Summarily: as discoverer and sponsor of Lampman, as inspirer and sponsor of Carman, and as exemplar, at least in technical ideals, to the first native-born group of systematic poets of the Dominion, Charles G. D. Roberts wielded a constructive influence on Canadian native and national poetry. That without his influence there would still have been a Systematic School of Canadian Poets, of which Lampman, Carman, or D. C. Scott might have been the most conspicuous creator, is a high probability. But it is a theoretical probability. We cannot, however, gainsay the fact of Roberts’ constructive influence on his _confrères_ in the Systematic School of Canadian Poets. On the grounds, therefore, of his triple role as sponsor, inspirer, and exemplar, and of his own creative poetic art, Charles G. D. Roberts is justly to be distinguished as the Inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. Roberts’ own poetry may be critically appreciated (1) as a recrudescence of the English classical idyll; (2) as poetry of nature, with special reference to its distinction from the nature-poetry of Lampman; (3) as elegiac poetry; and (4) as poetry of modern eroticism. At the outset it is important to emphasize two singular facts. First, with the single notable exception of Roberts’ spasmodic ‘Call’ to the Canadian people to achieve a national destiny, and with the further exception of a national or Canadian setting and color in some of his nature-poetry, Roberts’ verse is anything but Canadian. Secondly, Roberts’ poetry is signally an example of poetry which is not, to use Mathew Arnold’s formula, ‘a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life.’ It is characteristic of the essential Canadian genius that its attitudes to the universe and to existence are moral and religious, that it values the fine arts, including literature, as a means for the ideal enhancement of life, and loves the Beautiful in the fine arts as the only visible instance of the union of the real and of the ideal, which is, philosophically viewed, our only pledge of the ultimate supremacy of the Good. The only really deadly criticism, therefore, that can be applied against the poetry of Roberts is that he has missed in his own verse the supreme ethical note or ideal which is in the poetry of one of his masters, Keats:— Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that he did not engage himself to write poetry, with the intent which was really the aim of Keats, as well as of Arnold, namely, as a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. Aware now of the unethical intent and quality of Robert’s poetry, we can the better and more justly appreciate his development as a poet and his achievements in poetic substance and technique.