There was a lot of this going around at the time. "Drawn from the four winds of the earth," Canadians were, in the Beaudoin-Dobbie committee's version. "So long as the sun rises, the rivers flow, and the winds blow," another exulted, "we proclaim our loyalty to this land called Canada." Anyone attempting this sort of inspiring prose at home is advised to first read aloud what you've written. If you can't recite it with a straight face, chances are you have produced what the writer Peter Brimelow calls Nationalist baroque. Hint: "wind" and "land" are key words.

Try this bit of vintage Bruce Hutchinson, the poet journalist, circa 1958: "Something strange, nameless and profound moves in Canada today. It cannot be seen or labelled, but it can be heard and felt - a kind of whisper from far away, a rustle as of wind in prairie poplars. . . . Something moves as it has never moved before in this land, moves dumbly in the deepest runnels of the collective mind. . . ." Now try this, from the preamble to the Parti Quebecois's referendum bill, written by Gilles Vigneault, among others: "We know the winter in our souls. We know its blustery days, its solitude, its false eternity and apparent deaths."

The only way to read this without smirking is by disabling your pompousness alarm. It requires the suspension of any sense of irony. This is not something most human beings are capable of, or not for more than short stretches at a time. How is it, then, that writers could produce such stuff? Obviously there is a process of self-selection involved in any such exercise in nationalist kitsch. The kind of writers who would volunteer for the assignment are the kind who packed the halls at the official writers' conferences in Eastern Europe. They are politicians first; art is only their day job.

Quebec nationalists seem particularly steeped in purple. It is their natural voice, a tone of High Seriousness in which "a people" is forever "serenely" marching towards its "destiny," of which Lucien Bouchard is the acknowledged master. Who else, for example, could have produced that full- page ad in The Globe a few days ago, to the effect that the separatists - whoops, the "people of Quebec" - only wished to save the rest of us lots of cash by leaving? As psy-ops propaganda, it had an endearing Tokyo Rose obviousness to it ("Federalist soldiers! Your wives and girlfriends are sleeping with the milkman . . .") that only the truly deluded could have thought insidious.

But nationalism feeds on such delusion. The tumescent rhetoric of the separatists' preamble, the magnification of trivial distinctions, the carefully embroidered grievances, even the ludicrous historical revisionism - it's all sincere. They couldn't manage it otherwise. Phrases like "the time has come to reap the fields of history" or "because that heartbeat is as meaningful as the seasons that hold sway over it" can emerge only from an attitude of constant and universal sincerity, the kind that is manufactured by a sustained effort of will and a complete disconnection from reality: a fanaticism which in turn is fuelled by long drinks from the intoxicating dram of self-pity.

It isn't, as some have written, that the poetry was lost for being written by committee. The purpose precluded it from the start. An ideology of exalted self- pity must erect a self worthy of such sublime sentiments, a glorious idol for self- worship. It reads false because it is false. Bad poetry is no different in this regard from bad anything: It is all written in the same language. It is the language of task forces and fashion magazines and journals of semiotics. It is written in jargon, euphemism, sentimentality and cliche, and always streaming from the same source: a discomfort with truth, if not an active desire for falseness.

Quebec nationalism is narrow and nasty for the same reason that Canadian nationalism is narrow and nasty: because it is rooted in falsehood. A nationalism that is obsessed with the minor differences between peoples, with their "uniqueness" rather than their fundamental humanity, cannot be anything but false. The result is never poetry but propaganda.