With the publication of Charles
G.D. Roberts's
Collected Poems in 1985
and his
Collected Letters in 1989, students
and scholars of his poetry and fiction had easy
access to nearly all the relevant authorial materials,
the glaring exception being the non-fictional
prose by Roberts that remained scattered in periodicals,
newspapers, and the various books to which he
contributed essays. True, nine of Roberts's
most important critical essays had been made readily
available in W.J. Keith's
Selected Poetry and
Critical Prose (1974), but this scarcely did
justice to the breadth and depth of the "dozens
of . . . essays, reviews, literary portrait, and
prefaces" (Early 173) that he published between
1880 and his death in 1943. Working outwards
from an excellent selection of materials by the
editor of his
Collected Letters, Laurel
Boone, the present electronic edition of Roberts's
non-fictional prose is very much a work in progress:
although it includes all the pieces selected by
Boone and all the pieces that came to light during
research for
The
Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897,
it does not yet include a number of hard-to-find
items listed in John Coldwell Adams's "Preliminary
Bibliography" (1983) and other compilations,
or, needless to say, whatever items remain to
be discovered by researchers. Any information
about absent or newly discovered items would be
gratefully accepted and fully acknowledged.
Although
many of Roberts's critics discuss and draw upon
his non-fictional prose, none has discussed his
critical ideas more thoroughly than L.R. Early
in "Roberts as Critic" in The Charles
G.D. Roberts Symposium, edited by Glen Clever
(Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1983), pp.
173-89. Readers interested in the relationship
between Roberts's critical ideas and those of
his early mentor, Joseph Edmund Collins, and other
members of the Confederation group, especially
Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and William Wilfred
Campbell, should find some food for thought in
The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets,
1880-1897, particularly the chapter entitled
"Aesthetics: Workmanship and Variety."