SOURCE: Mathews, Robin. “‘Malcolm's Katie’: Love, Wealth, and Nation Building.” Studies in Canadian Literature 2, no. 2 (winter 1977): 49-60.

In the following essay, Mathews studies the various themes that comprise “Malcolm's Katie.”

Isabella Valancy Crawford's major poem “Malcolm's Katie,” a central work in the English Canadian literary tradition, deals with love, regeneration, wealth, and nation building. The poem, along with her others, has often been treated as the production of a solitary genius working largely outside the ideas of her time and tradition. Readers have seen Crawford as unique or eccentric because “Malcolm's Katie,” unlike poems of her contemporaries, is particularly rich in archetypes and symbols. She has, moreover, employed Indian lore and imagery with richness and evident sympathy. She seems to have done her work without having had much connection with the leading figures of her day; indeed, she seems to have been poor and even hard pressed to...