Charles G. D. Roberts has a secure and significant place in the literary history of Canada. His threefold importance rests on his poetry, his prose, especially his animal stories, and on the shaping influence he exerted on other Canadian writers and on the culture of the country he loved. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century Roberts was the acknowledged leader of Canada's first major group of poets, which included Bliss Carman (his cousin), Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, William Wilfred Campbell, and Pauline Johnson. As a creative writer and the catalyst of creativity in others, Roberts deserves the popular title he earned during his lifetime: the Father of Canadian Poetry.

Roberts was born on 10 January 1860 in the village of Douglas near Fredericton, New Brunswick, seven years before Confederation joined Canada's four existing provinces to form a nation. The first fourteen years of his life were...