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Non-Fictional
Prose
by
Joseph Edmund Collins
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Introduction
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Joseph
Edmund Collins (1855-92) belongs beside the six
poets of the Confederation group because, as recent
research has shown, he played a very significant
role both in the formation of the group and in
its disintegration. Born in Placentia, Newfoundland,
he migrated to New Brunswick in 1875 and began
to exercise a strong influence on Charles G.D.
Roberts in 1880, when the two men were working
in Chatham, Collins as the editor of a local newspaper
(The Star) and Roberts as a teacher at
the local Grammar School. After Collins
moved to Toronto late in 1880 to take up an editorial
position on The Globe, he became friends
with Archibald Lampman, who was then a student
at Trinity College. In addition to providing
nationalistic encouragement to both poets, Collins
helped to imbue them with the conviction that,
to be worthy of the new Dominion of Canada, their
work should be equal in merit to the very best
poetry that was being written in Britain and elsewhere.
As several of his reviews and essays of the early
'eighties testify, he also worked both openly
and covertly to promote Lampman and, especially,
Roberts as poets whose work transcended the provincialism
that he deplored. For their parts, Lampman
and Roberts
wrote laudatory reviews of Collins's Life and
Times of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald
(1883), the last chapter of which is his major
contribution to Canadian criticism as well as
to the enhancement of Roberts's poetic reputation.
When
Collins moved to New York in 1886 to take up the
editorship of a new periodical, The Epoch,
he continued to promote Roberts's poetry, maintained
an avuncular correspondence with Lampman, and
became fast friends with Bliss Carman after he
too moved to the city in 1890. By that time,
Collins's life had begun rapidly to disintegrate,
however: he had left The Epoch and become
a free-lance writer; his marriage had collapsed
and he was living in rented rooms; and he was
drinking heavily. For a time in 1890-91,
he lived with Carman and in the summer of 1890
he joined Roberts in Windsor, Nova Scotia, but
he was accumulating debts all the while and his
health was fast deteriorating. On February
23, 1892, he died in a New York hospital, but
not before writing a letter to the Saint John
Progress in which he accused the poets
whom he had nurtured of working covertly to enhance
one another's reputations, a charge that he could
level with some confidence.
"There are only a few people who know
what Joseph Edmund Collins has done for our literature.
. ., and perhaps all that he has done will never
be known," wrote Lampman in his "At
the Mermaid Inn" column on March 19, 1892;
"[he] was almost the literary father of some
of the young men who are now winning fame among
us."
The story
of Collins's role in the formation and disintegration
of the Confederation group is told more fully
in the first and final chapters of The
Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897.
John Coldwell Adams's "Roberts, Lampman,
and Joseph Edmund Collins" in The Charles
G.D. Roberts Symposium, edited by Glenn Clever
(Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), pp.
6-13 remains a valuable examination of the relationship
between the three men, and M. Brook Taylor's biography
of Collins in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography
12: 204-05 contains a useful bibliography of works
by and about him.
- D.M.R.B. |
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