering dénouement of his visceral poem, when the demise of the Titanic drags over 1,500 souls to their doom sealed in implacable Fate, or as the ancient Greeks called it, "moira". Sandwiched between the high-sounding claims riveting our attention right at the outset of this truly compelling dramatic poem and the tragic sinking of the Titanic at its all too fateful conclusion, we find ourselves face to face with one of the most gripping of all true historical events in the entire history of humankind, a story so compelling, so bizarre, so awful and so awe-inspiring in its terrible dimensions that you would be forgiven for believing this was some kind of Shakespearian tragedy of the darkest possible imagining, or a "film noir" on a par with the famous Titanic film "A Night to Remember" (1958). But it is far more than just that. Every word of the story is true, however fantastically far fetched it may seem. Now, here I ask you to pause and mark my words. They will come back to haunt us when we turn to consider Eric Linden's "Halifax Explosion 1917". Be it as it may, the very atmosphere of "stranger than fiction" overshadowing this freakish historical "accident" is precisely what makes the sinking of the Titanic the very stuff of legend. It ensures that, even though the entire poem is factually based, E.J. Pratt's uncannily preternatural "Titanic" is almost certainly bound to be more than likely read as "legend" with the passage of the centuries, just as such great historical legendary epics as Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" have always been, albeit on a lesser scale. Let's face it, no modern poet can ever hope to match the likes of Homer. Very few poets in all history have ever equaled Homer's gargantuan achievement, apart from perhaps Dante in his Divina Commedia or William Shakespeare in his finest tragedies. We do not presume to equate E.J. Pratt or any modern historical documentary poet with these great poets. Such a claim is patently preposterous. There is no need to go that route. On the other hand, the modern historical maritime documentary poem, which is almost exclusively a Canadian genre, is bound to leave an indelible mark on the history of Canadian poetry in future generations and on English poetry the world over in the early centuries of the Third Millennium. Of that I am virtually certain. E.J. Pratt has barely waded into his great maritime documentary when with a sudden jolt he wrenches our attention away from the crowning achievement of the launch of the Titanic to his lugubrious description of the nasty iceberg now trundling ominously down from the Bering Straits and Greenland, bearing unerringly towards the very point where it is fated to meet the Titanic at the stroke of 11:45 p.m. on the pitch black moonless night of Sunday, April 14, 1912. Pratt wastes no time evincing the utterly impassive brutal mass of the iceberg, carved out of the Greenland's icy core, a gargantuan force of nature no human technology, however seemingly "invincible", could ever hope to reckon with: The Iceberg .............. nothing but the brute [ * To ram his message home, Pratt repeats this phrase almost word Now, let's just scroll right back up the page to Roberts' chilling evocation of his "Iceberg", comparing his language and poetic style, right down to the angular, mock-prosaic metre he uses with Pratt's. Are not the parallels dramatic I have highlighted in italics in each of these passages? Judge for yourself. The phrases I have italicized in the passage cited here make it painfully clear what the poet's psychological and emotional responses are to this awesome force of nature. He is bloody well terrified of it, as surely he... or anyone... should be. Here again, do pause and mark my words. They are to haunt us again in Eric Linden's "Halifax Explosion 1917". Before we abandon ship and leave Pratt's justly famous maritime documentary poem, we should perhaps cast one more glance on another passage in his poem, a passage which starkly echoes the verses we have already visited, composed by Roberts just 4 years earlier. Starboard your helm: ship heeled Don't be too surprised if this distinctly reminds you of Roberts' passage we have just cited. Both Roberts' and Pratt's poems are without the slightest doubt firmly rooted in the Canadian maritime documentary poem as genre. Canadian Maritime Poems after 1935 in the Twentieth Century and the Early Third Millennium It is not so much a question whether Roberts' and Pratt's maritime documentary poems, pivotal though they unquestionably are, actually established the genre once and for all, or were necessarily the sole catalysts for all such subsequent poems peppering Canadian literature for the remainder of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. It is far more likely that these two lengthy maritime documentary poems by these two great Canadian poets came to be simply because their time was come. Given the fertile ground of historical or maritime lyrics that we have already highlighted in Canlit of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emergence of the