Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts) Biography

Canadian poet and writer, born in Douglas, New Brunswick, educated at the University of New Brunswick. Roberts is sometimes regarded as the father of Canadian poetry, chiefly because the favourable reception of his early and best work, which blends late Romantic poetic modes with an attempt to encompass Canadian themes, proved an inspiration to other poets of his generation. He is generally classified as one of the ‘Confederation Poets’, the group of turn-of-the-century Canadian writers who did much to establish a local tradition in poetry. His landscape verse ultimately turns away from the English models in which it finds its origins by legitimizing Canadian wilderness settings as proper subjects for poetry. His later work is influenced by Modernism and the changing social and ideological climate of the inter war years. Roberts published 21 volumes of poetry, of which Orion (1880), In Divers Tones (1886), Songs of the Common Day (1893), and The Iceberg (1934) are among the best-known. Along with Ernest Thompson Seton, he helped to establish the animal story as a highly popular Canadian form. His work in this genre reflects his belief that humanity should live closer to nature, and includes Earth's Enigmas (1896), The Kindred of the Wild (1902), The Watchers of the Trails (1904), and The Feet of the Furtive (1912).