Roberts, Charles G. D. (1860-1943), was a Canadian author. Roberts’s finest work appears in his romantic poems of nature and country life. These poems display his sensitive feeling for the landscape and wildlife of his native New Brunswick.
Roberts’s first book of verse was Orion and Other Poems (1880). His successful use of traditional poetic forms and themes in this book influenced many other young Canadian poets. Roberts’s sonnet sequence Songs of the Common Day (1893) contains some of his finest poems of rural life. Roberts also wrote much prose, including A History of Canada (1897) and a number of historical novels. Several of the historical novels were romances set in colonial North America. He won international fame for animal stories, many of which were collected in The Last Barrier and Other Stories (published in 1958, after his death).
Roberts was born on Jan. 10, 1860, in Douglas, near Fredericton, New Brunswick. King George V of the United Kingdom knighted him in 1935, and he became known as Sir Charles Roberts. Roberts died on Nov. 26, 1943.
