WILLIAM HENRY DRUMMOND, like Mrs. Jameson, Thomas D ’Arey McGee, and Isabella Val-ancy Crawford, was of Irish birth. He was born near Mohill, County Leitrim, the son of an officer in the Royal Irish Constabulary. When Henry was two years old, the family moved to the beautiful and romantic village of Tawley, situated on a mountain overlooking the Bay of Donegal. Here the future poet spent about seven of his most impressionable years. Then the family, after a short visit to Mohill, came to Canada, where the father soon died. Henry’s education had begun at Tawley, and his mother, by heroic efforts, continued it for a time at a private school. The boy, anxious to relieve his mother’s burden, learned telegraphy. As an operator at Bord-a-Plouffe he first came in contact with the French-Canadian life which was to furnish him with the material for his unique contribution to Canadian and world literature. Later he continued his education at the High School, Montreal, at McGill University, and at Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, from which he graduated in medicine in 1884. After two years’ practice each at Stornaway and Knowlton, he settled permanently in Montreal. For several years he was Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at McGill University. He died of cerebral hemorrage while fighting smallpox at the Cobalt mines, in which he was interested during the last two years of his life.

Drummond’s poems are largely a by-product of his experience as telegrapher, camper, and medical practitioner. Before his marriage in 1894 to Miss May Harvey, a lady of romantic temperament and poetic sensibility, his literary efforts were “somewhat shy and fugitive.” Under his wife’s sympathetic influence, he began to write with “more confidence and zeal,” and he became known, partly through his own recitation of his poems at public gatherings, as the “Poet of the habitant” before any of his verse appeared in book form. At the suggestion of his wife and brothers, the manuscript o^ The Habitant was submitted to Putnam’s, who quickly perceived its literary merits. The volume was immediately successful and was followed by others in a similar vein. He also wrote poems of Irish-Canadian life which have not yet received adequate recognition because they are so completely overshadowed by his French-Canadian poems. In the latter, his sympathetic interpretation of French-Canadian types—the habitant, the voyageur and the coureur de bois, is important not only as literature, but also as a medium through which Anglo-Saxon Canadians may arrive at that understanding of their French-Canadian brothers which will make for a stronger feeling of national unity. Drummond learned by long association with French-Canadians to admire and love them, and then characterized them in their native environment with unrivalled picturesqueness, humor, and pathos, employing the dialect, till then used in literature only for purposes of ridicule, in which the characters themselves would tell their experiences to English-speaking persons who do not understand French. This unparalleled sympathetic and realistic interpretation of a very important element in Canadian life gives Drummond a unique pl.K'c among the poets of Canada, of the British Empire, and of the world.

Check-List of First Editions
The Habitant, and Other French-Canadian Poems. New York and London. 1897.
Phil-o-rum’s Canoe, and Madeleine Vercheres. New York and London, 1898.
Johnnie Courteau and Other Poems. New York and London, 1901.
The Voyageur, and Other Poems. New York and London, 1905.
The Great Fight. New York and London, 1908.
The Poetical Works of William Henry Drummond. New York and London, 1912.

Drummond also wrote the historical description in Montreal in Halftone, published by Clarke, Montreal, no date.

Norm Macdonald recites 'How Batesse Came Home'
by William Henry Drummond

The poetical works of William Henry Drummond (1912) (pdf)

The Habitant
And other French-Canadian Poems by William Henry Drummond, M.D. (1897) (pdf)