He published a number of books of poetry during the last years of the nineteenth century, including Matins and In Memorabilia Mortis (a collection of sonnets in memory of William Morris).
[2] He attended Fredericton Collegiate School, where he came under the influence of headmaster George R. Parkin, "an Oxonian with an enthusiasm for the poetry of Rossetti, Swinburne, and, notably, Morris,"[3] who had also taught Bliss Carman and Charles G.D. Roberts.
[2] Charles G.D. Roberts, who first met Sherman in 1895, described him as "very tall, lean, very dark, with heavy black eyebrows like his mother, and with the large wistful eyes of the poet rather than the banker.
[2] When World War I broke out in 1914, Sherman left his bank position, enrolling with the Officers' Training Corps at McGill University, and then enlisting as a private for reinforcements of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in 1915.
[6] In 1896, Sherman visited Bliss Carman's publishers, Copeland and Day, in Boston, taking with him "a slim manuscript of thirty poems in an assortment of styles, most either sonnets or ballads."
[4] In the United States, the Hartford Courant cited the book for "dignity, art, and much beauty of thought and expression", and the Boston Transcript added that it was "of genuine literary importance.
Many of the stories recall Morris poems: "a narrator speaks from beyond life, a fantastic setting is located beyond space and time, a ballad and a dramatic monologue are written in the Froissartian tone, interior and exterior landscapes reflect the speakers’ disturbed psychological states, precise details of colour predominate, italics are used for effect, atmospheres are Medieval, and, in general, the subjects are love, fate, and death.
'A Memory,' 'The Path,' 'The Last Flower" and "The Kingfisher' ... vividly recall Rossetti’s brilliance of light color, but most of all his rich imagery and sensuous recollection.
Sherman incorporates Canadian foliage such as birches, maples, and pines more perceptibly here and allows himself a closer association to New Brunswick subject matter.
"[4] Roberts called "A Prelude" "a sustained contemplative poem of nature interwoven with human interest, inspired with that seriousness, that unawareness of the trivial, so characteristic of all Sherman’s work.
It is written, with unfaltering technique throughout, in that most exacting Italian verse form, the Terza Rima, which scarcely any one else except Shelley has known how to handle successfully in English.
"[citation needed] Modelled on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "House of Life," the sonnet sequence "demonstrates Sherman’s attempts to reconcile spiritual/secular dichotomies by exploring the soul/body conflict."
This cycle, meant to describe Canadian nature over a full year, show "a more authentic New Brunswick, partly because Sherman exhibits a greater diversity of metrical pattern than in previous works.
"[5] The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by Madame LaTour, "with varying stanza forms reminiscent of Morris’s 'Sir Peter Harpdon’s End' and 'Rapunzel'.
The speaker’s reflections on her betrayal by both love and history give her words the psychological intensity and nostalgic depth of the Guenevere poems....