A World of Songs

"Although L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942) is celebrated as a novelist, made famous by her novel Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, it is less known that she also published 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 salability, even though poetry paid far 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. Leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre organizes this work within the context of Montgomery's life and career, claiming Montgomery 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 t