Introduction

Edward Taylor Fletcher was born in Canterbury, England, on 20 May 1817, and first arrived in Canada on 20 October 1827 with his father, Captain John Fletcher of the 72nd Regiment of the British Army, his mother Martha (née Ashe), his elder sister, Anna, and his younger sister, Harriet. Two months later, he was enrolled at a private school in Québec City run by the Reverend Daniel Wilkie, where his studies included mathematics, Greek and Latin, and philosophy, before continuing on, in 1832, “to the Grand Seminaire,” apparently as a boarding student, as he recalls in “Reminiscences of Old Quebec” (85). He fell ill from cholera on 24 July 1834. The disease had arrived in Canada two years earlier, claiming thousands of lives despite various quarantine measures (Hamlin 2009, 47), and this second major outbreak had begun nearly two weeks prior to Fletcher’s infection, on 11 July (Nelson 1866, 144). Although he survived, his mother contracted cholera while caring for him and died on 30 July 1834. Fletcher’s hair turned prematurely white following his convalescence, and this experience appears to be the central trauma in his life, recurring repeatedly across his poetic works for another sixty years. During the Rebellions of 1837–38, he enlisted and was enrolled in the Quebec Engineer Rifles from 1838 but, as his son Sidney points out (Fletcher 1935, 212), this consisted of drilling and doing guard duty without any combat.¹ The records of the Montreal City Militia list him as a second lieutenant in the Montreal Rifle Battalion.

After school, Fletcher became an architectural student, learning under his cousin Frederick Hacker, for whom he became a clerk and then a partner. Around the same time (in December 1940), he began to keep his multilingual commonplaces books—a practice he appears to have continued for the rest of his life. He was licenced as a land surveyor on 7 March 1842, for the newly created Province of Canada, and on 17 March, in the original provincial capital of Kingston, the Governor General appointed Fletcher as a surveyor of land for Canada East (formerly Lower Canada), as was announced in the Quebec Mercury on 31 March by the office of the secretary of the Province of Quebec.

Having secured a career and income, his domestic life developed. On 21 October 1846, he and Henrietta Amelia Lindsay were married in the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral in Montréal. Born in 1827, Henrietta was the daughter of William Burns Lindsay, then clerk of the legislative assembly of the United Province of Canada (and whose son of the same name—one of Henrietta’s brothers—would eventually become the first clerk of the House of Commons). In 1849, Fletcher was appointed secretary of the newly created board of examiners for land surveyors in Canada, subsequently becoming the secretary for Lower Canada when the board was split in 1851, a position in which he served until 1858. These biographical milestones inform his choice of themes in his writing and his deep attention to landscapes in his poetry and travel narratives.

We also know that Pierre Coté, “a well-dressed young man,” was accused of stealing “chamois leather, six sovereigns, and four dollars in bank notes” while working and residing in Fletcher’s home but was acquitted by the jury on 18 January 1854 (“Court of Quarter Sessions,” 1854, 2). The family resided in Toronto for a time shortly after this, where his son Sidney Ashe Fletcher was born in 1856, but by 1860 they had returned to Montréal. His third surviving son was Ormond and his youngest and fourth was Cecil, although I have been able to identify only ten of his thirteen children.²

In the summer of 1863, Fletcher travelled through the Saguenay by water to Lac Saint-Jean, as detailed in this collection, and explored a route very similar to that of Highway 381 today, in connection with the proposed building of a road to link Saint-Urbain and the Baie des Ha! Ha! The family moved again in 1866 to Ottawa, where they lived in New Edinburgh, near to Rideau Hall, but they returned to Québec City in 1867 at some point after Confederation on 1 July. Less than a year later, in April 1868, Fletcher’s wife, Henrietta, died in childbirth, and only six months thereafter, his fourteen-year-old daughter Harriet Alma died of typhoid fever, echoing the loss of his mother in 1834. Writing in his own autobiography, his son Sidney later recalled his father’s grief:

A dreadful time this was to all of us. My father seemed to me to be in a sort of daze for a long time. We could hear him moving around at night and mourning his loss. I went once out of my bed to mourn with him. He was much affected, and we wept together. He kissed me and taking me in his arms brought me back to my bed but saying nothing. The Reverend Charles Hamilton of St. Matthew’s Church on St. John Street, where we attended, was a great comfort to my father and to all of us.³

It is difficult to reconcile this depth of feeling with the absence of literary work for him during this period, but the images of children, plague, death, adoption, fostering, and the stark voice of loss permeate his later works just as much as those of his youth.

During the summer of 1875, Fletcher made a voyage to Labrador, together with Sidney and several other companions, to explore various mineral deposits, a journey that both he and Sidney recount. He competed in the chess tournaments in Québec City in 1877, ranking fourth then seventh in a joint tournament with Montréal, and by 1882 was on the comité de direction of the Association d’Échecs du Canada—his obituary in the Semi-Weekly Colonist also describes him as “one of the best chess players in the province” (“Westminster” 1897, 1). In 1881 he became a subscriber to the Anglican periodical the Church Guardian, but these are only fragments of a life, whatever personal and emotional states they speak to individually.

In 1878, Fletcher was appointed deputy surveyor general for the province of Quebec. Following his retirement from the Crown Lands Department on 29 July 1882, he served as the secretary of the land surveyors of the Province of Quebec, an association that he had helped to found. He retired from this position in 1885, and the 1880s showed a period of increasing literary productivity as his professional demands appear to have lessened. He found time before and after his retirement to write of his earlier life, though neither recollections were published during his lifetime. In 1886 or 1887, he moved to British Columbia, accompanied by his daughter Henriette and youngest son, Cecil.⁴ He then privately published his first long poem two years later in Ottawa, this following on a small, private edition of 1887. He would live in British Columbia for another decade. He, Henriette, and Cecil first lived in Victoria with his eldest surviving son, Captain Everard Hyde Fletcher (1851–1925), the inspector of post offices for the province. All of Fletcher’s other sons were by then resident in British Columbia. Cecil subsequently left for work in Yale, and Henriette moved to New Westminster to live with her brother Sidney, later followed by her father at some point prior to 1892. He would remain with Sidney for the rest of his life.

After contracting influenza, Edward Taylor Fletcher died on 1 February 1897, having survived and lost family in a pandemic and to endemic disease.

Fletcher has largely escaped literary history without remark. For C. M. Whyte-Edgar in A Wreath of Canadian Song, Fletcher is among “the number of those who did really good work for the contemporary press, which was only collected years after, in many cases not at all” (1910, 23). Mary Lu MacDonald mentions Fletcher in passing for his poems “Day-Dawn,” “Noon,” and “Night,” all published in an 1839 issue of the Literary Garland, and Mary Markham Brown provides a bibliography of Fletcher’s contributions to the Literary Garland and related writings (MacDonald 1992, 161; Brown 1962, 11, 56). However, this is nearly the full scope of reviews and critical responses to his writings.⁵

Brown’s summation also points to the difficulties in identifying Fletcher’s works, some having been published under pseudonyms, and others seemingly unpublished and now most likely lost, such as his poem “The Lay of Leif Erickson” and the essays “Mark System of the Ancient Germans” and “On the Sanskrit Language and Literature.”⁶ The poem, which apparently won the “prize medal offered for public competition” by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in 1853 (Brown 1962, 56), would be a useful complement to Fletcher’s commentary on Erickson in “Notes of a Voyage to St. Augustine, Labrador.” His essay on Sanskrit would likewise inform his work if it could be found, although the snippets he included in his commonplace books and essays reveal some of the readings and passages that were of particular interest to him.

