English and French Canadian Poetry

On Mount Royal

If English-Canadian poetry is largely narrative and French-Canadian poetry is largely lyrical, then the most interesting French Canadian poets are Émile Nelligan (1879-1941), St-Denys Garneau (1912-1943), and Anne Hébert (1916-2000). There is a dreamlike quality to the work of both Garneau and Hébert and I think the best way to understand their work is to think of their poems as one thinks of dreams, as visits to the unconscious archetypal mind, to be understood as one interprets one's own dreams. They are direct expressions of the poet's psyche and the collective unconscious of the French-Canadian people. I am always interested in what a poet's work says about the soul of the poet, the soul of the nation, the poet's private mythology. These are dark poets that I have listed, they write of the human , they write of the dark side of the Quebec soul, this means the French soul but also in a symbiotic-two solitudes kind of way the English-speaking soul; that is, my soul. We have a spiritual darkness in Quebec that people in the rest of Canada will find difficult to understand; few people want to look at the soul, they are afraid of what they might see.