W.W.E. Ross
Encyclopedia
William Wrightson Eustace Ross (June 14, 1894 – August 26, 1966) was a Canadian geophysicist and poet
. He was the first published poet in Canada
to write Imagist poetry
, and later the first to write surrealist verse, both of which have led some to call him "the first modern Canadian poet
."
, to Ralph and Nellie Creighton Ross. He grew up in Pembroke, Ontario
. He studied geophysics
at the University of Toronto
., supporting his studies with summer work on geological survey
s in Northern Ontario
.
Ross served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force
in World War I
as a private in the signal corps
. On his return, he worked until his retirement as a geophysicist at the Dominion Magnetic Observatory at Agincourt, Ontario
(now part of Toronto
). On June 3, 1924, he married Mary Lowrey, "the well-known journalist." They had two children, Mary Loretto and Nancy Helen. The family bought a house on Delaware Ave. in Toronto, where Ross lived for the rest of his life.
Ross began writing poetry in or around 1923. His earliest works "are written in free verse
and reflect a knowledge of both imagism and Japanese poetry
." In 1925 Ross developed the 'laconic' as a distinctly Canadian verse form, "one that would be 'native' and yet not 'free verse
,' one that would be unrhymed and yet definitely a 'form.'"
One night in April 1928, after an evening's discussion of Canadian nationalism
among friends, Ross wrote "practically all" of his most famous work, "North." "It never 'clicked' so well before or since as that night in 1928," he later wrote. "North" was a series of laconics based on Ross's memories of his summers in Northern Ontario years earlier. Ross submitted some of its poems to Harriet Moore
's Chicago
magazine Poetry
and to Marianne Moore
's magazine The Dial
, and was published in both.
In 1930 Ross published a book of Laconics, privately and only under the initials 'E.R.'. ("North" was the first section of the book.) Ross mailed his own review copies to periodicals that he respected. He received "an admiring review by Marianne Moore (Poetry 35, 1931)",
Ross's next book, in 1932, was a volume of Sonnets. It was meant as a companion volume to Laconics, the subject matter of the sonnets "mirroring the subject matter and imagery of the modernist poems" in the earlier book. Once again, the book was published privately, and signed only 'E.R.'. "After Sonnets, a work that he considered a failed book, Ross's disdain for publication increased."
In the 1930s Ross translated work by the surrealist Max Jacob
. He also wrote prose poems influenced by Jacob and Franz Kafka
, some of which were published in New Directions in Prose & Poetry for 1937. "His work in this period incorporates elements of automatic writing, transcendentalism, mysticism, and archetypal imagery." The above were the first published prose poems written in Canada.
Ralph Gustafson
included Ross's work in his 1942 Anthology of Canadian Verse, bringing his works before a large reading public in Canada for the first time. By then, though, Ross had ceased to write new poetry. Through the next two decades he "revised and polished poems begun much earlier and experimented with some new poetry." He "confined his often brilliant verse-parodies to his letters and with the exception of Margaret Avison
generally disliked the younger poets beginning to publish in the 'fifties.
In 1944 Ross wrote an article in the Canadian Forum, "On Canadian Poetry," as part of the ongoing nationalist/cosmopolitan
debate, calling for a poetry that is "distinctly located" in a geographic "locale."
Ross contributed poems "sporadically to literary periodicals and anthologies until his death in 1966. Most of what he published after 1930 was solicited by anthologists or magazine editors. Critic Barry Callaghan
suggests that Ross wrote 'only when strenuously urged by an anthologist or literature student.'" Urging by poet Raymond Souster
resulted in previously unpublished poetry in the mimeographed collection Experiment 1923-29, published in 1956 by Souster's Contact Press, at which time Ross began to be recognized as Canada's first Imagist poet. However, "Ross felt this collection misrepresented him in its emphasis on his imagist work." Later encouragement by Callaghan led to Ross's composing new poetry included in the posthumously published Shapes and Sounds (1968). Shapes and sounds is a selection of Ross's poems edited by Souster and John Robert Colombo
, with a memoir by Callaghan.
Ross died of cancer
in 1966.
of Canada's Confederation poets
particularly unappealing." He "was disapprovingly detached from what was happening in Canadian poetry in general and disliked Pratt
's 'pretty expert word-juggling and rhyming' in particular.... He felt more enthusiastic about poems by Pickthall
, Knister
and Patrick Anderson than Pratt, and Tom MacInnes
'quite hypnotized' him." His chief American influences were E.E. Cummings and Marianne Moore
.