Brown also notes his publication of poetry in the Quebec Mercury beginning in 1834, but the poems of the period are generally published with only initials for attribution, so it is impossible at present to know which might be Fletcher’s pseudonyms. In the absence of Brown’s source information as a basis for attributing anonymous work from the 1834 volume of the Quebec Mercury to Fletcher, any effort to determine what pseudonyms he may have used would amount to pure conjecture. She drew on the Bibliotheca Canadensis; or, A Manual for Canadian Literature, which makes the same claim, again without elaboration (Morgan 1867, 128). The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, of which Fletcher would later be a member, advertised its meetings regularly in the paper, so it is certainly a plausible venue for his juvenilia. However, all of the unattributed poems published that year in the Quebec Mercury can either be firmly attributed to other poets or are stylistically quite distinct from Fletcher’s attachment to enjambment and internal rhyme. Of course, this does not preclude his works from having appeared there, per Brown’s assertion, but none have thus far been identified.

I have been able to locate reviews only of Fletcher’s two long poems, both written late in his career. In 1889, an anonymous reviewer for the Quebec Morning Chronicle wrote of The Lost Island:

Mr. Edward Taylor Fletcher, P.L.S. of Victoria, B.C., a gentleman well known and much esteemed in Quebec, where he resided very many years—sends us The Lost Island, written by himself in striking verse. The little volume is edited by Mr. William Wicksteed in Ottawa. The story, of course, is told of the submerged Atlantis. Mr. Fletcher’s imagination is very rich and original, and he has contrived to invest his narrative with a good deal of color. His incidents are managed with spirit, and his character-drawing is exceedingly strong. The poem is suggestive, and the author’s friends will be glad to note that he is as vigorous intellectually as ever. (Review of The Lost Island 1889, 4)⁷

The review is followed by the final stanza of the poem, by way of a sample of Fletcher’s work. The editor mentioned, William Wicksteed, was Fletcher’s relative by marriage. He, too, wrote poetry and was the author of a collection with the appropriately Victorian title Waifs in Verse.⁸

The most prominent remarks about Fletcher pertain to these late poems and his influence on the Confederation poets. David Ketterer momentarily compares Fletcher and Lampman for their “Fantasy themes” by noting Fletcher’s The Lost Island (Ketterer 1992, 63), but this implies Fletcher was of a group with Lampman, not his predecessor. It is also part of a study of science fiction and fantasy, not poetry, and it is difficult to place Fletcher in a Canadian tradition of epic fantasy poetry (if indeed one can be said to exist). Taken as a whole, this is the scope of Fletcher’s presence in scholarship on Canadian literature. Lampman himself reviewed the poem in 1893, writing that Fletcher had

a gift of high imagination and sonorous and beautiful versification. … It seems strange that amid the numerous company of verse-makers whom our reviewers delight to honour with sounding paragraphs, and whose work is, much of it, such very indifferent stuff, a writer capable of The Lost Island and Nestorius should have reached old age almost unknown as a poet beyond a limited group of sympathetic friends. Let us do honour to such a poet, who has maintained a reserve so fine and so unusual, who has run so far counter to the clamorous custom of his age as to live out a long life in the tranquil life of books, wisdom and poetry, without caring whether the public buy his photograph, or the reviewers blow all their penny whistles in his praise. (Lampman 1893, n.p.)

Very similar comments about a “flourish of trumpets” are made by “Fidelis” in a review of Nestorius for The Week, who wrote that the poem “contains more real poetry in proportion to its size than many far more pretentious volumes. … It deserves to find many readers” (1892, 762).

Lampman’s praise signals Fletcher’s importance to the Confederation poets but also notes his obscurity. What is telling here is that Fletcher’s clear inspiration to Lampman signals precisely the same calls for greater recognition afforded the authors already firmly seated in the Canadian canon. As an example, for Tom Marshall, “Roberts was the first Canadian poet of impressive achievement. He deserves his special position as the father of Canadian poetry, and, as we know, he gave particular impetus and inspiration to Archibald Lampman, who in turn encouraged Duncan Campbell Scott” (1979, 12). Of course, Fletcher’s inspiration mirrors this, and while Roberts’s Orion and In Divers Tones precede Fletcher’s The Lost Island by a few years, Fletcher was already publishing poetry twenty-six years prior to Roberts’s birth. It seems impossible, however, to bind Fletcher in with Marshall’s “Dear Bad Poets” preceding Roberts. Fletcher exemplifies the alternate possibility to the poor quality of much early Canadian poetry based on the limits of “the literary education and models that they had” (Marshall 1979, 5), and indeed, as the annotations to this collection show, Fletcher had ample access to a wide range of literary resources.⁹ If we accept the landscape emphasis and Marshall’s selection from John Matthews that “the successes of the later Confederation poets have much to do with their ability to apply the Romantic-Victorian idiom selectively to the Canadian environment” (1979, 5), then Fletcher challenges this model for success by expanding beyond the British national focus and English language traditions of the “Romantic-Victorian idiom,” effectively offering an alternate model still concerned with the Canadian environment but relating to it differently. He too drew on the Romantic-Victorian idiom but also others as well beyond English language poetry. Likewise, while it is common to see the Confederation poets as uniquely situating Canadian landscapes as suitable for a national poetry rather than fixating on an imagined “home” in Britain, Fletcher was doing so in “Legend of the Isiamagomi” at the outset of his career and only turned to reimagining Canadian landscapes through an unseen and unremembered “elsewhere” in his late long poems, both of which fixate on his new experiences of British Columbia locations.

While Fletcher’s contemporary Charles Sangster is often regarded as the father of Canadian poetry and as the first to show that a national poetry could be focused on Canadian landscapes in his The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856), Fletcher’s “Legend of the Isiamagomi,” set in the Saguenay country, precedes this work by eighteen years. It may be fruitful to compare Sangster’s vision of Trinity Rock—that “Samson of the Saguenay”—with Fletcher’s description of a massive rock as a “conspicuous object” (122) as ways of engaging with specific landscapes. Nonetheless, any comparison of the two based on place will likely first encounter their differing approach to prosody. Where Sangster is more predictable in his masculine line endings and more frequently employs end-stop lines and prefers a masculine ending for enjambed lines, Fletcher runs contrary and presents greater variety in his metrical feet and attraction to enjambment. Any direct comparison, including my own in this introduction, will be opportunistic, and the opening stanzas of each poem perhaps reveal their prosodic differences more starkly, with Sangster’s tendency toward strict iambic feet and paired rhymes matching masculine or feminine endings contrasting Fletcher’s entirely masculine endings (in this instance) disrupted by enjambments and the shifting metrical feet or tending towards syllabic rather than accentual verse. The stanzas focused on the central rock in both poems mark out their difference in a more obvious comparison based on location, although their prosodic differences are less obvious than other comparisons would show. Sangster offers:

Strong, eager thoughts come crowding to my eyes,

Earnest and swift, like Romans in the race,

As in stern grandeur, looming up the skies,

This Monarch of the Bluffs, with kingly grace,

Stands firmly fixed in his eternal place,

Like the great Samson of the Saguenay,

The stately parent of the giant race

Of mountains, scattered—thick as ocean spray

Sown by the tempest—up this granite-guarded way. (Sangster 1856, 58)

In contrast, for Fletcher we find:

There is a rock, precipitous and bare,

On the lake’s northern shore. At distance spied

It bears the aspect of a bird of air,

Vast, lone, and brooding by the water-side.

