"[I]n the struggle which every visionary must have with the world [Carman] had no divided heart," observes Colum; "quietly, without any argumentation, he took the side opposite to the world’s. ‘Getting and spending we lay waste our Powers,’ Wordsworth lamented. Bliss Carman did with the minimum of getting and spending. ‘Little we see in Nature that is ours,’ that noble lament goes on. Bliss Carman . . . earned the right to say these words with less bitterness than most visionaries" (vi).

It is apparent from her surviving letters to him in the Archives of Queen’s University that Margaret Lawrence (1896-1973) became infatuated with Carman when she heard him read at the University of Toronto in 1925 and that she sought him out at a literary party in Toronto shortly before initiating their correspondence in May, 1927.¹ At that time, Lawrence was single, intellectually accomplished, steeped in mysticism and thirty-one years of age.² She had graduated from the University of Toronto in 1920 with a B.A. in Modern History and a well-grounded "interest . . . in the women’s rights movement" (Introduction [v]).³ "After her graduation . . . , she pursued a freelance writing career for the next twelve years," becoming "literary and associate Editor for [the] Canadian Home Journal"⁴ and writing two books, Mediums and Mystics (with Albert Durrant Watson), published in 1923, and Sieur de La Salle, published in 1930 (Introduction [v-vi]).⁵ "In 1928 she joined the staff of Consolidated Press," the publisher of the Canadian Home Journal, Saturday Night, and other periodicals, where she "worked until 1943" (Dustcover).⁶ In 1943 she also married Benedict Greene (c. 1887-1984),⁷ the publisher of Who’s Who in Canada, whom she had met "at a Toronto literary party in 1929" and would have married in the ’thirties had not Greene, the son of an internationally known Jewish scholar, shrunk from hurting his father by marrying a gentile. Lawrence’s letters to Greene from 1936 (just prior to their separation) and 1942-43 (preceding their reconciliation) were published posthumously as Love Letters to Baruch (1973).⁸

As a number of Carman’s letters indicate, Lawrence’s "interest in women’s rights continued throughout" the ’twenties (Introduction [vi]). Several of her reviews in Saturday Night in 1928-29 substantiate this interest, not least her review of three books on marriage and birth control in the December 1, 1928 issue of the magazine.⁹ In 1931 she published a History of the School for Nurses at Toronto General Hospital, and in 1932 the Canadian Club "sent her on a national speaking tour during which she lectured to thousands of women on the feminist movement" (Introduction [vi]; Dustcover). In 1936, she published The School of Femininity, a study of women writers from Mary Wollstoncraft and Jane Austen to Dorothy Parker and Pearl Buck that fully reveals her alignment with the maternal feminism which, as Veronica Strong-Boag has demonstrated in The Parliament of Women: the National Council of Women of Canada, 1893-1929 (1976), characterized mainstream Canadian women’s movements prior to the Second World War. The School of Femininity was also published in Britain (as We Write as Women) and it was reprinted in the United States in 1972, the year before Lawrence’s death.

The essay "In Memory of Bliss Carman" that Lawrence published in the June 1930 issue of the Canadian Home Journal contains numerous intimations of her deep and abiding affection for him:

