21 pages • 42 minutes read
Alden NowlanThe Bull Moose
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
In “The Bull Moose,” Nowlan presents the subject as an animal who simply does not fit into the world of humans. He is an outsider in an artificial habitat. Nowlan's sympathies clearly lie with the moose, suggesting he identifies with the animal’s ultimate refusal to be tamed and categorized.
Nowlan certainly knew about the pressures of not fully fitting in, since he bridged the seemingly disparate worlds of the working-class poor and the world of academia. He refused to be absorbed fully by either, positioning himself as an observer of life—a unique perspective that gives his poetry its particular tension.
Nowlan was born in the poor village of Stanley in Nova Scotia to Grace Reese and Freeman Nowlan. At the time of his birth, Grace was only 14 and Freeman was 28. Freeman sporadically worked as a laborer in nearby mills. When Alden was seven, and his younger sister Harriet five, Grace left the family. The children were raised by Freeman and their paternal grandmother, Emma. Freeman considered education a waste of resources, so Alden was out of school by fifth grade. However, Emma encouraged his prolific reading habits.
After Emma’s death from stomach cancer, Alden fell into a deep depression and was sent to the Nova Scotia Hospital, a psychiatric facility. Released from psychiatric care at 15, Alden assisted his father in cutting pulp in the woods around Stanley. He became a night watchman at a local mill, which freed up time for him to write at night. His challenging childhood and immersion in the surrounding rural landscape gave Nowlan a fierce streak of individualism and a keen, lasting love of nature—themes reflected in “The Bull Moose.” Biographical factors shaped other features of his poetry, such as detailed observations of small-town life (like the townspeople in “The Bull Moose”), animal imagery, conflicts between nature and man, and references to Christian myth.
“The Bull Moose,” written before Nowlan was 30, is the most famous of his early work. It shows the characteristic animal imagery that “can be taken as a leitmotif for much of Nowlan’s early poetry […] to illuminate his themes of innocence and predation,” according to Canadian academic Patrick Toner. The Christian undertones of the poem are driven by Nowlan’s own faith. For Nowlan, faith in Christ was an important belief system in a difficult life. He was plagued by financial worries until he was appointed writer-in-residence at New Brunswick University. He suffered lifelong health problems owing to excessive dependence on tobacco and alcohol. However, it is important to note that Nowlan’s engagement was with the figure of Jesus Christ as a figure representing change, revolution, and innocence, rather than organized church-driven religion. This is evident in “The Bull Moose” where the speaker celebrates the moose, but subtly critiques the oldest man in the parish.
Nowlan’s work, after his recovery from throat cancer, became more humanist in its concerns, detailing the struggles of ordinary human beings. Though animal imagery and wild landscapes continued to feature in his poetry, his poems became increasingly personal and confessional, showing a deeper engagement with themes like love and his childhood experiences.
Literary Context
When Nowlan began publishing poetry in the late 1950s, there was a demand to celebrate Canadian culture and literature. Thus, poets like Nowlan, Al Purdy, and Margaret Atwood—whose works are rooted in the Canadian landscape and ethos—wished to create a distinctive Canadian. Nowlan was writing at a time when modernism was still the dominant trend in American literature, with keen attention to sparse language, sharp images, and dense literary references. However, like Purdy, Nowlan sharply departed from this tradition to create poetry that uses more colloquial language, has a distinct point of view, and is unafraid to show emotion. In “The Bull Moose,” Nowlan doesn’t hide the outrage of his speaker and uses easily aqccessible diction to express his themes. Nowlan’s prominent literary influences were English novelist George Orwell, from whom Nowlan inherited a talent for animal symbolism, and DH Lawrence. Like Nowlan, the English modernist too wrote about the destructive human impact on nature.
Representing the working class, Nowlan was emphatic that his poems should be accessible to everyone. Part of the reason for using Christian myth in his poetry was that such references would be immediately understood by the majority of his readers. Nowlan asserted that if “truck drivers read poetry, mine will be the poetry they’ll read.” This has led some critics to criticize Nowlan’s writing as unpoetic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Nowlan’s poems are rich in literary devices, such as metaphor and alliteration, and he paid close attention to poetic structure and form. His particular gift was that his poems could do both: be structurally sound and evoke a deeply emotional response. Further, Nowlan could balance the emotional pull of his poetry with irony, as seen in “The Bull Moose.”
Finally, Nowlan’s use of natural and animal imagery to convey emotions and personal beliefs is similar to the works of contemporary American poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, known as confessional poets. Nowlan’s works, too, became increasingly confessional in his later years, paralleling the literary movement in American poetry. However, as with Plath, it can be argued that Nowlan used personal details as symbols for deeper truths.