The spell of old tradition doth abide

On that hoar cliff, whose touching loneness brings

A dimness to the eye for him who died

Thereon, whose heart had yearned for unfound things,

And broke at last, worn-out by crushed imaginings. (“Legend of the Isiamagomi,” 124)

Both examples are in Spenserian stanzas, which makes direct comparison easy, but while Fletcher uses true rhymes in this example, most of the poem varies from this with half-rhymes and eye rhymes, and failed rhyme is almost as frequent as true rhyme. This is far less the case for Sangster. They also differ in the predictability of their feet, with Fletcher being more syllabic and Sangster more accentual. Sangster uses commas at line endings that may otherwise read as enjambed, and this emphasizes the end rhymes. Fletcher, by contrast, leans into the enjambment in a way that encourages the reader to consider his poem’s syntax over its rhyme, which in turn emphasizes caesurae within lines rather than line endings. Here, “abide” must continue quickly to “On that hoar cliff” lest the syntax no longer track for the ear, as do both of the subsequent lines. But more notably, whereas Sangster reads the Canadian landscape through Biblical and classical references, Fletcher reads the landscape first on its own terms and then as the locus of Indigenous cultures presumably soon to be extinct, with his poem’s unnamed Indigenous character providing a symbol of a people or a community rather than a specific individual. Ultimately, while both poets focus on landscape, Fletcher presents a wider set of references to more diverse literary traditions than Sangster (or his own contemporary, Charles Mair).¹⁰

Even in the more common division between the French and English traditions, ruptured in 1838, Fletcher offers complexity. He saw the rebellions in 1837 and 1838 as a “crime” but held deep sympathies with Lower Canada and the French, and he was a friend and correspondent of the artist and politician Joseph Légaré, who was arrested for his role in the rebellions. Fletcher also rejected anti-Catholic sentiments, attended events such as the visit of Cardinal Bedini, and transcribed speeches by the Pope in his commonplace books along with other religious materials outside of the Anglican faith. Fletcher’s approach to the main political divisions of his time, like his approach to landscape, does not fit the ready categories that reflect his contemporaries. In other words, the academic models that create a basis for literary genealogies seem to be attentive to matters different from Fletcher’s interests, so restoring him to Canadian literary history presses for subtle shifts in how we see and discuss Canadian literature.

Lampman’s remarks about Fletcher’s command of prosody points to another of Fletcher’s differences from his other contemporaries. His poetry shows a great deal of familiarity with his American contemporaries and with the English Romantics, as does Sangster’s, but Fletcher bases his work on a wide range of poetic forms in other languages, which may shape his tendency towards syllabic verse and away from iambic feet and the accentual focus of most other Canadian poets of the time. Apart from his attention to French syllabic poetry, Fletcher was as familiar with the trochaic tetrameter of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha as he was with the alliteration of the Poetic Edda or the verses of the Mahabharata, and this appears in his late poems through a rhythmic variety that seems distinct from the comparisons one might wish to make to the early works of the Confederation poets. For instance, the shifting rhythms of Fletcher’s Nestorius: A Phantasy, from 1892, contrast when set beside Duncan Campbell Scott’s “The Voice and the Dusk,” from his contemporary 1893 collection The Magic House, and Other Poems. Fletcher’s poem opens with the following stanza, contrasted with Scott’s first two stanzas beneath it:

The old Nestorius, worn with many woes,

Cast out, an exile, from the haunts of men,

To all a stranger and an alien,

And seeking only silence and repose,

Passed to the sands of Egypt.

Day by day,

Wrapped in the splendour of the sunlit air,

Which vestured, there, a world so strange and fair,

He watched the mighty river fade away,

For ever passing, and for ever there. (Fletcher, Nestorius, 190)

The slender moon and one pale star,

A rose-leaf and a silver bee

From some god’s garden blown afar,

Go down the gold deep tranquilly.

Within the south there rolls and grows

A mighty town with tower and spire,

From a cloud bastion masked with rose

The lightning flashes diamond fire. (Scott 1893, 5)

Both are essentially syllabic (pentameter and tetrameter, respectively), with Scott’s far more accentual and his lines landing on a stressed syllable quite reliably and rooted firmly in an iambic rhythm. However, Fletcher’s feet vary significantly in contrast and make his poetry more syllabic than accentual, perhaps showing a French influence (his commonplace books often transcribe French poetry) or at this late stage in his life his interest in Polish and Finnish poetry. While in this instance Fletcher favours the line break, much of the rest of his work prefers enjambment and favours a mid-line caesura in a manner less typical of Canadian poets of the time, as well as internal rhyme and alliteration, which are visible here. Fletcher’s uncharacteristic end-stop lines in the above example also serve to stress the delay of the grammatical verb, a syntactic feature made more prominent by the single medial caesura.

Likewise, Lampman’s poetry prior to his reading of Fletcher is more prone to a strict sense of rhythm and metrical feet with alternating masculine and feminine endings, as in his “Among the Millett,” which opens his collection of the same title from four years prior to Fletcher’s Nestorius:

The dew is gleaming in the grass,

The morning hours are seven,

And I am fain to watch you pass,

Ye soft white clouds of heaven. (Lampman 1888, 1)

While Lampman does go on to greater metrical complexity, and this is already anticipated in the same collection, it is difficult not to notice how quickly this shift occurs after his 1893 review of Fletcher’s long poems, and how pervasive Fletcher’s attention to rhythm and metrical variation is across his long life.

Perhaps the most striking contrast for contemporary readers comes in Fletcher’s forms of representation. These complicate the struggles of Canadian literature with its prejudiced past that is most clearly embodied in Scott’s twin roles as a national bard and the designer of the genocide of the residential schools for Indigenous children. There are standard racist tropes in Fletcher’s poetry, including the Indigenous “wood-elves” in his 1838 poem “Legend of the Isiamagomi,” although the idyllic Romanticism differs in kind from Scott’s racism. Likewise, the colonial symbolism in Fletcher’s “Notes of a Journey Through the Interior of the Saguenay Country” (1869), with its open acknowledgement of “the interests of colonization” (56), can be compared to his earlier poem as they overlap in locality:

When the Red Cross replaced the Lilies, the vast interior fell into the hands of other powerful and exclusive trading companies, and became a terra incognita, a land of hobgoblins and chimeras dire, where ingress was always discountenanced and often forbidden. By degrees, the few traces of civilization disappeared; the voice of the missionary was heard at rare intervals; the quiet homestead, the cornfield and the garden, which the patient industry of the Jesuits had reclaimed from the wilderness, returned again to the dank vegetation of the forest. The dust gathered around their records, and their voices at length waxed faint and unreal as the utterances of a fairy tale. (“Notes of a Journey,” 45)

This conflation of Indigenous territories with “wilderness” and “fairy tale” relies on familiar settler logics of “civilization” and “conversion” that end in genocide, as do Scott’s “legendary land” and the infantilizing “frightened child” in his poem “The Half-Breed Girl.” Fletcher’s point, of course, is that our predecessors may have known far more than we do, and we should not treat knowledge-loss as a presumed ignorance. However, note as well the contrast between Fletcher’s preference for the forest over “civilization” in his 1838 “The Legend of the Isiamagomi” set against Scott’s “The Half-Breed Girl” from 1906, respectively (as well as Fletcher’s early characteristic interest in internal rhyme, enjambment, and alliteration):

A spacious temple, where the unchecked eye

Through high and far-diverging vaults may see:

An ancient temple, where all live to die,

And dies to nourish some fresh-springing floe:

A lasting temple? —No, this may not be!

The tide of cultivation rolls along

With ruthless haste, and stern utility

Shall silence soon the low, delicious song

Of the wood-elves that sit the forest-glades among. (“Legend of the Isiamagomi,” 123)

She is free of the trap and the paddle,

The portage and the trail,

But something behind her savage life

Shines like a fragile veil.

