Low Tide on Grand Pré As a student at Harvard, Carman "was heavily influenced by
Royce, whose spiritualistic
idealism, combined with the
transcendentalism of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, lies centrally in the background of his first major poem, "Low Tide on Grand Pré" written in the summer and winter of 1886." "Low Tide..." served as the title poem for Carman's first book. "The poems in this volume have been collected with reference to their similarity of tone," Carman wrote in his preface; a nostalgic tone of pervading loss and melancholy. Three outstanding examples are "The Eavesdropper," "In Apple Time" and "Wayfaring." However, "none can equal the artistry of the title poem. What is more, although Carman would publish over thirty other volumes during his lifetime, none of them contains anything that surpasses this poem he wrote when he was barely twenty-five years old." Even
modernists loved
Vagabondia. In the "October, 1912 issue of the
London Poetry Review, Ezra Pound noted that he had 'greatly enjoyed
The Songs of Vagabondia by Mr. Bliss Carman and the late Richard Hovey.'" Carman's most famous poem from the first volume is arguably "The Joys of the Open Road."
More Songs... contains "A Vagabond Song," once familiar to a generation of Canadians. "Canadian youngsters who were in grade seven anytime between the mid-1930s and the 1950s were probably exposed to ... 'A Vagabond Song' [which] appeared in
The Canada Book of Prose and Verse, Book One, the school reader that was used in nearly every province" (and was edited by Lorne Pierce).
Behind the Arras With
Behind the Arras (1895), Carman continued his practice of "bringing together poems that were 'in the same key.' Whereas
Low Tide on Grand Pré is elegiacal and melancholy,
Songs from Vagabondia is mostly light and jaunty, while
Behind the Arras is philosophical and heavy."
By the Aurelian Wall "By the Aurelian Wall" is Carman's
elegy to
John Keats. It served as the title poem of his 1898 collection, a book of
formal elegies. In the last poem in the book, "The Grave-Tree," Carman writes about his own death.
The Pipes of Pan "
Pan, the goat-god, traditionally associated with poetry and with the fusion of the earthly and the divine, becomes Carman's organizing symbol in the five volumes issued between 1902 and 1905" under the above title. Under the influence of Mrs. King, Carman had begun to write in both prose and poetry about the ideas of 'unitrinianism,' "a strategy of mind-body-spirit harmonization aimed at undoing the physical, psychological, and spiritual damage caused by urban modernity ... therapeutic ideas [which] resulted in the five volumes of verse assembled in
Pipes of Pan." The
Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) calls the series "a collection that contains many superb lyrics but, overall, evinces the dangers of a soporific aesthetic." Carman's method, as Charles G.D. Roberts saw it in his Introduction to the book, "apparently, has been to imagine each lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it; for the indefinable flavor of the translation is maintained throughout, though accompanied by the fluidity and freedom of purely original work". It was a daunting task, as Roberts admits: "It is as if a sculptor of to-day were to set himself, with reverence, and trained craftsmanship, and studious familiarity with the spirit, technique, and atmosphere of his subject, to restore some statues of
Polyclitus or
Praxiteles of which he had but a broken arm, a foot, a knee, a finger upon which to build." Yet, on the whole, Carman succeeded. "Written more or less contemporaneously with the love poems in
Songs of the Sea Children, the Sappho reconstructions continue the amorous theme from a feminine point of view. Nevertheless, the feelings ascribed to Sappho are pure Carman in their sensitive and elegiac melancholy."
Later work In his review of 1954's
Selected Poems of Bliss Carman,
literary critic Northrop Frye compared Carman and the other Confederation Poets to the
Group of Seven: "Like the later painters, these poets were lyrical in tone and romantic in attitude; like the painters, they sought for the most part uninhabited landscape." But Frye added: "The lyrical response to landscape is by itself, however, a kind of emotional photography, and like other forms of photography is occasional and epigrammatic.... Hence the lyric poet, after he has run his gamut of impressions, must die young, develop a more intellectualized attitude, or start repeating himself. Carman's meeting of this challenge was only partly successful." It is true that Carman had begun to repeat himself after
Sappho. "Much of Carman's writing in poetry and prose during the decade preceding World War I is as repetitive as the title of
Echoes from Vagabondia (1912) intimates" says the
DCB. What had made his poetry so remarkable at the beginning – that every new book was completely new – was gone. However, Carman's career was by no means over. He "published four other collections of new poetry during his lifetime and two more were ready for publication at the time of his death:
The Rough Rider, and Other Poems (1908), ''
A Painter's Holiday, and Other Poems (1911), April Airs (1916), Far Horizons (1925), Sanctuary (1929), and Wild Garden'' (1929). James Cappon's comment on
Far Horizons applies almost equally to the other five volumes: 'There is nothing new in its poetic quality which has the sweet sadness of age rehearsing old tunes with an art which is now very smooth though with less vivacity than it used to have.'" Carman continued to write poems until the end of his life, such as
The Old Grey Wall (
April Airs),
Rivers of Canada (
Far Horizons),
The Ghost-yard of the Goldenrod and
The Ships of Saint John (
Later Poems, 1926), and The Winter Scene (
Sanctuary: The "Sunshine House" sonnets). ==Recognition==