Ross distrusted the cosmopolitanism
of the Montreal Group
. In "On Canadian Poetry" he "wrote that a poet is inevitably associated with a place and that the cosmopolitan doctrine as espoused by Smith
was not tenable. 'I have a horrid suspicion,' he said, 'that the "Cosmopolis" will turn out to be not "world city" in general but one of London
, New York
, [or] Paris
.'"
"The Fish," "The Diver," "The Dawn; the Birds," "The Snake Trying," "Gum," "The Creek," "The Walk": mostly, the poems of "North" that he had written that one night in April 1928.
"In Ross's spare, ... narrow poems, the inquiring spirit of the New World
seeks release from old sentiments, customs, and poetic conventions.... Ross seeks ‘something of the sharper tang of Canada’ in the surface reflections and dark shadows of pine-surrounded lakes, where reality is recognized as profound and mysterious. The modern poet of the New World seeks illumination by objectifying the ordinary sensations of sight and sound. His explorations of the land of lake and loon thereby serve as metaphors for illumination and rejuvenation."
"In an early draft for his 'Introduction' to The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958), Ralph Gustafson explained what these poems meant to him: 'A modern awareness, with its concomitant experimentation with technique, a reduction of Canada, of the quality of Canada, were entering into Canadian verse. W.W.E. Ross' "northern" poems were written almost entirely in one night in April 1928.... They captured precisely, with wonder and freshness, a distinct Canada."
It has been said that the poems of "North" "present the northern Ontario landscape in the stark manner of the Group of Seven
. His strongest work is undoubtedly this early imagist-oriented poetry, work that derives its strengths from his restrained, skeptical personality, from his scientist's preference for objective, factual material, and from his affection for the Canadian wilderness landscape." This is poetry which, as he wrote in 'On National Poetry' (Canadian Forum, 1944), is 'distinctly located' in a geographic 'locale.'
The book "reveals a lesser-known side of Ross — the classicist and traditional metricist concerned not only with factual reality but also with spiritual truth." Sonnets was meant to be more overtly philosophical than Laconics — which Ross thought would be better suited by the traditinal form's longer lines — but ultimately he considered the book an experiment that failed:
, Smith
, Gustafson and so forth — because unlike them he was not interested in propagating the future any more than he was interested in perpetuating the past.... Ross was well-read in Canadian, European and American poetry, yet he cut his own work free from any direction that this reading might have suggested for his verse. His poetry is unique in its timelessness."
"Ross's writing became of special importance in the 1950s and 1960s when new generations of Canadian poets sought their precursors in the modernist goals of restraint, precision, organic rhythm, and the factual image."
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
. He was the first published poet in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
to write Imagist poetry
Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
, and later the first to write surrealist verse, both of which have led some to call him "the first modern Canadian poet
Canadian poetry
- Beginnings:The earliest works of poetry, mainly written by visitors, described the new territories in optimistic terms, mainly targeted at a European audience...
."
Life
Ross was born in Peterborough, OntarioPeterborough, Ontario
Peterborough is a city on the Otonabee River in southern Ontario, Canada, 125 kilometres northeast of Toronto. The population of the City of Peterborough was 74,898 as of the 2006 census, while the census metropolitan area has a population of 121,428 as of a 2009 estimate. It presently ranks...
, to Ralph and Nellie Creighton Ross. He grew up in Pembroke, Ontario
Pembroke, Ontario
Pembroke is a city in the province of Ontario, Canada, at the confluence of the Muskrat River and the Ottawa River in the Ottawa Valley...
. He studied geophysics
Geophysics
Geophysics is the physics of the Earth and its environment in space; also the study of the Earth using quantitative physical methods. The term geophysics sometimes refers only to the geological applications: Earth's shape; its gravitational and magnetic fields; its internal structure and...
at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
., supporting his studies with summer work on geological survey
Geological survey
The term geological survey can be used to describe both the conduct of a survey for geological purposes and an institution holding geological information....
s in Northern Ontario
Northern Ontario
Northern Ontario is a region of the Canadian province of Ontario which lies north of Lake Huron , the French River and Lake Nipissing. The region has a land area of 802,000 km2 and constitutes 87% of the land area of Ontario, although it contains only about 6% of the population...
.