…

A voice calls from the rapids,

Deep, careless and free,

A voice that is larger than her life

Or than her death shall be. (Scott 1906, 12, 14)

Where Scott’s poem implicitly sets Indigeneity and tradition as the cause of torment, with freedom only coming from the girl’s momentary turning away from her heritage, Fletcher presents quite the opposite with a modernity harmful to all and conflated with disease. While his poem does end with the “vanishing Indian” trope, it is more praiseful and respectful than Scott’s. Both juxtapose an Indigenous community in decline against modernity, but for Fletcher that modernity is “ruthless” and “stern” in contrast to the poem’s opening advice: “He that is weary of the din and toil / Of towns and commerce, let him go abroad / And ramble through the wilderness” so that “his better nature wake” (122). That is, the Indigenous protagonist of Fletcher’s poem is a figure of reverence and well-being beset by a modernity intent on harming traditional ways, hence leading to the “vanishing” trope as this damage strikes—it is an image far different from Scott’s in which the anglophone antagonist is invisible, gazing on others yet remaining unseen. Because of this elision, of being unseen like the subject in the passive voice, the suffering figure of Scott’s “Half-Breed Girl” seems responsible for her own harm, as if her being itself were to blame for her torment and future death.¹¹ As Lisa Salem argues, the girl is haunted by her likely unknown white homeland because “it is present in her blood and in her dreams, causing her to question her ‘savage life’” (1993, 107), and hence she is condemned to internal conflict in Scott’s vision. Salem also draws on Robert McDougall’s argument that Scott’s “outer” life in the Department of Indian Affairs and the “inner” life of his art may work in an ideologically racist context, but that this supplies context rather than a basis for dismissal (McDougall 1980, 134–35). For McDougall, we enjoy a hindsight on the “Indian problem” that Scott did not, and Scott “administered federal government policy relating to the Canadian Indians” (1980, 139), although this is based on his critical edition of Scott’s correspondence with the professor E.K. Brown. My approach is more to conflate rather than distinguish Scott’s administrative actions with his depictions in writing, just as my attention to Salem falls to her interest in Scott’s “depiction of mixed blood characters who are both defined and limited by the contradictory sets of characteristics which are inherent in the two strains of blood” such that, for Scott, “Native peoples possessed a ‘savage’ nature which was determined by their blood and which could be altered only through miscegenation” (Salem 1993, 107), which I understand as itself racist rather than a reflection of a racist ideological context. This is in line with Julia Boyd’s assertion of “the relationship between his IRS [Indian Residential School] policy and his depictions of Indigenous children” (Boyd 2015, 144). For Boyd, Scott’s imagery establishes “a fictionalized Canadian past in which the children are always already neglected and threatened” by their Indigeneity itself, such that it creates a “pseudomemory for Anglo audiences” that contributes to his IRS labours. The half-breed girl’s internal conflict reflects not only the poem’s form but Scott’s labours as well. Poetically, it is a racism made all the more damaging by its secret nature. That Fletcher’s vision precedes Scott’s by nearly seven decades only makes Scott’s genocidal racism even more unacceptable and visible by comparison to a more empathic precursor, even while that precursor raises concerns as well. Recuperating Fletcher has the potential to change how we understand those who came after him, and while this does not excuse Fletcher’s own biases, it does accentuate the fact that those who followed had a different, and ostensibly known, model and precursor available to them.

Further to this point, Fletcher casts his sympathies with the Indigenous communities in the same early poem, despite only very rarely naming them in his works and often falling into “elvish” Eurocentric tropes—only four years after his illness and his mother’s death in the cholera pandemic, the central recurring trauma in his poetry, he sets modern life as the source of a “pestilence [that], in few short days, hath mown / What time, in years, would not have stricken down” (“Legend” 123), just as plague again drives The Lost Island fifty years later. The romanticized alternative is “the patriarchal woods” that “wear a temple’s mien” (123) and give a viable spiritual life apart from urban modernity even while it is doomed to destruction by modernization. Likewise, where Scott’s “half-breed girl” will either die of her ties to tradition or remain paralyzed between life and death from her internal division (life seems impossible for her), Fletcher’s implicitly Indigenous protagonist instead dies of grief. Where both represent a break with traditional ways and can be regarded as sharing a “vanishing” trope, in Fletcher this is to be grieved: “their many-toned tongue” will be “bound” by modernity’s cruelty, which will “silence soon the low, delicious song / Of the wood-elves” (“Legend” 123). Both conflate magic with Indigeneity, but Fletcher does not traffic in the malice that haunts Scott, nor does he condone the “vanishing” trope in which modernity is actively harming a linguistically complex and admired people, the same modernity that he is himself a part of but that also drives the urban malaise of which he complains and the pestilence that had for him recently caused the core trauma of his life: his own near death and the death of his mother from cholera. Fletcher became an agent of the modernity he laments and regards as damaging to himself and others but that he also saw as inevitable. This is to say, both poets document the harm occurring to Indigenous peoples, and both rely on tropes of the child and the fantastical, but where Scott uses a passive construction, as if the harm originates in the non-specific Indigenous peoples and traditions themselves rather than his concrete work to enforce the vision of his poetry on real people, Fletcher locates it in modernity and makes clear this is not where his own sympathies, health, and joy reside.

Despite Gordon Waldron’s contention that “Scenery … is the most barren topic of poetry” (1896, 180), landscape, language, and culture are prevalent yet troubling notions in narratives of Canadian identity. Indeed, topography appears to be a central concern for the Canadian long poem, especially prior to the twentieth century, as discussed here by comparing Fletcher and Sangster. Yet, for Fletcher, these landscapes are surprisingly plural and distinctly hybrid. His descriptions of place cover the oldest cities in Canada and the newest provinces while integrating ancient and linguistically diverse allusions. His autobiographical works also include residencies in Canada’s major cities and many smaller outposts. In addition to all this, his recollections of cultural life across Canada focus on richly overlapping communities rather than imposing a vision of national heterogeneity. He privileged variation rather than commonality. Moreover, as an important surveyor, Fletcher was intimately familiar with the Canadian landscape as something to be cherished and loved rather than represented as a terrifying “beyond.” Northrop Frye’s garrison doors are wide open, and the instinctive pathway is out into the world rather than merely circling the walls. Even where his late long poems fall into the pattern of conceiving of Canadian landscapes with references to elsewhere (the Nile and Atlantis), he reverses the typical pattern of, say, understanding the Fraser River as a variant by comparing it to the original Thames (reinforcing a colonial centre and periphery). Instead, Fletcher largely does away with gestures to the colonial centre and understands the Nile or Atlantis through comparison to the Fraser or Vancouver Island. His surveyor background and this inversion of the typical colonial pattern made it possible for Fletcher to blend the aesthetic traditions in Canadian poetry with a view that privileges landscape over plot and narrative.

Chaim Mazoff sets the stage for landscape literature in his study of the rhetoric of the Canadian long poem by holding that “the prolonged reliance on Classical form in the early Canadian topographical poem is not only an exercise in failed aesthetics; it is also a device in the employ of Empire in its ongoing battle against the French, the Aboriginal, the Americans, and the new land” (Mazoff 1997, 7). This is a position troubled by Fletcher’s accounts of landscape as well as his insistence on linguistic and cultural pluralism and an expanded range of cultural references that rely on Classical models as well as the classical works of other traditions. Indeed, where A. B. De Mille and Duncan Campbell Scott both point to the importance of a “sympathetic knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics” (De Mille 1897, 184) as the basis for Roberts’s prosody, Fletcher would seem to be an important precursor. Where Mazoff points to Jameson’s political unconscious (1997, 9), if one takes the rhetoric of the long poem as a prosodic expression of the demands of the imperial social formation, Fletcher decidedly does not fit despite being an agent of empire as a surveyor. This may indeed be a rationale for why his works have been forgotten, like any impulse contrary to the actions of a censorious super-ego, political or otherwise—his absence is the parapraxis. If we read the rise of a national literary tradition in poetry through this frame of landscape, then setting Fletcher amidst (as well as prior to) Sangster and the Confederation poets shows other possibilities that either do not fit that rationale or become nonsensical. Where, for instance, Wordsworth’s influence is prevalent, especially in nature poetry, Fletcher mentions him only once, in his essay “Icelandic Poetry” (1844b), and his commonplace books give preference to Byron and Shelley. While he copies extracts from Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge are more pervasive and Byron opens the book. For Mazoff’s point on prosody, Fletcher’s tendency towards syllabic rather than accentual metre likewise does not “fit” so either seems nonsensical or looks like a stylistic failure in comparison to the norms that he sees as serving empire—Fletcher is, however, highly accentual in his light verse, such as “The Broomstick.” It is fascinating that perhaps the most obvious comparison among Fletcher’s contemporaries would be to James De Mille, a professor of Classics at Acadia University and later English at Dalhousie University, who also had interests in Sanskrit and Persian (MacMechan 1924, 49)—tellingly, De Mille is remembered while Fletcher is not, perhaps specifically because his multilingual interests did not shape his creative work; De Mille’s ties to academia may also have contributed.

