SOURCE: Johnson, James F. “‘Malcolm's Katie’ and Hugh and Ion: Crawford's Changing Narrative Vision.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, no. 3 (1978): 56-61.

In the following essay, Johnson compares the early “Malcolm's Katie” with the unfinished Hugh and Ion.

The poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford has not gone completely unadmired since her death in 1887, though it has never been elevated to the stature of the work of Lampman and Roberts. Students of Canadian poetry, throughout this century, have generally been aware of a handful of lyrics and of the narrative poem “Malcolm's Katie,” or at least of excerpts from this long work. Based on these poems there has developed a view of the poet—as a brilliant but unironic possessor of a sensuous, romantic imagination—which, while not untrue, seems now somewhat incomplete. A new complexity concerning Crawford's perception of the world has been suggested recently by the discovery of...