A master of the esoteric in verse and of the eccentric in life, John Hunter-Duvar is among the most curious of nineteenth-century Canadian writers, his writing itself often a kind of historical curiosity. His reputation in Canadian literature lies less in his books than in excerpts from them and in individual poems he placed in little magazines including the Dominion Illustrated Monthly and periodicals such as the Maritime Monthly, occasional verse that has since found its way into standard Canadian poetry anthologies and thus effectively turned an amateur into a literary figure of representative exception. His most qualitatively exceptional (and frequently anthologized) works are indeed his only works dealing emphatically with Canada as a fit place for poetic expression, De Roberval and The Emigration of the Fairies (published together in 1888) offering historically and fantastically romantic treatments of the rite of passage from Old World to New. Even his...