In any case, Fletcher does not appear desublimated in Mazoff’s study of the Canadian long poem, nor in Frank Tierney and Angela Robbeson’s collection Bolder Flights, nor in David Bentley’s Mimic Fires, all of which emphasize geography and landscape at the heart of Canadian poetry. It can only be speculated how an awareness of Fletcher’s works may have altered their analyses. They built on a solid foundation that also excluded Fletcher while recognizing the importance of landscape. For the nineteenth century, only Fletcher’s The Lost Island (and in only its 1889 edition) is recorded in C. C. James’s A Bibliography of Canadian Poetry (1899, 22). James was one of the sources for David Sinclair’s Nineteenth-Century Narrative Poems, in which Sinclair notes the challenges of writing a long poem in the nineteenth century with neither surety of audience nor publication. These pressures led to “the tradition of descriptive writing that had made the Canadian scene known to the old country” (1972, vi) specifically as “an account of England’s valuable overseas territory which stresses the loyalty and sufferings of the inhabitants, the potential bounty to be drawn from the natural resources, the superiority of the settlers over the uncivilized native races, and their ability to tame and transform the land” (1972, vi). Fletcher’s more cosmopolitan outlook and catholic diversity would hence not align with this kind of “pioneering theme” (1972, vii) despite his reliance on his own travels as documented in his prose. Fletcher never published for English readers, rejected the superiority of settlers, openly valued a culturally and religiously diverse community, and valued land “untamed”—he would mismatch the works in Sinclair’s collection. Earlier still, he is likewise absent from E. H. Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets and W. D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion on which Sinclair relies, although their nationalist focus and attention to historicization of national events would again make him mis-matched to their general tenor. He is absent as well from E. K. Brown’s foundational On Canadian Poetry. Fletcher does not appear in George Woodcock’s collection Colony and Confederation: Early Canadian Poets and Their Backgrounds, nor in Tom Marshall’s Harsh and Lovely Land that followed in its path, nor later in Carl Ballstadt’s collection of original works The Search for English-Canadian Literature.¹² Just as we can only speculate on how an awareness of Fletcher might have altered some critical works, something like Charles Heavysege’s reliance on traditional prosody that renders him archaic also led to Northrop Frye’s pinning on him “the central Canadian tragic theme … loneliness, the indifference of nature, and the conception of God as a force of nature” (Frye 1995, 173). Fletcher, however, anticipated this by thirty years in “Legend of the Isiamagomi” as well as Frye’s sense of “the irresistible advance of capitalist civilization and its conquest of nature” (Frye 1995, 153) that he identifies in Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie by fifty.

If Heavysege and Crawford are the two poets whom Woodcock sets as “outstanding … because in varying ways they stand aside from the rest” (1975b, 24), then Fletcher is a further and farther back aside. We might speculate how the state of contemporary criticism would look or what other topics it may have explored if he had been included in the University of Toronto Press’s Literature of Canada series or the renaissance of critical studies of Canadian literature in the 1970s. These may be grand suppositions, but at a minimum it outlines a rationale for Fletcher’s inclusion in the early literary life of Canada and a consideration of the processes of canon-formation that rose from it. We also have a telling answer to Woodcock’s provocation “Why is there a gap of almost fifty years after ‘Malcolm’s Katie’ … before the next significant poems of that kind were published by E. J. Pratt in the 1920s” (1975b, 27). Fletcher’s long poems narrow that gap. Even outside of Canadian literature, Fletcher may answer some questions; we need not rely solely on Ezra Pound’s use of “Evanoe” in his 1911 “The House of Splendour” as an instance of the name (Pound’s source is unknown) since it follows on Fletcher’s use of the name more than two decades earlier in The Lost Island, potentially from the same etymological and poetic sources.¹³

Fletcher’s late long poems written in British Columbia are richly allusive and draw on several literary and cultural traditions beyond those that we associate with his contemporaries. These polycultural and multilingual influences are also embedded in and altered by Canadian landscapes while concomitantly shaping Fletcher’s prosody. These late long poems mark a change in Fletcher’s poetic subjects, a change that developed from his experiences of the West and that anticipates one of the most prominent themes in Canadian literature: place. His poetry from the period of his residence in western Canada is deeply influenced by western landscapes, which overlap with classical subjects relating to the ancient world, but also beyond Greek and Latin traditions. His two surviving long poems both come from his residence in Western Canada, and they also show a striking increase in his attention to distinctly Canadian landscapes. As narrative poems, The Lost Island and Nestorius: A Phantasy entail extensive descriptions of the specific territories in which Fletcher resided at the time but under different names, moving from images of Vancouver Island through the Fraser Valley and into the British Columbia Interior.

Moreover, Fletcher blurs the classical interests of much of his early poetry with these landscapes, recasting British Columbia locations through Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Indian allusions. This blurring becomes a crucial element of his poetic project. However, the locales do not become intelligible through the Indo-European literary tradition so much as this tradition is modified and recast in order to align with its being situated in the western Canadian landscape. This reverses what might be the standard expectation in Canadian literature: an imitative tradition comparing Canadian localities to an imperial “home” in contrast to breakout works that see such places as their own (even amidst classical or Biblical allusions). Fletcher anticipates the latter early in his career and reverses the former. For Fletcher, contemplation and poetry come from leaving the garrison and going out into the world (not the reverse). In The Lost Island this departure from the garrison into the wider world comes because of disease. This echoes Fletcher’s own early life and his early poem “Legend of the Isiamagomi,” and that outer world assumes a reader familiar with its landscapes such that ancient and foreign locations become intelligible through that familiarity.

The Lost Island went through two editions in the space of six years, 1889 and 1895, but both follow on “a few copies of The Lost Island for private circulation among our friends” printed by George Wicksteed in 1887.¹⁴ In the poem, images of the West Coast dominate, in sharp contrast to Fletcher’s early works, but they are wrapped in classical and Indian references. I would argue, however, that these gestures to the ancient world are understood through the West Coast and not vice versa. The importance of the new landscape is made clear if we juxtapose his earlier essay “The Lost Island of Atlantis” (1865) with the fifty-six-stanza poem that developed out of the same source materials more than a quarter century later. In the essay, Fletcher pursues philological and classical interests exclusively, just as his poetry of this earlier period is predominantly classical in theme, tending towards Romantic moments of quiet contemplation, with the main exception being “Legend of the Isiamagomi.” His concern in the essay is with the potential for linguistic recuperations as evidence for a lost civilization as well as a historical survey of classical references to Atlantis and potential origins. Moreover, his method is primarily academic in this work, rather than an expression of creative energies or an interaction with the environment around him. This importance of classical allusions and source materials is prominent throughout his life, but in his last two long poems, and the earlier “Legend of the Isiamagomi,” these classical references take a secondary position to a recognizable and important Canadian landscape: a landscape that makes its role in the poetry felt by dominating the imagery, and a landscape that should be familiar to Canadian readers from the West. In other words, in Fletcher’s late poetry, the erudite allusions and contexts deepen. The ancient past is articulated through Canada (rather than vice versa), and Canada is articulated only through this multiplicity of references to other cultures.

