Politician

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) was born of a noble family at Mâcon, where he spent a happy childhood with his mother and sisters. In October 1816 Lamartine visited Aix-les-Bains where he met Madame Julie Charles, who, as Elvire, was to inspire many of the poems in the famous Méditations poétiques. She was ill with tuberculosis, but it was agreed that they would meet again the next summer at the same spot. Lamartine went back to Aix in August 1817, but Madame Charles was too ill to travel there and she died December 18 of that year. In later life Lamartine entered politics and after the Revolution of 1848 he was for a short time the leader of the government. He died impoverished in relative obscurity.

• "Alphonese de Lamartine." Representative French Poetry. Ed. Victor E. Graham. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. 31-38.
• Alphonse de LAMARTINE (1790-1869). Les grands Classiques. Boulogne: la société Webnet, 1996-2009.

• Hargreaves, Mary W. M. "Adams, John Quincy." American National Biography Online. American Council of Learned Societies: Oxford University Press, 2000.

• Djwa, Sandra. Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.
• Richardson, Keith. "Scott, Francis Reginald (Frank)." The Canadian Encyclopedia.
• Scott, F.R. The Collected Poems of F. R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981.
• --. The Dance is One. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973.
• --. Essays on the Constitution: Aspects of Canadian Law and Politics. 1977. [Non-fiction]
• --. Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.
• --. The Eye of the Needle: Satire, Sorties, Sundries. Montreal: Contact Press, 1957.
• --. Overture. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945.
• --. Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966.
• --. Signature. Vancouver: Klanak Press, 1964.
• --. Trouvailles: Poems from Prose. Montreal: Delta Canada, 1967.
• --. Signature. Vancouver: Klanak Press, 1964.
• --, trans. St-Denys Garneau & Anne Hebert: Translations/Traductions. Vancouver: Klanak Press, 1962.
• --. Poems of French Canada. Burnaby, B.C.: Blackfish Press, 1977.
• --, A.J.M. Smith, and Leo Kennedy, eds. New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936.
• -- and A.J.M. Smith, eds. The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective and Disrespectful Verse. 1957.

Abraham Lincoln was born 12 February 1809 near Hodgenville, Kentucky, and grew up with little formal schooling. Self-educated, he was eventually elected to the Illinois House of Representatives and served from 1834 to 1842. Admitted to the bar in 1836, Lincoln used law as a gateway into politics, which dominated his life. He became Vice-Presidential candidate for the (new) Republic Party in 1856 and was elected 16th President of the United States, serving from 1861 to his assassination by John Wilkes Booth in Washington on April 15, 1865. Lincoln's slave emancipation principles led to the civil war between the North and the South in 1861. He was survived by his wife Mary Todd, whom he married in 1842 in Springfield, Illinois, and one son.

Lincoln's favourite poem was "Mortality" by the Scottish poet William Knox. Its religious melancholy ran through Lincoln's own, always occasional poems, which set down personal thoughts on his life in the context of Biblical time.

• The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap. 9 vols. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55. E 457 .91 Robarts Library

• O'Callaghan, Michelle. "Wither, George (1588–1667)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

Editor and owner of the Novascotian, then leader of the Reformers' party, Joseph Howe in 1848 obtained for Nova Scotia status as the first British colony to achieve responsible government. He became Liberal party premier of the province's government from 1860 to 1863, a federal cabinet minister under Sir John A. Macdonald in 1869, and Lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia in 1873, just prior to his death. Although he began preparing his poems and essays before then, his family brought them to publication a year late.