Ross served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force
Canadian Expeditionary Force
The Canadian Expeditionary Force was the designation of the field force created by Canada for service overseas in the First World War. Units of the C.E.F. were divided into field formation in France, where they were organized first into separate divisions and later joined together into a single...
in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
as a private in the signal corps
Signal Corps
The Signal Corps is a military branch, usually subordinate to a country's army, responsible for the military communications .Many countries have a Signal Corps, whose main function is usually communication .* Arma de Comunicaciones, signals branch of the Argentine Army* Arma delle...
. On his return, he worked until his retirement as a geophysicist at the Dominion Magnetic Observatory at Agincourt, Ontario
Agincourt, Toronto
Agincourt is a very diverse neighbourhood in the Scarborough district of the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is centred along Sheppard Avenue between Kennedy and Markham Roads...
(now part of Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
). On June 3, 1924, he married Mary Lowrey, "the well-known journalist." They had two children, Mary Loretto and Nancy Helen. The family bought a house on Delaware Ave. in Toronto, where Ross lived for the rest of his life.
Ross began writing poetry in or around 1923. His earliest works "are written in free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
and reflect a knowledge of both imagism and Japanese poetry
Japanese poetry
Japanese poets first encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang Dynasty. It took them several hundred years to digest the foreign impact, make it a part of their culture and merge it with their literary tradition in their mother tongue, and begin to develop the diversity of their native poetry. For...
." In 1925 Ross developed the 'laconic' as a distinctly Canadian verse form, "one that would be 'native' and yet not 'free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
,' one that would be unrhymed and yet definitely a 'form.'"
One night in April 1928, after an evening's discussion of Canadian nationalism
Canadian nationalism
Canadian nationalism is a term which has been applied to ideologies of several different types which highlight and promote specifically Canadian interests over those of other countries, notably the United States...
among friends, Ross wrote "practically all" of his most famous work, "North." "It never 'clicked' so well before or since as that night in 1928," he later wrote. "North" was a series of laconics based on Ross's memories of his summers in Northern Ontario years earlier. Ross submitted some of its poems to Harriet Moore
Harriet Moore
Harriet Moore , is formally known as Lady Bowell, the Spouse of the Prime Minister of Canada and wife of Mackenzie Bowell, the fifth Prime Minister of Canada. They had 9 children together....
's Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
magazine Poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
and to Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
's magazine The Dial
The Dial
The Dial was an American magazine published intermittently from 1840 to 1929. In its first form, from 1840 to 1844, it served as the chief publication of the Transcendentalists. In the 1880s it was revived as a political magazine...
, and was published in both.
In 1930 Ross published a book of Laconics, privately and only under the initials 'E.R.'. ("North" was the first section of the book.) Ross mailed his own review copies to periodicals that he respected. He received "an admiring review by Marianne Moore (Poetry 35, 1931)",
Ross's next book, in 1932, was a volume of Sonnets. It was meant as a companion volume to Laconics, the subject matter of the sonnets "mirroring the subject matter and imagery of the modernist poems" in the earlier book. Once again, the book was published privately, and signed only 'E.R.'. "After Sonnets, a work that he considered a failed book, Ross's disdain for publication increased."
In the 1930s Ross translated work by the surrealist Max Jacob
Max Jacob
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
. He also wrote prose poems influenced by Jacob and Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, some of which were published in New Directions in Prose & Poetry for 1937. "His work in this period incorporates elements of automatic writing, transcendentalism, mysticism, and archetypal imagery." The above were the first published prose poems written in Canada.
Ralph Gustafson
Ralph Gustafson
Ralph Barker Gustafson, CM was a Canadian poet and professor at Bishop's University.- Biography :He was born in Lime Ridge, near Dudswell, Quebec on August 16, 1909. His mother was British, his father Swedish. He was educated at Bishop's University, earning a B.A...
included Ross's work in his 1942 Anthology of Canadian Verse, bringing his works before a large reading public in Canada for the first time. By then, though, Ross had ceased to write new poetry. Through the next two decades he "revised and polished poems begun much earlier and experimented with some new poetry." He "confined his often brilliant verse-parodies to his letters and with the exception of Margaret Avison
Margaret Avison
Margaret Avison, OC was a Canadian poet who twice won Canada's Governor General's Award and has also won its Griffin Poetry Prize. "Her work has often been praised for the beauty of its language and images."-Life:...
generally disliked the younger poets beginning to publish in the 'fifties.
In 1944 Ross wrote an article in the Canadian Forum, "On Canadian Poetry," as part of the ongoing nationalist/cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
debate, calling for a poetry that is "distinctly located" in a geographic "locale."
