(William) Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, April 15, 1861, of a long line of United Empire Loyalists who withdrew from Connecticut at the time of the Revolutionary War. Carman was educated at the University of New Brunswick (1879–81), at Edinburgh (1882–3) and Harvard (1886–8). He took up his residence in the United States about 1889 and, with the exception of short sojourns in the Maritime Provinces, has lived there ever since.

In 1893, Carman issued his first book, Low Tide on Grand PrÉ: A Book of Lyrics. It was immediately successful, running quickly into a second edition. From the outset, it was evident that Carman possessed the true lyrical power: the ability to fuse thought in emotion, to interpret the external world through a personal intensity. Simple and direct in his choice of themes, his passion made them universal. A vivid buoyancy, new to American literature, made his worship of Nature frankly pagan as contrasted to the moralizing tributes of most of his predecessors. This freshness and irresponsible whimsy made Carman the natural collaborator for Richard Hovey, and when their first joint Songs from Vagabondia appeared in 1894 Carman’s fame was established. (See Preface.)

Although the three Vagabondia collections contain Carman’s best known poems, several of his other volumes (he has published almost twenty of them) vibrate with the same glowing pulse. An almost physical radiance rises from Ballads of Lost Haven (1897), From the Book of Myths (1902) and Songs of the Sea Children (1904).

Carman has also written several volumes of essays and, in conjunction with Mary Perry King, has devised several poem-dances (Daughters of Dawn, 1913) suggesting Vachel Lindsay’s later poem-games. In his collection April Airs (1916), although the strength is diluted and the music somewhat thinned, the old magic persists; the spell may be overfamiliar but it is not powerless.