author
Wilfred S. Skeats
A late-19th-century poet remembered for a Canadian epic that blends personal feeling with questions of exile, identity, and nationhood. His surviving work has a thoughtful, old-fashioned voice and a strong sense of place.
1 Audiobook
The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic
by Wilfred S. Skeats
About the author
Wilfred S. Skeats is known today for The Song of the Exile: A Canadian Epic, published in Toronto in 1891. Public-domain library records and ebook editions confirm that this is the principal work currently associated with him, and modern cataloging often places him among Canadian poets of the period.
Genealogy records identify him as Wilfred Stradling Skeats, born in England in 1864 and later connected with Ontario, Canada, where he died in 1934. That background fits well with the themes of The Song of the Exile, which reflects on migration, memory, belonging, and life in a new country.
Although not widely known today, Skeats remains of interest to readers of older Canadian literature and public-domain poetry. His work offers a window into the literary mood of the 1890s, when poetry often carried both personal emotion and a larger sense of national history.