National Seminar on Contemporary Perspectives on Intersections of Literature, Language and Culture (26-27 Nov., 2026)

Earle Birney's Poetry: A Study

- March 31, 2018

Of all the Canadian poets who appeared during the mid-twentieth century, Earle Birney comes before us as the most central and pivotal literary figure. He was born in Calgary , Alberta , to Will Birney, an itinerant prospector. He was an only child and spent what he called a ‘solitary and Wordsworthian childhood’ on a subsistence farm near Ponoka , Alberta . During his childhood days he read the Holy Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress , and the poems of Robbie Burns. He was educated at the University of British Columbia , the University of Toronto , Berkeley and the University of London , where his primary interests were in Old and Middle English, culminating in a dissertation on Chaucer. Throughout his career he was an experimental poet, publishing over 20 books of verse that vary as widely in form and voice as they do in subject. His poems reveal his constant concern to render his encyclopedic experience – be it of Canada 's geographical ...