Wilfred Campbell was a late-Victorian and Edwardian Canadian poet who is frequently linked with Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman of New Brunswick, and with Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott of Ontario. Like these two Ontario poets, he lived and wrote principally in Ottawa. His most distinctive contribution, however, was made in his first book, Lake Lyrics and Other Poems (1889), inspired by the scenery around his parents' home in Wiarton. His lyrics have more than local interest, for he created a mythology of the waters and shores of Georgian Bay and Lake Huron in terms of the Indians who lived long ago by "the lakes of the West." The poems can be read as Canadian or American--or as people of both nations read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855).

William Wilfred Campbell was born in 1858 in Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, the second son of Matilda and...