Among minor Canadian poets who during their lifetime enjoyed unusually high reputations, William Henry Drummond is perhaps foremost. While he had a natural talent for composing French-Canadian dialect verse, he became a public and published poet more in response to the desires of his friends and (eventually) his readers than in response to any personal desire for notoriety. Yet at the turn of the century and during the years leading up to World War I he was extremely popular, not only in Canada but also in England and the United States. He made few demands on his readers, who found his poems amusing, witty, and original. If today Drummond's verse seems little more than a literary and historical curiosity, it is mainly because the community spirit that the poet and his audience shared has been diluted over the years. Arthur Phelps's 1959 remark that "Drummond today is discard material...