Canadian maritime documentary poem as a distinct genre in its own right was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Accordingly, for the remainder of the twentieth century and into the opening years of the Third Millennium, we find ourselves face to face with many more instances of Canadian maritime poetry, a fair proportion of it also documentary. We will cite only a few examples in contemporary Canadian poetry following this tradition before moving on to consider the key position of Eric Linden's garland of sonnets. In 1961, Suzanne O'Callaghan, who incidentally is a Maritimer living in Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.), published her book of maritime poems, "The Sea and Other Red Roads" [14]. We also find on the Internet a truly comprehensive critical study by Jane Ledwell, dated 2002, dealing with the omnipresence of the shoreline as a vital symbolic and compelling reality in the maritime lives of the islanders of P.E.I. This article only serves to register even more vividly the very thesis of our own review [16]. In her critical study, Ledwell identifies several Canadian Maritime poets of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: May Carroll (early twentieth century) [17], Milton Acorn (1923-1986) and the contemporary poets Catherine Matthews and Shauna McCabe, all inhabitants of P.E.I. The article mentions other poets whose poetic themes are likewise genuinely maritime, but the list above suffices for our purposes. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, another Maritimer living on the far eastern shoreline of Quebec right opposite Newfoundland, the Québécois poet by the name of Roland Jomphe (1917-2003), himself a fisherman and lifelong "man of the sea", whom this reviewer personally met in Havre Saint Pierre in the summer of 2000 [18], published book after book of maritime poetry, most of it lyrical, some of it documentary. The titles of almost all his poetry books are, as it were, dead giveaways: Amour et souvenance au coeur de Minganie = Love and Memories in the Heart of the Mingan Islands (1985, republished 2004), Confidences des îles = Secrets of the Islands" (1987, republished 2004) [19] and À l'Ombre d'un village (In the Shadow of a Village), 1988, and Parole du golfe = The Word of the Gulf (1996) – to mention but a few of his pithy maritime productions. Hard on the heels of Canadian poets of the last century writing in the genre, we find contemporary Canadian poets such as Donna Allard, current President of the Canadian Poetry Association, a Maritimer who lives in New Brunswick, and Richard Vallance, who spent most of his childhood in Nova Scotia. These poets often address similar maritime topics in their poetry. From Donna Allard we have such poems as "East West Passage", in which she vividly portrays the harsh livelihood Maritime fishermen must glean from the sea: Turbulent Add to this title "Red Wind" and "Spinnaker's Run", all three of them Maritime poems and all of them to appear in the forthcoming international poetry compendium, The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry = Le Florilège de la nouvelle Pléiade, © 2005. As for Richard Vallance, his earliest long poem, "Bras d'Or", which he composed in 1963 at the age of 18, is itself a maritime poem through and through. This poem is to be published in C.S. Snow's CD-ROM anthology, "Messages from the Ether" (Kedco Studios, 2006). Richard has written many a sonnet centred on maritime themes, not the least of which are his own documentary maritime sonnet, "Iceberg Dead Ahead!", which tellingly describes in painstaking detail the very moment of Titanic's impact with the "paleolithic face" of the iceberg, as she bore down on it at the crunching speed of 21.5 knots: One lookout rings the bridge, "Iceberg dead ahead!", These two poems are far from being the only instances of specifically maritime poetry from the hands of this contemporary Canadian poet. Witness also his picturesque bilingual English and French sonnets, "The Dunes of Bouctouche = Les Dunes de Bouctouche" [21.2], set where else but in the Maritimes, viz. in Acadia, the French territory of New Brunswick, which he visited in the fall of 2004. Richard premiered the French version of this now multi-published sonnet when he read it for the first time at the Oct. 3rd. 2004 Open Mic of The Canadian Poetry Association in Moncton, New Brunswick. We could just as easily cite several more examples of maritime poetry by this poet, but suffice it to say, Richard Vallance, like so many Canadian poets before him, seems quite besotted with the sea and maritime themes in much of his poetry. Eric Linden's Garland of Sonnets, "Halifax Explosion 1917"
As I was conceptualizing how best to write this review, the thought crossed my mind to ask Eric Linden himself what his own impressions of the similarities between E.J. Pratt's "Titanic" (1935) and his own "Halifax Explosion" (2003) were. Eric kindly obliged. So without further ado, let us examine what Eric Linden himself [22] has to say about these two singularly successful Canadian documentary maritime poems.