Ross contributed poems "sporadically to literary periodicals and anthologies until his death in 1966. Most of what he published after 1930 was solicited by anthologists or magazine editors. Critic Barry Callaghan
Barry Callaghan
Barry Morley Joseph Callaghan is a Canadian author, poet and anthologist. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Exile Quarterly.Born in Toronto, Ontario, he is the son of late Canadian novelist and short story writer, Morley Callaghan...
suggests that Ross wrote 'only when strenuously urged by an anthologist or literature student.'" Urging by poet Raymond Souster
Raymond Souster
Raymond Holmes Souster, OC is a Canadian poet whose writing career spans almost 70 years. He has published more than 50 volumes of his own verse, and edited or co-edited a dozen volumes of others' poetry...
resulted in previously unpublished poetry in the mimeographed collection Experiment 1923-29, published in 1956 by Souster's Contact Press, at which time Ross began to be recognized as Canada's first Imagist poet. However, "Ross felt this collection misrepresented him in its emphasis on his imagist work." Later encouragement by Callaghan led to Ross's composing new poetry included in the posthumously published Shapes and Sounds (1968). Shapes and sounds is a selection of Ross's poems edited by Souster and John Robert Colombo
John Robert Colombo
John Robert Colombo, CM is nationally known as the Master Gatherer. He is among Canada's most prolific authors of serious books...
, with a memoir by Callaghan.
Ross died of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
in 1966.
Writing
"Though never widely read outside academic circles ... Ross had clearly thought out his attitudes toward poetry early on and diverged little from his initial position." "He objected to both difficult and ornate verse and found the conventional romanticismRomantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
of Canada's Confederation poets
Confederation Poets
"Confederation Poets" is the name given to a group of Canadian poets born in the decade of Canada's Confederation who rose to prominence in Canada in the late 1880s and 1890s. The term was coined by Canadian professor and literary critic Malcolm Ross, who applied it to four poets Charles G.D...
particularly unappealing." He "was disapprovingly detached from what was happening in Canadian poetry in general and disliked Pratt
E. J. Pratt
Edwin John Dove Pratt, FRSC , who published as E. J. Pratt, was "the leading Canadian poet of his time." He was a Canadian poet originally from Newfoundland who lived most of his life in Toronto, Ontario...
's 'pretty expert word-juggling and rhyming' in particular.... He felt more enthusiastic about poems by Pickthall
Marjorie Pickthall
Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall , was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven...
, Knister
Raymond Knister
John Raymond Knister was a Canadian poet, novelist, story writer, columnist, and reviewer, "known primarily for his realistic narratives set in rural Canada .....
and Patrick Anderson than Pratt, and Tom MacInnes
Tom MacInnes
Thomas Robert Edward MacInnes was a Canadian poet and writer whose writings ranged from "vigorous, slangy recollections of the Yukon gold rush" to "a translation of and commentary on Lao-tzu’s philosophy"...
'quite hypnotized' him." His chief American influences were E.E. Cummings and Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
.
Ross distrusted the cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
of the Montreal Group
Montreal Group
The Montreal Group was a circle of Canadian modernist writers formed in the mid-1920s at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, which included Leon Edel, John Glassco, A.M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith. Most of the group's members attended McGill as undergraduates. Due to this...
. In "On Canadian Poetry" he "wrote that a poet is inevitably associated with a place and that the cosmopolitan doctrine as espoused by Smith
A. J. M. Smith
Arthur James Marshall Smith was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" -- the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, and F.R...
was not tenable. 'I have a horrid suspicion,' he said, 'that the "Cosmopolis" will turn out to be not "world city" in general but one of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, [or] Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.'"
Laconics
His first book,Laconics, "ratified Ross's claim as an innovative poetic craftsman by establishing an aesthetic bridgehead on the modern world, and the conditions under which poetry could be written in order to be reconciled with the modern world." It "collects the imagist poems Ross is best known for:""The Fish," "The Diver," "The Dawn; the Birds," "The Snake Trying," "Gum," "The Creek," "The Walk": mostly, the poems of "North" that he had written that one night in April 1928.
"In Ross's spare, ... narrow poems, the inquiring spirit of the New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
seeks release from old sentiments, customs, and poetic conventions.... Ross seeks ‘something of the sharper tang of Canada’ in the surface reflections and dark shadows of pine-surrounded lakes, where reality is recognized as profound and mysterious. The modern poet of the New World seeks illumination by objectifying the ordinary sensations of sight and sound. His explorations of the land of lake and loon thereby serve as metaphors for illumination and rejuvenation."
