[citation needed] He published Sonnets in 1855, Saul: a drama in three parts in 1857, Count Filippo; or, the unequal marriage in 1860, The Owl (an imitation of Poe's "The Raven") and The Huntsman in 1864, The Advocate (a prose work) and Jephthah's daughter in 1865, and Jezebel in 1867.

"[citation needed] That was followed by further favorable reviews in the Atlantic Monthly, Galaxy, and New York Evening Post.

Other admirers of Saul were Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald and American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

[6] However, his reputation declined in later decades; as national pride grew in the 1920s, he was criticized for not really being a "Canadian writer".

[5] In 1956, while dismissing Saul and Count Filippo as "Victorian dinosaurs," Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye acknowledged Heavysege as the "first poet who really came to grips with" what Frye considered to be "the central Canadian tragic theme" (that being "the indifference of nature to human values"): "His third poem, Jephthah's Daughter, seems to me to reflect more directly the influence of his Canadian environment, as its main themes are loneliness, the indifference of nature, and the conception of God as a force of nature.

[4] Solly Bridgetower, a character in Robertson Davies' The Salterton Trilogy, is an associate professor of English at the fictional Waverley University, and is urged by his department chair, Dr. Sengreen, to stake out a claim in the emerging field of "Amcan" (American-Canadian literature) by editing a scholarly edition of Heavysege's collected works, in order to earn tenure and make a name for himself (Leaven of Malice, 1954).