POETRY, WESTERN, the verse of the Commonwealth's American provinces, is a geographical division convenient to the historian and occasionally inconvenient to the poems. Its writers employ inherited forms; its readers move between the two shores; and the expectation that a Western poem must contain a river or an enormous prospect has caused much inferior description to be mistaken for independence of manner.
Anne Bradstreet (q.v.) established the first claim of the West to a hearing. In her learned poetry the new settlement demonstrates its possession of the old learning; in her domestic verse experience more often determines the movement of the line. The distinction recurs through the history of Western letters. A poet may spend his strength proving that his country can do what another country has done, or may use the inherited means upon an occasion which has become his own. The latter course does not require the invention of a new metre every time a ship crosses the ocean.
The university and the presses of Oceana (q.v.) provided a settled literary society. The public ode and the occasional poem flourished there, sometimes with more confidence than distinction. The ceremonial verse of the two shores belongs to one tradition (see ODE FOR COMMONWEALTH DAY, THE (q.v.)). Its strongest recent influence has been Orme's (q.v.) language of common mourning. Western imitators learned his broad cadence more easily than the management of silence which gave his first elegies their force. Landscape supplied them with an inexhaustible stock of consolations: rivers continued, grass returned, and the reader was seldom detained by asking what the continuance consoled.
The French poetry of Canada (q.v.) defeats any account which makes the English inheritance the whole history. Marguerite Tessier (q.v.) wrote in the speech of Quebec and in measures which an English summary cannot make its own without alteration. In Les Lampes du fleuve (1854), distance separates persons who observe the same river. In La Chambre des cartes (1867), the apparent unity of a represented country gives way to the several uses its readers wish to make of it. She is Western by the circumstances of her attention, not by the magnitude of the objects which she names.
Dinah Canaan's (q.v.) Hymns of the Charter (1878) have another public. Their plain psalm metres permit the congregation to take possession of them; their repeated requests do not permit the congregation to suppose that possession is fulfilment. The written promise of the Charter and the experience of those singing remain audibly distinct. This is an artistic achievement as well as a public service. The refrain returns to words which the preceding stanza has made harder to hear without attending to them.
Beside the printed book must be set the song transmitted by singing, especially in the letters of the Indies (q.v.). Its variations are often the evidence of continued use, though collectors tend to regard them as blemishes upon a presumed original. The several inheritances will not fit a neat succession from primitive song to polished verse. They coexist and borrow from one another. The Western contribution is strongest where a writer has heard that coexistence closely, and weakest where the ocean is offered as sufficient proof that a familiar phrase has become new. (H. M.)