Poems of James McIntyre

James McIntyre · 1889

The witness is the CIHM microfilm of the 1889 volume, Archive.org cihm_11791, filmed from the copy held by the National Library of Canada. Its title page gives the imprint as Ingersoll, published at the Office of the Chronicle, 1889; the catalogue record titles it "Poems of James McIntyre" and notes that the second part carries a special title page, "The rise and progress of the Canadian cheese trade, and descriptive poems and tales". It is one volume, not two. Assign ran after the 1884 volume, so it considered only the 165 poems still loose, and placed 162. Many of those were also in 1884: the preface here says the earlier book's reception induced the poet to issue a more comprehensive volume containing about one hundred new pieces, so this is a gathering rather than a wholly new book. Where the 1884 scan did not show a poem at threshold, first located printing on a readable witness is this edition, and that is what the poems are dated from. Castle Gordon scored 0.50 and was left in the compilation; the threshold was not lowered. Two poems, McIntyre Has a Few Rows and The Glorious Land of Maple Leaf, scored below 0.25 on both witnesses and are in neither volume. The 1889 preface says the book prints "a few short pieces from many letters and poems we received from friends", so whether every piece in the source compilation is McIntyre's own is a question these two raise and neither witness settles.