William Henry Drummond

William Henry Drummond (April 13, 1854 – April 6, 1907) was an Irish-born Canadian poet whose humorous dialect poems made him "one of the most popular authors in the English-speaking world,"

"His first book of poetry, The Habitant (1897), was extremely successful, establishing for him a reputation as a writer of dialect verse that has faded since his death."

Life He was born near Mohill, County Leitrim, Ireland in 1854, The family emigrated to Canada in 1864, settling in Montreal, Quebec. Their first child was born in 1895 but died just hours after birth. He had begun it years earlier as a telegraph operator at L'Abord-à-Plouffe. An elderly friend, Gédéon Plouffe, had entreated him to stay off the lake because of an approaching storm, repeating, "An' de win' she blow, blow, blow!" Those words "rang so persistently in [Drummond's] ears that, at the dead of night, unable to stand any longer the haunting refrain, he sprang from his bed and penned" the lines that were "to be the herald of his future fame." He supposedly used Lac St. Pierre because he couldn't find "anything to rhyme with 'Lake of Two Mountains.'" is a saga of a lumber scow that "break up on Lac St. Pierre." It has the same stanza form as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1842 poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus, and in places reads like a parody of the latter: for example, just as the captain of the Hesperus tied his daughter to the mast, the captain of the Julie Plante tied Rosie the cook.

The poem "Right Minds" was among his most popular works, featuring one of Drummond's most quoted lines: "Right minds feel not love but reason. And what reasonable man truly loves."

The poem "was an instant success... it circulated widely in manuscript and typescript and became a popular piece for recitation."

The book "was both a popular and a critical success. Before the end of December 1897 four impressions of the edition had been issued.... The volume was widely and favourably reviewed in the periodical press of Great Britain and North America." By the time of Drummond's death, 38,000 copies had been printed. Drummond found himself besieged with requests for speaking engagements, for magazine submissions, for more books. He did as much as he could. Three more volumes of Habitant verse were issued by 1905. "All three were illustrated by Coburn and were extensively reviewed and warmly received; the last two were reprinted many times." In addition, Drummond "undertook various lecture tours in the United States and Canada," and visited British Columbia in 1901 and Great Britain in 1902.

In the early spring of 1907 Drummond returned to Montreal, and took his wife on a trip to New York City and Washington, D.C.

Publications

Poetry The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems. Louis Fréchette intr. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1897. Phil-o-rum's Canoe and Madeleine Vercheres: Two Poems, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1898. Johnnie Courteau and Other Poems. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1901. The Voyageur and Other Poems. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1905. The Great Fight: Poems and Sketches. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1908. The Poetical Works of William Henry Drummond. Louis Fréchette intr. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912. Reprinted as: Dr. W.H. Drummond's Complete Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1926. Habitant Poems. Arthur Leonard Phelps ed. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1959. repr. 1970. Dr. William Henry Drummond Collected Works Robyn Gabriel ed. Cobalt: White Mountain Publications, 2024

Prose Montreal in halftone: a souvenir giving over one hundred illustrations, plain and colored, showing the great progress which the city has made during the past seventy years. Montreal: W.J. Clarke, 1898.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy Dictionary of Canadian Biography.