I suppose that if the old expression, "Get it from the horse's mouth" rings true, it surely must here. By way of summary, I have a few remarks to add to Eric's own observations. From Eric's analysis of the thematic and structural similarities underlying these two major Canadian maritime documentary poems, and from my own, we should be able to draw at least some well-grounded conclusions. Outside Canada itself, the Halifax explosion, horrific as it was, is virtually unknown. Such is the fate of much of Canadian history, including its worst tragedies celebrated in major Canadian poetry, all but largely ignored in the rest of the English speaking world. Another frightful maritime tragedy which immediately leaps to mind for any Canadian is the gruesome loss of the liner, the Empress of Ireland, in the frigid waters of the Saint Lawrence River opposite Rimouski, on the night of May 29 1914, with the loss of over 1,000 lives. Almost all the children on board were drowned. Yet who outside of Canada knows of this horrific maritime tragedy? Few indeed, I would wager. My own Conclusions on the Similarities between E.J. Pratt's "Titanic" (1935) and Eric Linden's "Halifax Explosion 1917" Eric Linden has himself come to some of the same conclusions as have I on the amazing similarities between these two poetic oeuvres. Let us summarize his conclusions first: 1. Both works recount "maritime disasters of horrendous proportions. Ships are sunk; thousands of lives are lost (Linden)." The number of lives lost was scarily similar in both cases. When Titanic foundered, 1,503 people almost instantly froze to death in the North Atlantic. When the Mont Blanc exploded to smithereens, also on a bitterly cold day, the morning of December 6 1917, in Eric Linden's own words, "Two thousand people died that moment, too;" (sonnet 7, verse 11) Halifax, like the Titanic before her, was reduced to a total wreck. 2. Eric Linden correctly underscores the fact that both of these maritime tragedies were quite needless, and could have very easily have been avoided altogether. Human error was at the root of both these tragedies. But Linden lays heavy stress on the dangerous cargo of the Mont Blanc: There'd be no accident before she sails. What contradistinguishes Pratt's "Titanic" from Linden's garland of sonnets is that the former poet deliberately focuses on the sheer hubris and arrogance of the builders of the Titanic and of her smug first class passengers all through his poem, while the latter is at pains to make us realize, as readers, the sheer negligence, if not downright human stupidity of either the Captain of the Mont Blanc or the Captain of the Imo, or more likely than not, both of them. 3. Eric Linden has also – and I think judiciously – flagged the fact that outside Canada itself, and certainly in American literary circles more than anywhere else in the world, both of these great maritime documentary poems are not so likely to rouse anywhere near the level of interest as they do amongst Canadian readers and critics. The problem, or more accurately speaking, the conundrum is in fact really political in nature. While America is both a political and literary superpower in our present day and age, Canada, however huge our nation may be geographically, is a very small country in terms of population. Our 32 million inhabitants come in at something like 1/9th. of America's population at best. Moreover, Canada is a mere middle power on the world stage, while the USA holds sway over the entire planet in every conceivable domain, including literature and publishing. In the deluge of American literature, Canlit simply ends up being marginalized. Regardless of era, our poetry in both English and French (and I think equally the English language poetry of other nations outside America) is no exception to this rather sorry state of affairs. Still, it is this writer's firm view that history will more than vindicate the pre-eminent role of at least E.J. Pratt's "Titanic" on the world stage of poetry in English literature in the decades and centuries to come. In other words, the greatest works of Canadian poetry, as indeed of American, British and Australian poetry, along with English poetry of all other anglophone nations, will hopefully all claim their rightful place in the annals of our literature in ages to come, regardless of the nation of their origin, which is really of secondary significance. There is a very good chance that Eric Linden's garland of sonnets will also survive the acid test of history, and will withstand the test of time in its own right as a cornerstone of English Canadian poetry. I make this daring claim, if for no other reason than this. When I sent the spring 2005 issue of SONNETTO POESIA to The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, in Halifax, Nova Scotia [23], scene of that horrific explosion almost 90 years ago, the museum's library immediately wrote me back, informing me that they would keep this garland of sonnets in their collection in perpetuity, even though it was not their standard policy to accept unsolicited poetry manuscripts to said end. Enough said. 4. While these two poems (and I use the term "poem" advisedly in the case of Linden's garland of sonnets, since they can quite easily be read as one continuous documentary poem) do indeed share the theme of great maritime tragedy, there is one telling distinction between them. As E.J. Pratt appears to have envisioned it, his "Titanic" (1935) is meant to serve as a critical retrospective view of a modern, twentieth century poet, who has personally lived through all the horrors of the Great War (WW I) and who is fully cognizant of the fact that the Titanic represents all the over-confidence and self-aggrandizing values of the era immediately preceding his own, namely, that of Victorian and Edwardian England and indeed of the British Empire itself, already on the wane. We must also bear these factors firmly in mind: not only had World War I intervened between the loss of the Titanic in April 1912, but other horrors of even greater magnitude had since occurred. The Empress of Ireland sank in the Saint Lawrence River at 2:00 a.m. on May 29, 1914, with the loss of 1012 lives. Worse