Francis Joseph Sherman, though ten years younger than the well-known writers Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, was closely associated with them and others of the Roberts family in the 1890s in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The work of these poets, which began appearing in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, along with that of the Ottawa poets Archibald Lampman, D. C. Scott, and Wilfred Campbell, is the first manifestation of Canada's national literary consciousness and the first flowering of romanticism in the new nation. Sherman as one of that school adapted late romantic modes to the needs of his own sensibility and created a body of consistently well-made verse.

The eldest son of Louis Walsh and Alice Maxwell Sherman, Francis Sherman was born on 3 February 1871 in Fredericton and educated at the local grammar school and high school and at the University of New Brunswick. Like...