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Celebrated as a novelist and made famous by her novel Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, L.M. Montgomery (1874–1942) is far less known for also writing and publishing hundreds of poems over a period of half a century.Although this output included a chapbook and a full-length collection in which she presented herself primarily as a nature poet, most of her poems appeared in periodicals, including women’s magazines, farm papers, faith-based periodicals, daily and weekly newspapers, and magazines for children. As a shrewd businesswoman, she learned to find the balance between literary quality and commercial saleability and continued to publish poetry even though it paid less than short fiction.
A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921, the second volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, gathers a selection of fifty poems originally published across a twenty-five-year period. Benjamin Lefebvre organizes this work within the context of Montgomery’s life and career, claiming her not only as a nature poet but also as the author of a wider range of "songs": of place, of memory, of lamentation, of war, of land and sea, of death, and of love. Many of these poems echo motifs that readers of Montgomery’s novels will recognize, and many more explore surprising perspectives through the use of male speakers. These poems offer today’s readers a new facet of the career of Canada’s most enduringly popular author.
This book collects a sample of fifty poems by L.M. Montgomery originally published in periodicals across a quarter of a century. It discusses this work in the context of early Canadian poetry and North American periodical culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: January 2019
- Pages: 160
Benjamin Lefebvre, editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library, is director of L.M. Montgomery Online. His publications include an edition of Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted, and the three-volume critical anthology The L.M. Montgomery Reader, which won the 2016 PROSE Award for Literature from the Association of American Publishers. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
"The collection of fifty poems published over a twenty-five-year period, beginning in 1894 with the first, is not only the second volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library but a step in a major reconsideration of her poetry."
Anne Burke
Prairie Journal
"The two greatest strengths of A World of Songs are its author and its editor, the first a major Canadian writer whose books have sold millions of copies – a fact that has not disqualified her from being the subject of serious academic scholarship – the other a world-renowned Montgomery scholar with, to judge by his publications, an encyclopedic knowledge of her work."
Andre Narbonne, Department of English, University of Windsor
"L.M. Montgomery’s verse has considerably more merit than that of many popular versifiers and yet has been unduly neglected, even by Montgomery scholars. A World of Songs expands the current limited horizon of Montgomery’s verse and possesses biographical/historical interest, including insights into publishing verse in the late Romantic period."
Kevin McCabe, co-editor of The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery
"L.M. Montgomery is a major writer of personal and general significance to many readers, and her work is of wide interest. The poems selected for this volume complement her better-known novels and short stories. Reading them will reward readers with insights and unanticipated pleasures."
Jane Ledwell, PEI poet, co-editor of L.M. Montgomery and War