A writer of lyrical, mystical poetry, Bliss Carman was born in Fredericton and grew up in this house. His evocative poems, often reflecting his love of nature and the Maritimes, show the influence of classical and Romantic literature as well as New England transcendentalist thought. As a literary editor in New York and Boston, he published and promoted the work of many Canadian authors. A cosmopolitan and bohemian figure, Carman was a member of the Confederation group of poets and one of Canada's most recognized poets during his lifetime, both at home and abroad.
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Bliss Carman, whose ancestors were loyalists, was educated at the Collegiate School in Fredericton, where George Robert Parkin was headmaster, and at the University of New Brunswick (ba 1881, ma 1884); he subsequently attended the University of Edinburgh (1882-83) and Harvard University (1886-87).
After returning to Fredericton from Scotland in 1883, he had tried his hand at teaching, surveying, and the law, and had written reviews for the University Monthly, activities that reflected his restlessness and his journalistic bent. At Harvard, he was heavily influenced by Josiah Royce, whose spiritualistic idealism, combined with the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, lies centrally in the background of his first major poem, “Low tide on Grand Pré,” written in the summer and winter of 1886.
After again returning briefly to the Maritimes in the late 1880s, he moved permanently to the United States, where he worked for two years (1890-92) as literary editor of the Independent (New York), the first of many similar positions on various American magazines. In 1894 he helped to found the Chap-Book (Boston), between 1895 and 1900 he wrote a weekly column for the Boston Evening Transcript, and in 1904 he published the ten volumes of The world’s best poetry (Philadelphia), of which he was editor-in-chief.
Even before his permanent removal to the United States in February 1890, Carman had begun, with the help of his cousin Charles George Douglas Roberts, to establish a reputation for himself as an accomplished and promising poet. In 1893 he published his first collection of poems, Low tide on Grand Pré: a book of lyrics, and in ensuing years his gift for lyricism resulted in over twenty more books of poetry, including the three volumes of the Vagabondia series (1894-1900) that he co-authored with the American poet and essayist Richard Hovey. Under the tutelage, first of Hovey’s companion, Henrietta Russell, and then of the woman who became a major love of his life, Mary Perry King, he drew on the theories of François-Alexandre-Nicolas-Chéri Delsarte to develop a strategy of mind-body-spirit harmonization aimed at undoing the physical, psychological, and spiritual damage caused by urban modernity. By terms charmingly, orotundly, and fancifully expounded in such prose works as The kinship of nature (1903) and, with Mrs King, The making of personality (1908), his therapeutic ideas resulted in the five volumes of verse assembled in Pipes of Pan (1906), a collection that contains many superb lyrics but, overall, evinces the dangers of a soporific aesthetic. It was a combination of these concerns and the discipline of the Sapphic fragments that produced his finest volume of poetry, Sappho: one hundred lyrics (1903).
Like other members of the “confederation” group of Canadian poets (Roberts, Archibald Lampman, William Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Frederick George Scott), Carman was lifted to fame in Canada by the wave of post-confederation nationalism and its accompanying call for a distinctive and distinguished Canadian literature. Outside the country, however, he was widely regarded not merely as a typical Canadian poet, but also as one of the most prominent American poets of the generation that was coming to maturity in the 1880s and 1890s. “I passed everywhere for a ‘young American writer,’” he told a correspondent after a trip to Paris in 1896; “I wept inwardly, but could not refuse the compliment.” His impact on American letters is suggested by the fact that in 1909 Wallace Stevens composed poems “to the accompaniment” of a line from Carman’s “May and June” and by his appointment as editor of The Oxford book of American verse (1927). Nor was Carman’s influence and reputation confined to North America: during the 1890s his work was well received by Arthur William Symons and other discerning British readers, and in 1904 Francis Thompson described him as “a Canadian poet of deserved repute this side the water, with a lusty and individualized joy in nature.”
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