A new era in Canadian poetry began in 1880 with the publication of Charles G.D. Roberts’ Orion and Other Poems. He was just twenty years old. Roberts was soon acknowledged as leader of the so-called Confederation Poets—Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Archibald Lampman. During his long lifetime he wrote hundreds of poems as well as novels, histories, short stories, translations, and essays; he also originated the realistic animal story popularized by Ernest Thompson Seton. He awed literary critics with the versatility of his writing and shocked staid Canadians with the escapades of an unconventional private life. Married at twenty in his native New Brunswick, Roberts soon after began a series of romantic entanglements. While his wife, May, raised the children in Fredericton, he swanned around New York, Havana, and the capitals of Europe. He experienced the Bohemian life of Washington Square around the turn of the century and lived in Montparnasse long before it became famous as an expatriate haven. In 1907 he sailed off to Europe and stayed for eighteen years. When he finally returned aboard the Berengaria in 1925 for a reading tour, he was lionized from coast to coast. For almost two decades he remained a prominent figure in Canadian literary and social circles. He was national president of the Canadian Authors’ Association from 1927 to 1929, and in 1935 he was knighted. At the age of eighty-three, just three weeks before his death in 1943, he married for a second time. Perhaps over-praised as a writer in his own lifetime, Roberts’ reputation has since languished. His main literary achievement, Adams concludes, was in being the first Canadian writer to come to terms with the Canadian landscape, influencing his contemporaries to see their own surroundings with fresh and discerning eyes. The story of his personal life, recounted here fully and objectively for the first time, adds a vivid portrait to the gallery of Canada’s literary pioneers.

Ranging far beyond the traditional canon, this ground-breaking anthology casts a vivid new light on poetic responses to the First World War. Bringing together poems by soldiers and non-combatants, patriots and dissenters, and from all sides of the conflict across the world, International Poetry of the First World War reveals the crucial public role that poetry played in shaping responses to and the legacies of the conflict. Across over 150 poems, this anthology explores such topics as the following: · Life at the Front · Psychological trauma · Noncombatants and the home front · Rationalising the war · Remembering the dead · Peace and the aftermath of the war With contextual notes throughout, the book includes poems written by authors from America, Australia, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, and South Africa.

There were very few land burials in Moon Beach. It was considered old-fashioned, unhealthy and something that only happened to the poor. Instead the dead were buried in ocean cemeteries, twelve miles out. A special festival was held every year in their honour. Children loved it. They were given white chocolate bones, marzipan skulls and ice-cream coffins on a stick. There were costume parties too. You had to wear something blue because that was the colour people went when they were buried under the sea. You could paint your hands and face if you liked, or even dye your hair. That's what people did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then they turned blue forever...

Canadian literature was born in New York City. It began not in the backwoods of Ontario or the salt flats of New Brunswick, but in the cafés, publishing offices, and boarding houses of late nineteenth-century New York, where writing developed as a profession and where the groundwork for the Canadian canon was laid. So argues Nick Mount in When Canadian Literature Moved to New York. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary exodus from English Canada, draining the country of half its writers and all but a few of its contemporary and future literary celebrities. Motivated by powerful obstacles to a domestic literature, most of these migrants landed in New York - by the 1890s the centre of the continental literary market - and found for the first time a large, receptive literary market and recognition from non-Canadian publishers and reviewers. While the expatriates of the 1880s and 1890s - including Bliss Carman, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Palmer Cox - were recognized for their achievements in Canada, the domestic literature they themselves spurred into existence rekindled a nationalist imperative to distinguish Canadian writing from other literatures, especially American, and this slowly eliminated most of their work from the emerging English Canadian canon. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York is the story of these expatriate writers: who they were, why they left, what they achieved, and how they changed Canadian literary history.