Can Lit-- British plant cutting?

I just sat through an interesting lecture on the beginnings of Canadian Literature. We looked at a poem of Oliver Goldsmith's called: The Rising Village.

It's all about Pioneer settlers in Nova Scotia, and basically it's a piece of pompous bombastic royalist propaganda. It starts off with the regular invoking of the muse, then goes on to praise Britannia extensively and then contrasts the harshness of Acadia with the lushness of Britain all in iambic pentameter. Of course, this goes on for 500 lines, with a random little story about a guy who seduces a maiden and then leaves her to go insane in the Canadian wilderness when she comes chasing after him (just for kicks) before Goldsmith gets back to the business of praising Britannia.

On the whole the poem is lousy, but it's Canada's first book-length poem and is therefore an important part of Canadian literary history. My prof went on to say (and here is the more interesting part:) that the reason this is important is that Canadian literature can be likened to a plant cutting: a transplant from British literature. She says that early canadian lit. is all pretty crummy, but that it get's better and grows as it moves on in time, just like a baby plant cutting.

First the cutting works on the root-system before ameliorating the foliage and letting us see the progress that was originally only happening underground. Something to think about huh? In addition she said that we were still in the root stage in terms of influence on other cultures, and our tendancy to bandwagon onto other literary movements (we've only had one genuinely canadian literary movement, the McGill Movement @ McGill U.) It makes me feel better that Margaret Atwood, the bane of my existence, is only part of the root system...heh heh.