The Group of Seven Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. Macdonald, and F.H. Varley made up the Group of Seven. Formed in 1920, these men thought that great Canadian art could be produced through a connection with nature. They are largely responsible for the modern art development in Canada. Teachers can use their paintings as visuals for what Canadian landscape looks like across the country and how it influences art. Students can look at what the artists have chosen to include in the images, what features are prominent, and how the landscapes were formed.
Poetry: F.R. Scott F.R. Scott (1899-1985) was a Canadian writer and Canadian Constitution expert. Scott wrote non-fiction and poetry in both English and French. He was awarded Canada's top prize of the Governor General's Award twice, once for poetry and once for non-fiction. He was a big fighter in getting past Canadian-Romantic poetry and moving onto Modern poetry. He focused on landscape which influenced many poets after him. Teachers can use Canadian poetry that focuses on landscape to examine the words people chose to describe certain environments and features. The different weather patters, foliage, and fauna are often described in these poems, giving students less 'scientific' descriptions of regions in more relatable words.
LAURENTIAN SHIELD Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, empty as paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. This waiting is wanting. It will choose its language When it has chosen its technic, A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity. A language of flesh and of roses. Now there are pre-words, Cabin syllables, Nouns of settlement Slowly forming, with steel syntax, The long sentence of its exploitation. The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur, And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle; Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines, Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth; And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice, Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood And links our future over the vanished pole. But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines, The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life, And what will be written in the full culture of occupation Will come, presently, tomorrow, From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.