Complete Poems of Émile Nelligan

The Cogswell version of the 'Poems,' with a critical introduction by the editor and translator, is the first complete translation of Nelligan's poetry from its original French. Its publication has been authorized by the Emile Nelligan Foundation. With this book the author hopes to persuade the reader that Emile Nelligan, 'the most brilliant and original of the poets of the Ecole Littéraire of Montreal,' was also the finest Canadian poet of the nineteenth century .... In this view he is seconded by the American critic Edmund Wilson who wrote: 'The accepted idea up there [in Canada] ... is that the poetry of English Canada is excellent and better than their fiction, and it irritates them to be told that the best Canadian poet [Emile Nelligan] was French.' (Edmund Wilson to Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, Jan. 20, 1967, from Letters on Litterature and Politics: 1912-1972, New York, 1977, p. 636). / As Cogswell has written in his 'Introduction': 'Between the years 1896 and 1899, an unhappy, bewildered boy wrote poems in Montreal before succumbing to madness. When I first read these poems in their entirety, I came to the conclusion that their author was the finest poet writing in Canada in the nineteenth century, and the first modern Canadian poet.' / Fred Cogswell is professor of English at the University of New Brunswick and a graduate of the University of New Brunswick and Edinburgh. He is the translator of six works and collections of poetry and is himself the author of some twelve books of poems. He is represented in a score of anthologies and is well knwon as a critic, essayist, and reader. As the publisher and editor of Fiddlehead Poetry Books, he has been responsible for publishing more than 300 books of Canadian poetry. His The Poetry of Modern Quebec, an anthology of 20 major Quebec poets of four decades, was published by Harvest House in 1976.