For instance, in The Lost Island, the reader encounters a type of landscape more developed in detail and scope than most of Fletcher’s other poetry from the previous fifty years:

Along the beach, beneath the massy wall,

The great sea rippled drowsily: afar

The headland glimmered, like a misty star,

Wearing a cloud wreath for a coronal;

And all the air was filled with tremulous sighs

Borne from the waste of waters, musical,

Yet dreamy soft, as some old Orphic hymn,

That floated up, what time the day grow dim,

From Dorian groves, and forest privacies. (165)

The fog-covered headland resembles the description given of Victoria and New Westminster in Sir Sandford Fleming’s From Westminster to New Westminster (1876, 320). In addition to this possible allusion, “Dorian groves, and forest privacies” that sit adjacent to “The great sea [that] rippled drowsily” recall an image of the Pacific far more readily than any experiences he may have gleaned from Toronto, Québec City, or Montréal, especially as high mountain ranges become prominent in subsequent stanzas. These are not mountains akin to his “Notes of a Journey Through the Interior of the Saguenay Country.” The image of “Sunshine and clouds, mountains and sea” (168) adjacent to each other recalls the Coast Mountains rising behind Vancouver or northeast on the mainland from Victoria. The phrase itself is nearly a trope of the West Coast tourism industry in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, given the newness of these landscape descriptions to Fletcher’s works, images that appear only after his move to Vancouver Island, the distinctly western Canadian nature of these images caught among classical allusions is striking. Moreover, it is the classical material that is subjected to change here, inheriting as it does a landscape that it cannot recast. That is, the coast is not cast as like Atlantis, but rather, Atlantis adopts the traits that make it like coastal British Columbia. This only intensifies when he later identifies the geological rock types through which the river cuts.

Furthermore, the two children of the plague-stricken island city of Atlantis, the primary protagonists Eiridion and Thya (so much like his own experience of plague and parental loss), retreat from the port of Atlantis to the wilderness of the mainland. This journey leads them to find classical figures, but they only do so against what appears to be a Canadian backdrop. In the classical frame,

Thya exclaimed, ‘Oh father, oh my lord,

What awful shape hangs there, with brow all scored,

As if with flame of lightning from on high,

Yet unsubdued, and wearing as a king

The garment of his silent agony?’

To whom the Marut: ‘This is Themis’ son,

The Titan, who, for love to mortals shewn,

Is doomed, by Zeus, to penal suffering.’ (176)

Prometheus is clearly the subject, especially through the reference to flame, his silent agony, and his love for mortals. However, to reach this classical figure, the twins Eiridion and Thya are led by an Indian Marut (a storm god) through a land completely unlike Greece, which Fletcher describes in the thirty-first stanza with their journey through the mountains:

Far to the North they saw the boundless plain,

Where roved the mammoth. There, in dusky bands,

Innumerable as the ocean sands,

They wandered, with white tusks and shaggy mane,

Hugest of living beasts that looked on man.

So came they to a rugged mountain chain,

Gloomy and dark, a wilderness forlorn,

So wild, it seemed the world’s extremest borne,

Withered and grey with some unending ban. (175–76)

Otto von Kotzebue gave the first descriptions of mammoth skeletons from the west coast of what is now Alaska in 1821, sparking numerous popular images of mammoths in the northern Canadian plains. Moreover, S. Sturton discussed mammoth remains on the West Coast in his paper delivered on 2 January 1863 before the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (Sturton 1863, 103), a paper Fletcher probably heard and almost certainly read in the society’s Transactions, as he was actively publishing in that publication and presenting his own work at the society while serving as its council secretary, all in the same year as Sturton.

Moreover, this rugged mountain chain, so like the one Fletcher traversed on the new rail system joining New Westminster to eastern Canada in 1886, has another peculiarly western Canadian association: “With balmy odours of sweet-scented pines; / Where, in clear blue, the white clouds sailed aloft” (“Lost” 174). The Edenic imagery is not new to Fletcher, and even as early as May 1845 in the Literary Garland of Montréal, he casts “the glad freshness of that summer dawn” in “Tempe’s vale” (“Medea” 157). Yet, the classical images of Edenic bliss in this early poem are without a specific landscape apart from the most general outlines implicit in the allusion. Fletcher’s encounter with western Canada, then, appears to have had a marked influence on his later poetic landscapes such that they transform classical sites into a reflection of dramatic British Columbia locations.

The descriptions in his earlier work instead focus on the metaphoric moon and the emotional state of the dreamer recollecting a “bright land wherein I loved to dwell!” (“Medea” 159). The nature of the loved land is empty, and its landscape is without articulated features. Even in September 1844, in his imaginative inhabitation of Dante’s exile from Florence (a specific site), Fletcher recalls the “shady privacies / Of glen and grove, where formerly abode / Old Tuscan sybils and haruspices” (“Dante” 154–55). Yet, this landscape is not allocated such vivid descriptions in his later works written from the West Coast. The specificity of Florence supplies names and allusions, but the imagined landscape does not interact with the imminence of Fletcher’s lived experiences in Canada. More specifically, the Arno of Florence is not transformed into the St. Lawrence, and the potential for a Canadian image of the landscape from the past, or even a connection between Fletcher’s experienced and imagined environments, does not occur. The allusions do not lead the reader to inhabit Canadian locales in new ways, while this is the case in his later works. This blurring of landscape and allusion in his later poetry, with landscape dominating, remains striking even now, more than a century later.

Furthermore, in The Lost Island, the Marut who guides Thya and Eiridion in their journey is, as Fletcher explains in his notes to the poem, tied to India: “The Maruts, gods of the wind, are described in the Veda as Sons of Indra” (note to stanza 22, 186). Likewise, the lake they find in this landscape—a type of landscape Fletcher never described prior to his move to the west coast—is “Manasa, a sacred lake and place of pilgrimage, encircled by lofty mountains and lying between Mount Kaitâsa and the Himalayas. It is frequently alluded to in Hindu poetry” (note to stanza 36, 187). He draws on Prometheus and Ulysses in the same poem, overlapping them with Daitya in the thirty-eighth stanza. Defining “Daitya (a son of Diti)” as “a demon, an enemy of the gods,” Fletcher explains, “The incident here introduced is adapted from an episode of the Mahabharata” (note to stanza 38, 187). This cultural combination of Indian and Greek literary materials is provocative on its own, suggesting as it does a pluralist history. His son Sidney’s later travel narrative about a canoe voyage on the river to Alouette Lake and Stave Lake offers similar images based in Stó:lō territory (“Autobiography,” in Fletcher [2022]). Yet even before we as readers imaginatively inhabit Canadian locales that are being described contiguously with these allusions, Fletcher has disallowed a culturally univocal discourse about this space. Before we can recognize the landscape as British Columbia, the multiple allusions and references have already made the poem culturally plural. Furthermore, once the landscape takes precedence, we see it altering our vision of an Indo-European literary tradition rather than this tradition obscuring the territory as some kind of screen for the projections of the imagination of the Western viewer. This is, simply, a reversal of the expected colonial logic: understanding “here” by making it more like “there” (the colonial centre). For Fletcher, instead, the prized ancient source material only takes on a shape and form through reference to the familiarity of “here.”