It is a year in June since Bliss Carman died. Though at no time will it ever seem to Canadians that Bliss Carman is dead. We do not hear his soft woodsy voice, or see his strange eyes that looked out at the world from far away. We cannot laugh at his sudden whimsical remarks or try to keep up with his long strides. All this has gone. But the poems remain, and the memories of people who loved him. And that counts.
     Last June the papers of Canada were filled with editorials and verses and letters from constant readers about the death of Bliss Carman. It made those of us who knew him well, cry quietly to ourselves. For, however sweet the devotion of people is, it seems to matter very little after someone has died. I said to myself, "if only he could have known this while he lived." What it might have done for him. For I have never known a human being to be so responsive to appreciation as Bliss Carman. I do not mean that he looked for adulation. He shrank from the person who hunted literary lions, and made great to-do about him because he was Bliss Carman. Many a time I have seen him almost congeal in front of too gushing a person. He seemed to know instinctively when it was real, and then he gave royally of the lovely mind that was his. When it was not real he looked out from his house as he described it in a letter, and wondered what all the excitement was about. For, though he lived consecratedly for his poetry, he did not take the business of being a famous poet too seriously. His joy was to be with a friend in whom there was a lot of laughter, as well as sufficient understanding of the inwardness of life. But, for all of that, he would have been touched by the editorials and letters and poems. He would have been touched softly as people are when triumph comes at the end of sorrow and struggle. His life had not been easy. It is hard to be a poet in these days, when the measure of justification is in how much money can be made. No money, or very little of it, can be made by writing poetry.
     I said to him once that if I had a son, and found one day that he was writing poetry, I would not be elated, but infinitely concerned. Because I knew there was a small place in the modern world for the children of verse. He said, you would be right. He went on to tell me that it depressed him dreadfully to think that at the end of his years he was poor. Not that he would have changed places with anyone else. He loved his verse-making too much for that. But he was no fool about the world. He estimated things correctly. He knew he had adventured for poetry, and he took what came of that adventuring graciously, without any complaints against the cost, and also without any self-congratulation on account of the fame.
     I am putting this down because I think Canadians should know it.
     But, there is something else they should know. That the reception which Canada gave Bliss Carman when he came back to read his work in recitals gave him a new zest for life. He had been very ill, as most of us know, but he recovered amazingly, and was able to take long reading tours. Everywhere he drew packed houses, and though the soft voice had not power enough behind it to carry much beyond the first few rows, the people cheered and clapped, out of love for the work of his which they knew anyway. They were happy to look at him, as indeed they might well have been, because Bliss Carman, even in his old age, racked with tuberculosis, and drawn with fatigue lines from a disordered heart-action, was fascinating to look at. He was like an old king from a fairy story, tall and slim and finely built. His hair had been tawny, and was only touched with grey. His eyes were golden coloured. His whole appearance stimulated the imagination. The heroic lines made one expect a booming voice, and here was a gentle lovely tone, like the distant sounds that come from the forests, or like the mid notes of a fine cello. He spoke his words distinctly, giving them their due, as one who loved them dearly.
     News of his death came to me as I sat in my garden on a mellow afternoon in the lovely early days of June last year. There were scarlet poppies blazing in the sun, and a silver birch tree was making whispering sounds in the wind. Strange as it may seem, I had a volume of his poems in my hands. I was thinking that no one else had ever loved the spring as Bliss Carman. I was looking at the gorgeous poppies and thinking how his perfectly sculptured hands might touch their petals. I was hoping that something would send him to Canada soon, for I had been ill a long time, and I wanted someone who had known the terrors of convalescence to tell me that life was worth being determined about. But, Carman had gone on his long hike while I was thinking.
     As the days passed I could not be sorry. Death had no horror for Bliss Carman. He was aware of god, and quite content to follow the mortal span with graciousness. As he said again and again in his poems. The night before he died, he planned happily to go on a long walk the next day. June meant walks in the woods to him. I sat in my garden and remembered. I tried to write because everyone else was writing who had loved him, and many also who had loved his name and his work. But I was not able to. It was all too recent. I was disappointed in myself, until I recalled what Carman himself had written in a letter about his emotion over the death of Peter MacArthur, who was his friend. He had written "I have just been reading Peter MacArthur’s Friendly Acres. It makes me cry like a simp. But do read it, you won’t have to cry, you didn’t love him." That comforted me. Carman, for all his radiant spiritual faith, was human, and lonely when his friend went on to death, though not sorry in the ordinary sense of things, any more that I was as I looked at Scarlet poppies in June, and knew that Carman would not pass my way again. For in spite of all the lovely colors of early summer, and all the strange sounds of nature, there is nothing on earth beautiful enough for a poet like Carman. So, I could be glad in my soul that he was gone in search of God.¹⁰

As a number of Carman’s letters to Lawrence attest to the development of their relationship through several stages. At the outset, it was the cordial outcome of Lawrence’s interest in the poet and his work, but very quickly it developed into a long-distance romance that had come to mean a great deal to them both. "[Y]ou seem to grow darlinger with every epistle," wrote Carman on September 21, 1927; "[a] very few more such letters . . . and you will have passed the comparative and reached the superlative!" (Letter 10). To Lawrence’s request that he visit Toronto during his forthcoming travels, he replied that this would be impossible "[b]ut thanks be to Allah, or whoever, nor space nor time can quite undo us. ‘Us’ meaning Margaret and Carman." The epistolary lovers did meet in Toronto on at least two or three occasions in 1927 and 1928,¹¹ but their relationship probably remained platonic—a meeting of minds that shared similar philosophical and literary interests. Nevertheless, there are sexual elements to their correspondence. Carman’s letters of February 10 and 25, 1928 hint of some jealousy on Lawrence’s part in regard to the women who inspired his Songs of the Sea Children (1904) (see Letters 52 and 55), and in his letter of July 11, 1928 he uses his animalistic alter ego "Willie," first to flirt with various amorous possibilities and then to discuss the amatory proclivities of his cousin, Charles G.D. Roberts (see Letter 68). The fact that Carman’s next letter is a plea to Lawrence "to WRITE" (Letter 69) may indicate that such explicit "gabble" (Letter 68) was not to her liking. It may also indicate that the pressures of her work and the attentions of the "man" mentioned in Carman’s letter of August 22, 1928 (Letter 71) had moved him towards the margins of her thoughts. For whatever reasons, the flow of their correspondence slowed noticeably after the middle of July, 1928, and in the early months of 1929 when Lawrence was acutely ill and Carman was continually travelling, it ceased almost entirely (see Letter 78). Carman’s last letter to Lawrence was written a little over a week before his sudden death of a brain haemorrhage on June 8, 1929. There is a certain poignancy to its closing words: "Love to you as ever / B."