author
William Henry Drummond
1854–1907
An Irish-born Canadian poet and physician, he became famous for lively, affectionate verse inspired by French-Canadian life. His best-known work brought him a huge readership at the turn of the 20th century and helped make dialect poetry widely popular in Canada.
2 Audiobooks
The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems
by William Henry Drummond
The Voyageur and Other Poems
by William Henry Drummond
About the author
Born in County Leitrim, Ireland, in 1854, he moved to Canada with his family as a boy and grew up in Montréal. Before becoming widely known as a writer, he studied at Bishop's College and worked as a physician, practicing in Montréal and in rural Québec communities.
That medical work shaped the writing he is remembered for. He became best known for humorous and sympathetic poems that drew on the speech and daily life of French-Canadian habitants and voyageurs, especially in The Habitant (1897), the book that made his name. Later collections such as Johnnie Courteau and The Voyageur helped build a large audience in Canada and beyond.
Drummond died in 1907, just before his 53rd birthday. Although modern readers sometimes view his dialect writing through a more critical lens, he remains an important figure in Canadian literary history for the way his poems captured a popular image of rural Québec and reached an unusually broad readership for a poet of his era.