Perhaps most strikingly, the long poem was written after Fletcher came to Victoria on Vancouver Island, crossing Canada by rail to do so. He then moved to New Westminster to live with his son Sidney, and then visited even further up the Fraser River into the Fraser Canyon where his youngest son Cecil lived in Yale (Cecil had moved with his father to Victoria from Québec City and then relocated to Yale). The family later owned farmland as far as Abbotsford, and easy travel as far as Yale was made possible by riverboats. By recognizing this landscape as it also recurs in the recollections of his family, Fletcher in effect describes his own journey in two stanzas of The Lost Island, while his allusions have, as noted above, blurred Greek and Indian classical materials, placing Prometheus near the Indus River:

Silent in thought, the four held on their way

Through sandy wastes, past Sindhu’s rapid stream;

Till rose, among the hills, the distant gleam

Of Manasa: and here they made their stay.

It was a lake secluded, in deep calm,

From worldly tumult, and the troublous day,

Where peace unbroken reigned: so still and cool,

Here might repose the heart with anguish full,

And every sorrow here might find its balm.

At length, refreshed with welcome rest, they rose,

Crossing the Hima mountains, home of snow,

The stony girdle of the world, and so

Entered on Aryavartha’s sacred close.

Land of the marvellous! Here, being’s tide

Swept on exultant, through the long repose

Of silent centuries: and glowing life

Came forth, with thousand forms of beauty rife,

On flowery plain and shady mountainside. (177–78)

Again, Fletcher’s allusions blur Greek and Indian classical materials, here placing Prometheus near the Indus River.

These scenes are not, however, the only or even the most persuasive instances of Canadian landscapes integrated into Fletcher’s classical poetry, nor is the Fraser River’s displacement of the Indus the most striking river image. In his subsequent long poem, Nestorius: A Phantasy, Fletcher again takes up the trope of a grand river with an aging man contemplating life on its shore, and his descriptions of landscape increasingly clarify his overlapping mixture of lived experiences and allusions. At this time living in New Westminster on West 3rd Avenue next to Queen’s Park, looking down to the Fraser River as an elderly man troubled by gout, Fletcher opens his poem in a way that conflates himself with Nestorius:

The old Nestorius, worn with many woes,

Cast out, an exile, from the haunts of men,

To all a stranger and an alien,

And seeking only silence and repose,

Passed to the sands of Egypt.

Day by day,

Wrapped in the splendour of the sunlit air,

Which vestured, there, a world so strange and fair,

He watched the mighty river fade away,

For ever passing, and for ever there.

Haply he found, in that mysterious stream,

Some semblance to the current of his life:

Placid, at first, it rose, and far from strife,

Cradled in lotus-blossoms, with the gleam

Of dewdrops sparkling in the morning sun;

Then through bare rocks of basalt, dark and grim,

Impetuous forced its way, with widened brim

Until, at last, its stormy life-course done,

It sank in silence. It was so with him. (Nestorius 190–91)

In the first stanza, the Keatsian technique of deferring the completion of the independent clause (here until the fifth line) draws attention to the stylistics of this passage and is a formal trait visible in his works across seven decades. However, this should not cause readers to overlook the more basic story of an elderly man relocating to a new land in order to contemplate “the mighty river” as it rises from an Edenic and placid origin, impetuously blasts through basalt, and then finds rest in the ocean—much like Fletcher’s own spirit. Experienced travellers might notice that the Nile itself does not cut through basalt until far into Upper Egypt and Ethiopia, away from the ostensive setting of the poem in Lower Egypt. Basalt is also not associated with the Nile in any significant literary way. The basalt used in the construction of the pyramids was quarried from the northern edge of the Fayoum Depression, then shipped by boat across what was once a lake, and only subsequently carried down the Nile. Likewise, most basalt in Egypt is found quite distant from the Nile. However, as Fletcher would have surely known, being a longstanding executive member of the Geographical Society of Quebec and possessing demonstrated familiarity with geological discourse and being a respected authority on it, there was another more immediate river to his experience, a river that does visibly cut “through bare rocks of basalt, dark and grim” after rising from placid origins and, just before it reaches the ocean, crashes dramatically through such a landscape. It is a river with which his family was intimately familiar: the Fraser River, from the area of Hope and Yale into the interior but with basalt formations clearly visible from Abbotsford and Mission where the slack tide from the river’s mouth reaches. As I recall from my own childhood summers in the area, the exposed basalt is one of the most visually memorable feature of this terrain. Basalt rock “dark and grim” and the “Impetuous forced” river crashing through it is the core feature of the Fraser River from Hell’s Gate through Yale and Emory Creek until the opening of the valley begins downstream from Hope. Fletcher’s description does not match the Egyptian landscape, but it does capture perfectly the image of the riverboat trip from New Westminster to Yale, where all of his sons visited and his youngest son Cecil, who moved West with him, lived.

In this context, Nestorius, the banished Patriarch whose heresy was to argue the Virgin Mary carried the human Jesus rather than God, has another very West Coast experience. In Egypt, ostensibly, he finds an oasis near the river that cuts though “bare rocks of basalt,” although the environment now seems more plainly akin to a lush rain forest than the mouth of the Nile:

Around them closed the tall columnar trees,

Giants in growth, through whose interstices,

High-branched, with lofty crowns of foliage,

Clear moonlight fell, and chequered here and there,

The heavy gloom with points and lines of light.

Here they slept, through the soft autumnal night,

Till morning came. (Nestorius 195–96)

Again, amidst allusions to an archaic fourth- and fifth-century heretical Patriarch of Constantinople, which also overlap with a narration of travels through the Nile Basin and ancient Egyptian sites, Fletcher manages to integrate distinctly West Coast imagery into his Classical preoccupations and his Romantic narrative style. In addition to this stylistic wedding, he parallels his own autobiographical journey from the “centre” of Canada to its periphery, just as his protagonist departs Constantinople to spend his old age beside another distant river. As with the striking resemblance to Vancouver Island in The Lost Island and the nearest mainland to Atlantis strongly resembling the Coast Mountains, the Nile in Nestorius closely resembles the Fraser River. Most importantly, however, it is the Fraser that displaces images of the Nile, rather than Classical notions of the Nile that displace the real landscape that spreads out before the author in his New Westminster home.

The land, in most examples of this period, would not only be empty but would be most akin to familiar imperial landscapes, such as the Thames or the Seine, and hence amenable to Western control and reconstruction. The most overt instance would be the names of these locations and the brutal fact of imperial inscription that overlays them like a palimpsest: New Westminster, as in Fleming’s From Westminster to New Westminster; Surrey; Abbotsford, which must have brought to mind Sir Walter Scott; Queen’s Park, for Queen Victoria; Victoria itself; and so forth. Indigenous territories in British Columbia are renamed to elide Indigenous peoples and replace them with a settler logic of a Eurocentric topos. I write this on “Old Yale Road” in “Surrey” that is “South Westminster” even though the Katzie and Kwantlen peoples’ names and territorial acknowledgements are now recognized here. In this context, it is important that rather than simply imposing a colonial understanding of the Fraser River through a colonial gaze that reinscribes the Thames over it, Fletcher takes the Nile and re-imagines the Nile through the image of the Fraser River. This is to say, the Fraser River of British Columbia recasts Fletcher’s understanding of the Nile in Western literature rather than the typical colonial approach in which European sites or materials constitute the schema for interpretation of colonized space.

