Ralph Gustafson - Biography

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. (1st class honours and winner of the Governor General's medal along with many other awards) in 1929 and an M.A. in 1930, with a thesis on John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He also completed a B.A. at Keble College, Oxford in 1933, an M.A. in 1963.

Over the years, Dr. Gustafson held a number of posts. He was music master, Bishop's College School, 1920–30; teacher of English St. Alban's School for Boys, Brockville, Ontario, 1933–34; tutor and journalist, London, England, 1935–38; British Information Services, New York, N.Y., 1942–46; Professor and Poet-In-Residence, Bishop's University, 1963–79 and music critic, C.B.C., since 1960. Dr. Gustafson wrote over twenty volumes of poetry and prose and edited several anthologies of verse. He died in 1995.

His views on poetry are documented in essays collected in Plummets and Other Partialities (1986), and in letters to W.W.E. Ross published as A Literary Friendship in 1984. He also was in contact with John Sutherland.

Gustafson's early poetry owes a significant debt to Gerard Manley Hopkins (as evidenced in The Golden Chalice (1935) and Alfred the Great (1937)), while Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats were important influences on his later work.

In 1942, Gustafson edited the Anthology of Canadian Poetry which developed into the Penguin Book of Canadian Verse in 1958, both volumes a reflection of his extensive studies on the history of Canadian poetry.