While poetry would eventually enable Québécois literature, and subsequently Acadian, Franco-Ontarian, and Franco-Manitoban writing, to make the transition to modernity, it had first to pass through a long period of uncertainty and obscurity. Even in 1981, Laurent Mailhot and Pierre Nepveu maintained that up until the end of the nineteenth century, “les rimeurs franais d’Amérique imitent, racontent, prêchent, se plaignent, décrivent, chantent mais n’écrivent guère.” Nonetheless, the sheer bulk of the Textes poétiques du Canada français (TPCF) remains striking: twelve volumes covering the period from 1606 to 1867 (10,000 pages, 3,857 poems, 227,175 lines), published between 1987 and 2000. Furthermore, the prefaces accompanying the poetry identify and define the development of two and a half centuries of a literary life which had, so far, never been considered as autonomous, but rather as a tributary of other historical, political, and social domains. Who would have thought that French Canada produced so many poems? While the TPCF may not represent a fundamental shift of the milestones in the history of French-Canadian poetry that have been established over the course of several centuries, the collection is a vitally important achievement. Functioning within both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, it uncovers, classifies, and puts into context thousands of compositions in verse.