William Henry Drummond

William Henry Drummond (born April 13, 1854, Mohill, County Leitrim, Ire.—died April 6, 1907, Cobalt, Ont., Can.) was an Irish-born Canadian writer of humorous dialect poems conveying a sympathetic but sentimentalized picture of the habitants, or French-Canadian farmers.

Drummond immigrated to Canada about 1864, left school at the age of 15 to help support his family, but at 30 took a degree in medicine at Bishop’s College in Quebec. After four years in country practice he moved to Montreal, where he gave public readings of his poems with great success. His verses, mingling humour and pathos, are written in a synthetic patois and from the viewpoint of a British imperialist but are redeemed by his evident goodwill and genuine fondness for his subject. His first collection, The Habitant (1897), was followed by several others, all of which were published together as The Poetical Works of William Henry Drummond (1912).