"In an early draft for his 'Introduction' to The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958), Ralph Gustafson explained what these poems meant to him: 'A modern awareness, with its concomitant experimentation with technique, a reduction of Canada, of the quality of Canada, were entering into Canadian verse. W.W.E. Ross' "northern" poems were written almost entirely in one night in April 1928.... They captured precisely, with wonder and freshness, a distinct Canada."
It has been said that the poems of "North" "present the northern Ontario landscape in the stark manner of the Group of Seven
Group of Seven (artists)
The Group of Seven, sometimes known as the Algonquin school, were a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920-1933, originally consisting of Franklin Carmichael , Lawren Harris , A. Y. Jackson , Franz Johnston , Arthur Lismer , J. E. H. MacDonald , and Frederick Varley...
. His strongest work is undoubtedly this early imagist-oriented poetry, work that derives its strengths from his restrained, skeptical personality, from his scientist's preference for objective, factual material, and from his affection for the Canadian wilderness landscape." This is poetry which, as he wrote in 'On National Poetry' (Canadian Forum, 1944), is 'distinctly located' in a geographic 'locale.'
Sonnets
"Exhilarated by the knowledge that he had succeeded" in Laconics — "a knowledge that came to him from inner self-realization rather than popular success" — Ross next "turned his new-found strength, in Sonnets, to the conditions under which poetry had been written in the past. His purpose was ... to reduce tradition to the structures of the method that had tested out in Laconics."The book "reveals a lesser-known side of Ross — the classicist and traditional metricist concerned not only with factual reality but also with spiritual truth." Sonnets was meant to be more overtly philosophical than Laconics — which Ross thought would be better suited by the traditinal form's longer lines — but ultimately he considered the book an experiment that failed:
- The general idea was to employ the 'clean' language of free verse without the lack of rhythm or pattern which offended me in all the latter except some of PoundEzra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
etc. As regards Sonnets I had the notion that longer lines were needed to express ideas adequately and the sonnet form seemed suited to this purpose. I was ditched by my inability to carry over into them — the prestige of the models being so great — the aforesaid 'cleanness.'
Legacy
"Ross's private and somewhat trenchant nature, together with his diffidence toward publishing and the publicly lived literary life, caused him to be little known during his lifetime except to fellow poets." He "was never fully accepted into the company of the 'moderns' — LivesayDorothy Livesay
Dorothy Kathleen May Livesay, was a Canadian poet who twice won the Governor General`s Award in the 1940s, and was "senior woman writer in Canada" during the 1970s and 1980s.-Life:...
, Smith
A. J. M. Smith
Arthur James Marshall Smith was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" -- the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, and F.R...
, Gustafson and so forth — because unlike them he was not interested in propagating the future any more than he was interested in perpetuating the past.... Ross was well-read in Canadian, European and American poetry, yet he cut his own work free from any direction that this reading might have suggested for his verse. His poetry is unique in its timelessness."
"Ross's writing became of special importance in the 1950s and 1960s when new generations of Canadian poets sought their precursors in the modernist goals of restraint, precision, organic rhythm, and the factual image."
Publications
- Laconics (by E.R.) 19301930 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:*Alfred Bailey, Tao: A Ryerson Poetry Chap Book, ....
. - Sonnets (by E.R.) 19321932 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*W. B. Yeats rents a house in Dublin....
. - Experiment, 1923-1929. Toronto: Contact Press, 19561956 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* February 27—Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath meet in Cambridge...
. - Shapes & sounds: poems of W. W. E. Ross (with a portrait by Dennis Burton, a memoir by Barry Callaghan, and an editorial note by Raymond Souster and John Robert Colombo). (Toronto: Longman's 19681968 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Belfast Group, a grouping of poets in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which was started in 1963 in poetry, lapsed in 1966 when founder Philip Hobsbaum left for Glasgow, is reconstituted this year by...
) - Irrealities, Sonnets & Laconics. (Exile Editions, 20032003 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry was opened at Queens University, Belfast, this year. It houses the Heaney Media Archive, a unique record of Heaney's entire oeuvre, as well as a full catalogue of...
) ISBN 9781550965612
Anthologized poems
- "The Diver," "If Ice," "The Snake Trying," The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Ed. Margaret AtwoodMargaret AtwoodMargaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...
. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983. ISBN 0195404505