still, the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by the German submarine in sight of the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1917, with the loss of 1198 lives. Such huge technological horrors simply never happened in the nineteenth century. Both the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania sank far, far faster than the Titanic. Titanic took 2 hours 45 minutes to founder. The other two ships went down in less than 20 minutes! Then of course, World War I itself intervened. All of these tragedies happened in E.J. Pratt's own lifetime, and all must have been painfully fresh in his memory. None of these tragedies happened in Eric Linden's lifetime. E.J. Pratt's memories are visceral and personal. We must also realize that for the vast majority of the earliest readers of "Titanic" (1935), all of these horrific events were still fresh wounds in their memories too. Linden's can be neither. Nor can we as readers in the early Third Millennium even begin to imagine the scale of the horrors these tragedies must surely have been to Pratt himself and to his contemporaries. For E.J. Pratt and his own generation the tragic loss of the Titanic in 1912, the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in 1914 and of the Lusitania in 1917, as well as the Halifax Explosion itself, were all still vivid memories they could not ignore in the least. For so many of the then living, who had been born in the latter part of the nineteenth century, all of these dreadful tragedies marked the end, indeed the death knell of an era, the Victorian-Edwardian Age, and the gruesome birth of what we know only too well as "the modern world". On the other hand, who in his right mind today, without being grossly deceived, could be so rash as to claim that we, at the outset of the Third Millennium, do not have to live with horror on such a gargantuan scale as these events must surely have symbolized in their own day? For we, almost all of us born since 1940, have witnessed the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the cancerous spread of international terrorism and the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, not to mention other gruesome recent events fresh in our own memories. That list of horrors has now assumed monumental proportions. As the passage decrying the horrors of World War I at beginning of Eric Linden's first sonnet cited at the outset of this review attests, I am assured that Eric Linden must have at least unconsciously felt the tug of the rampant horror that has continually plagued the modern world as we must live in it, ever since World War I and even before it, as he set about composing his garland of sonnets early in this century. If anything, his "Halifax Explosion 1917" sonnets only serve to ram home yet again the well nigh apocalyptic aura that suffuses every corner of the earth and gnaws away at civilization today. If anything, we who are lucky enough to be alive and well in the early Third Millennium should, I think – and I am quite certain Eric Linden shares this belief – be far more on our guard against such horrors. If anything, we should commemorate even more sympathetically the terrible tragedies we have so painstakingly catalogued in this glummest of reviews. Remembrance Day? I should think so. Daily Remembrance of the last century's reign of horrors, and of this century's reign of terrorism? For our sake as poets, for the sake of all humanity, we dearly pray so. 5. Last but far from least, and on an altogether more positive note, given my penchant for multi-media analysis, I would be remiss if I did not underscore the media-savvy nature of both Pratt's "Titanic" and Linden's "Halifax Explosion 1917". In his "Titanic" (1935), Pratt speaks of the Titanic's and other ships' "wireless" and "telegraph" (all the same technology) no less than 25 times. He goes to some length to stress the vital importance of what was then cutting edge technology on the Titanic. Her wireless had a range of 500 nautical miles – incredible for 1912 – not that it did her any good. My point is simply this: E.J. Pratt was very familiar with the latest technology of his own day and age, and indeed read his poem, "Titanic" on the radio in his lifetime. Media savvy poet? No doubt about it. Now, if a T.V. documentary film maker were to take Eric Linden's 15 sonnets and string them all together end to end, he or she would have not the slightest difficulty in using the entire garland of sonnets as voice over for a televised documentary... and no one would be the wiser for it. The same technique could be readily applied to Pratt's "Titanic". Both poems would make for exciting television and even Internet docudramas. Why not? Anyone who is not a poet but who is an adept T.V. journalist, could narrate as fact either poem with a vivid film backdrop. Nor should anyone who reads this Vallance Review or, for that matter, several others I have previously penned, be the least surprised if I, as a literary critic of the twenty-first century, am so eager to flog the notion of adapting such highly dramatic poems as these two works are to television, the Internet or any other multi-media interactive format. That is surely the direction we are heading in at the outset of the early Third Millennium. Time will tell all. © by Richard Vallance October 27 2005, with editorial assistance and textual contributions from Eric Linden and the editorial assistance of Bradley Alexander Bucsis References & Notes: [1] Athabasca University: Canadian Writers. This bibliography cites Dorothy Livesay's essay on pp. 267-281 in: Mandel, Eli, ed. Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, © 1971
Richard Vallance is the author of: Canadian Federation of Poets: Poetry Lessons: Lesson & Exercise - Week 18 SONNETS in The Canadian Federation of Poets weekly Poetry Progress Lessons & Exercises series SONNETTO POESIA is published quarterly in print & is advertised on the front page of the current issue of Poetry Life and Times. To subscribe to SONNETTO POESIA, contact the editor, Richard Vallance. To read the earlier e-zine back issues, visit the sonnet journal's Home Page here: 
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