"'The Lonely Land' first appeared in the McGill Fortnightly Review on 9 January 1926. Smith continued to revise the poem, and the final, further improved version appeared in the American poetry magazine The Dial in June 1929. It later went on to be published in the first collection of modernist Canadian poems called New Provinces, which was edited by F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith. Smith’s 'The Lonely Land' was inspired by both Imagist poetry and the Group of Seven, a group of Canadian landscape painters. The Group of Seven painted bleak but true-to-life Canadian landscapes. The paintings depicted the natural beauty of the land without romanticizing it. Smith’s poetry serves the same purpose through its Imagist influence." (http://post.queensu.ca/~mayr/montreal/lonely.html).