William Chapman is best known as a nationalistic French-Canadian poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His worst poetry, often ridiculed for its bombast and technical clumsiness, makes him an easy scapegoat for a literary fashion that has long since declined. Nevertheless, no anthology of French-Canadian poetry is complete without some of Chapman's best poems, which were greatly admired in his day and still stand as robust expressions of national sentiment.

George William Alfred Chapman was born in Saint-François de Beauce (Quebec), a prosperous rural region. His father, George William Alfred Chapman, was a businessman from England who had settled in what was then Lower Canada; his mother, Caroline Angers Chapman, was the daughter of a French-Canadian military and legal family. Chapman studied in Levis and Quebec City, without distinction, but well enough to gain a place at Laval University, where he entered his...