George Longmore is one of those writers whose significance for Canadian literature is disproportionate to the time he spent in Canada. Although only two of his many poems are set in Canada. Longmore is important because of his considerable merit and because of his participation in noteworthy literary trends. The Charivari (1824) is the finest of the early Canadian responses to Lord Byron, and Tecumthe (written in 1824 and included in Tales of Chivalry and Romance, 1826) is the first treatment of its titular hero.

The details of Longmore's career and canon are still somewhat obscure because of a dearth of biographical information, the difficulty of obtaining most of his works and also because of the anonymous and pseudonymous publication of his early volumes. Until the 1979 scholarship of Mary Lu MacDonald, both his Canadian poems were mistakenly attributed to Levi Adams. Longmore was born in Quebec City, probably in 1793, the son...