Nobel Intentions

William Chapman was not a great poet. Not terrible, not the worst, but not very good. That hardly makes him unique. Au contraire! Bad poets are a dime a dozen.

But as Tolstoy might have said, each bad poet is bad in his own way. In Chapman’s case, the absence of genius was not for lack of effort. Born in 1850, in what is now Beauceville, Quebec, he published five collections of poetry. Despite his English name, he wrote in French. (His surname was “something like échappement,” sniffed one member of the Académie française.) His first book, Les Québecquoises, appeared in 1876. It included translations of poems by the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, famous for Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, among other enormities. In 1881, he published Mines d’or de la Beauce, a work of cultural propaganda disguised as a geological report; for a time, he was a gold prospector himself. His final book, Les Fleurs de...