Isabella Valancy Crawford's major poem Malcolm's Katie, a central work in the English Canadian literary tradition, is remarkably modern in its concepts of wealth, power, capital, exploitation, and environment, yet the values expressed are clearly those of the majority of the people in Crawford's nineteenth-century Canada. As a poem about nation-building, it is connected to Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush and to Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising through its linking of nation, the individual, love, and community fulfilment. This link is developed through a portrayal of the self-respect and freedom realized through land ownership, a portrayal it shares in common with poems such as Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village, Alexander McLachlan's "Acres of His Own," and Moodie's "Canada, The Blest – The Free."
