Isabella Valancy Crawford, gifted with an extraordinary mythopoeic imagination, is today regarded as one of the major poets of late-nineteenth-century Canada. Although most of her fiction and her shorter poems were written to suit the conventions of the periodicals from which she tried to earn a living, her narrative poems (the best known of which is "Malcolm's Katie") and some of her lyrics are gripping expressions of a unified cosmological vision in which the interdependent opposites of light and darkness, good and evil, and life and death are eventually reconciled through the power of human love. She animated the Canadian landscape and the cycles of nature with vivid Indian and animal imagery, expressing the meeting of European civilization and New World wilderness in language and symbols very different from those of her leading Canadian contemporaries, Charles G. D. Roberts and Archibald Lampman.

During her brief lifetime, however, Crawford...