Fletcher, whether by intention or not, disturbs a pattern that was endemic in his contemporaries. He casts Western narrative conventions, such as classical texts, as intelligible only through a genuine engagement with the “foreign” landscape and a sincere attempt to see it as it exists without rewriting it via another colonizing culture’s position. His landscapes are also inhabited by non-European peoples (Indigenous, Chinese, and settlers from elsewhere). For Fletcher’s works, this linguistic and cultural plurality is tied to his life in Québec and his experiences in West Coast landscapes and derives from his experiences during the creation of Canada as a modern nation. While he was an anglophone writer wrapped in the beliefs of his day and lived in the anglophone community, he also represents the first breaths of a greater diversity in Canadian literature and makes readers ask how that may have developed differently. This gives room for further discussion, but Fletcher’s implicit desire to include Indigenous languages in this diversity (his own works notably exclude English myths) and explicit ambition to integrate a global world literature tradition also offers a prospect for a more inclusive dialogue than has typically been seen among his contemporaries.

These are the challenges that reading Fletcher and including him in our history present to Canadian literature. Reading him demands that we at least consider how we might reread the Confederation poets differently (and much of the nineteenth century for that matter). That we read them with higher expectations. That we read them as having known of other models of engagement that have problematic yet nuanced and empathy-oriented modes of plural engagement. Reading Fletcher also demands that we consider Classical and Romantic poetic influences somewhat differently, in particular by abandoning an Anglocentric vision for these modes. It is not a Brown Romantics (Chander 2017) nor an anticipation of the Bigger Six Collective, but it is still different. Fletcher’s hierarchy of languages may seem racist, particularly his antipathy to written Chinese, but English fares little better as an analytic language, and the poetic traditions to which he alludes in his own poetry point outward to other world literature traditions in Sanskrit, Finnish, Icelandic, and Polish, among so many others, and make these a part of Canadian literature. For today, this means these are not “new voices” as they reappeared in the later twentieth century; they are already long-familiar voices, long a part of Canadian literature. Lest it seems this is an unproblematic approach, his published “Letter on British Columbia” deplores the local population. He dislikes the Chinese population based on their language even while describing them as honest, trustworthy, and preferable to new English and American settlers; he gives only “the noble red man of the forest” for Indigenous peoples of the Coast, which is reductive and unelaborated as a nostalgic Romantic trope; but he then describes the British population as “angular and prejudiced” and the miners of 1858 as dishonest drunkards, among whom the Eastern Canadian emigrants arrive as newcomers (“Letter on British Columbia,” 77). Likewise, his travels in the Saguenay have him meet Paul Duchesnes, whose “wife was an Indian half-breed, and his children had all of them a decided Tartar physiognomy” (“Notes of a Journey” 55), although he likewise describes Paul by his features and praises his temperament and intelligence, in general preferring the Indigenous and Francophone people he meets on the journey to those who live in the urban world. For our sense of Canadian literature of the period, Fletcher’s works are transformative in their cultural and linguistic concerns and attention to Canadian literature as a world literature, even with his integration of racist elements of his time.

Reading Edward Taylor Fletcher transformed my life as well, giving me a model of curiosity and capaciousness that I did not otherwise have as a first-generation student and academic. I would argue there is nothing less at stake in Canadian literature. The careful and nuanced attention given to any and every exculpatory pathway into Duncan Campbell Scott and the Confederation poets now has a transformed precursor that demands attention and scrutiny for other possibilities rather than a simple historical relativism. In particular, Scott’s embracing of cultural genocide and its reflection in his poetry does not arise without context nor without the voice of a precursor offering a profoundly different vision—not an unproblematic vision, but a very different one more amenable to dialogue. Hugh McLennan’s Two Solitudes now sits under the shadow of prevalent pluralist body of previous literary work and a sense of cultural and linguistic diversity within the literary community. The policy of multiculturalism under Trudeau in the 1970s is also now to be thought of as a tradition with a very long precursor of sorts stretching back before Confederation and Canadian multiculturalism. That is, multiculturalism is not only an aspiration from that moment in the 1970s but is also a recuperation of a nascent already-existing tradition in Canadian society and literature. Fletcher, as the British-born son of a British captain, openly valued the francophone community, or at least the well-educated community and clergy, explicitly favoured religious pluralism without a dominant sacred community, wrote in a fashion that arguably attends to the syllabic style of French prosody, and embodied linguistic pluralism—his views on race are more Romantic, which is to say they are a misrepresentation, but he specifically avoids the prevalent intergroup bigotries. The racist exclusion of the Komagata Maru incident intensifies its shame on Canada when we know that the praise and translation of Indian cultures three decades earlier in the same place is a part of Canadian literature praised by no less than Archibald Lampman. The idea of a “trans-Canada” paradigm must also be moved backward in time, not only for a literary figure writing from coast to coast but also for his inclusion of the named and unnamed communities that shaped his works. Fletcher, amidst his faults and flaws and failures, demanded a Canada that was linguistically and culturally plural; open to engagement across diverse cultures while acknowledging difference rather than standardizing Canadian identity into a hegemonic Anglocentrism; rooted in landscape; existing beside Indigenous communities that Canadian modernity harms but should instead centre; and grown from the human experiences of trauma and loss that might lead to a sense of sharing humanity’s painful struggles with others who also struggle and suffer.

My proposal, then, is that by recuperating Fletcher’s nineteenth century works, modern readers have potential avenues for understanding voices that did not agree with the hegemonic colonial narrative tropes of the period and its imagery of a terra nullius that could be understood only through Eurocentric and specifically Anglocentric instrumentalizations of nature that ultimately alienate the reader from the environment and submit Indigenous voices to colonial erasure. More speculatively, we may consider how his less accentual approach to poetic metre might relate to his interests in French poetry and that of other traditions, just as we cannot know exactly how extensively he read in French, although his commonplace books transcribe selections from Victor Hugo’s Les misérables (1862) some pages before a note dated to 1886 and a news clipping dated to 1888. His transcriptions in Sanskrit (in Devanāgarī script) and translations of very brief excerpts from the Hitopadeśa (drawing from Müller’s German translation as a bridge) likewise set him aside from his Canadian poetic contemporaries. While Fletcher does not leave us with translations from Indigenous languages and has only fleeting references to Indigenous peoples, he also appears to privilege their linguistic complexity, even though this leads to problematic displacements of representations of Indigeneity by other often effaced or elided minority populations and his dislike for purportedly simple languages. This vision is deeply problematic yet also engenders an openness to other voices that is quite different from many of Fletcher’s contemporaries.

I found Fletcher by coincidence, but I choose to think of this less as a random surprise than as the demand Fletcher’s works place on his readers. I read the writing directly from his hand, and those commonplace books demanded that I discover more. As I did so, those published works demanded I reconsider how I had thought of his contemporaries. This book collects the results of that demand, as does the digital companion volume of his non-fiction prose, “The Sealed Book of the Future”: The Collected Prose of Edward Taylor Fletcher (the division is between his autobiographical work and poetry here in contrast with his historical, professional, and quasi-academic essays in the latter, despite the temptation to set his essay on Atlantis with his long poem, for example). The works he penned across seven decades of Canadian history also make a demand of readers today, whether as a historical instance of a rising literary community or as a voice meriting recovery for its own sake. If this collection shares any of those demands, it is a sense of calling for attention, and that such attention be diffuse and broad. Amidst his complications, culpabilities, and role in Canada’s mixed praiseful and harmful histories, Fletcher is a strong voice demanding that the future of Canada shift its centre: that no one community, language, or set of cultural practices and references attain to the ideological purity of being a standard of national culture. When we centre the experiences, literatures, languages, and practices of diverse and at times unexpected communities, we are not only anticipating the Canada we desire but are echoing a Canadian literary practice begun nearly two centuries ago that did not develop as it may have—however, that practice has a body of literature and thought behind it. It has failures, and it should not be accepted uncritically, but it is also part of our inherited legacy, and it should provoke us as readers to judge the subsequent voices by a higher standard, seeking more moral justice, more decentering and re-centering, and reflecting more pluralism.