Common menu bar links
Lorne Pierce Medal
- 2010 – Sherrill Grace, FRSC
- 2008 – Rosemary Sullivan, FRSC
- 2006 - Paul Wyczynski
- 2004 - William H. New, FRSC
- 2002 - Sandra Djwa, FRSC
- 2000 - Jean-Louis Major, FRSC
- 1998 - David Staines
- 1996 - Clément Moisan, FRSC
- 1993 - Alice Munro
- 1991 - Gilles Marcotte
- 1989 - Maurice Lemire, MSRC
- 1986 - Rudy Wiebe
- 1984 - Sheila Watson
- 1982 - Malcolm M. Ross, FRSC
- 1980 - Antonine Maillet, MSRC
- 1978 - Carl F. Klinck, FRSC
- 1976 - Douglas LePan, FRSC
- 1974 - Rina Lasnier, MSRC
- 1972 - W.C. Desmond Pacey
- 1970 - Roy Daniells, FRSC
- 1968 - Robert Duer Clayton Finch, FRSC
- 1966 - Arthur James Marshall Smith
- 1964 - Ethel Wilson
- 1963 - Léo-Paul Desrosiers, MSRC
- 1962 - Francis Reginald Scott, FRSC
- 1961 - Robertson Davies, FRSC
- 1960 - Morley Callaghan
- 1959 - Philippe Panneton
- 1958 - H. Northrop Frye
- 1957 - Abraham M. Klein
- 1956 - Thomas H. Raddall, FRSC
- 1955 - William Bruce Hutchison, FRSC
- 1954 - Alain Grandbois
- 1953 - Earle Birney, FRSC
- 1952 - Hugh MacLennan, MSRC
- 1951 - Edward Killoran Brown
- 1950 - Marius Barbeau, FRSC
- 1949 - John Murray Gibbon, FRSC
- 1948 - Gabrielle Roy, MSRC
- 1947 - Dorothy Livesay (Mrs. Duncan Macnair)
- 1946 - Charles N. Cochrane, FRSC
- 1945 - Félix-Antoine Savard, MSRC
- 1944 - Audrey Alexandra Brown
- 1943 - George H. Clarke, FRSC
- 1942 - Watson Kirkconnell, FRSC
- 1941 - Léon Gérin, MSRC
- 1940 - E.J. Pratt, FRSC
- 1939 - Wilfrid Bovey, FRSC
- 1938 - Mazo De La Roche
- 1937 - Stephen B. Leacock, FRSC
- 1936 - Pelham Edgar, FRSC
- 1935 - Edouard Montpetit, MSRC
- 1934 - Frederick Philip Grove
- 1932 - Archibald MacMechan, FRSC
- 1930 - Sir Andrew Macphail, FRSC
- 1929 - Camille Roy, FRSC
- 1928 - Bliss Carman (corresponding member)
- 1927 - Duncan C. Scott
- 1926 - Charles G.D. Roberts
Top of Page2010 – Sherrill Grace, FRSC
Sherrill Grace teaches Canadian literature and culture at the University of British Columbia. She has published 23 books and over 200 chapters, articles and review articles. She won the 2008 Canada Council Killam Prize in Humanities and is writing the biography of Canadian writer Timothy Findley.
2008 – Rosemary Sullivan
Scholar, biographer, and poet, Rosemary Sullivan combines a rootedness in Canada and its culture with a cosmopolitan sensibility. She is the founder of the University of Toronto's M.A. creative writing program and has been a mentor to young writers. She has put her energies into promoting Canadian writing in an institutional context. As a scholar, a writer, a teacher, and a mentor, Rosemary Sullivan is an outstanding Canadian writer.
2006 - Paul Wyczynski
Paul Wyczynski est honoré pour son importante étude, en deux volets, sur le poète Émile Nelligan : Émile Nelligan. Biographie (Fides, 1987 ; 2e éd. 1990 ; 3e éd. 1999, coll. « B.Q. ») et Album Nelligan. Les rééditions du volume de même que la récente publication du second volet, Album Nelligan, attestent que le critique Jean Basile avait vu juste : Wyczynski a établi les fondements des études nelliganiennes. Cet ouvrage en deux volumes, croyons-nous, est digne de reconnaissance.
2004 - William H. New, FRSC
William H. New, FRSC, is University Killam Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, The University of British Columbia. Author of 14 books, more than 85 articles and editor of 30 volumes - in addition to having been the editor of the journal Canadian Literature from 1977 to 1995 and editor of the recently published Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) - Dr. New is without question the premier scholar/critic/historian of Canadian Literature today. His contribution to Canadian letters is unparalleled, from guiding graduate and undergraduate students for more than thirty years at The University of British Columbia to being an articulate international spokesperson for Canadian culture around the world. Not only through his editing and publishing such original critical studies as Articulating West (1972), A History of Canadian Literature (1989; 2nd ed. 2003) and Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada (1998) but through his conscientious and outstanding work as a journal editor, poet (six volumes to date) and lecturer, Professor New has been an outstanding voice for Canadian thought and writing - while shaping the current study and understanding of Canadian literature both nationally and internationally. Receiving the 2000 "Award of Merit" from the Association of Canadian Studies for career accomplishments attests to the importance of his contribution, which the Gabrielle Roy Prize in 1989 earlier marked. It is now appropriate and timely for Professor New to receive the Lorne Pierce Medal for his unprecedented achievement in critical and imaginative literature.
2002 - Sandra Djwa, FRSC
In nominating Sandra Djwa, FRSC, Professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University, for this prestigious prize, we are recognizing her biography of Roy Daniells, Professing English (UTP 2001) as a high point in her extremely distinguished career as a Canadian biographer, cultural critic, and literary historian. The Daniells biography has been described as having "the vividness and fascination and compulsion of a work of fiction," but it is important for several other reasons. It is an exhaustively researched study of a man whose life informed the cultural, literary, and institutional life of Canada during the mid-twentieth century as the country emerged into full intellectual self-awareness and maturity. Professing English, therefore, contributes to the biography of a nation as well as exploring the life and times of a complex, ambitious, creative man. Very few Humanists in Canada could hope to do this kind of foundational work, and Sandra Djwa is one of the pioneers of biography in Canada. With her work on E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, and now Roy Daniells she has traced the lineaments of her country.
2000 - Jean-Louis Major, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1998 - David Staines
David Staines, Department of English, University of Ottawa, has contributed vigorously and creatively in three fields of English Studies, and in all three has emphasized the relation between literature and its social context. In Medieval Studies he has traced the evolution of romance traditions, and against this background has produced a major retranslation of the classic tales of Chrétien de Troyes which constitutes the new standard in the field. His analysis of Victorian writers' indebtedness to medieval sources extends critical understanding of the function of literary form. In Canadian Studies, he has convincingly demonstrated how the complex relations between shared cultural sensibilities and literary expression help shape the course of literary history and help mediate the divide between absolutes of judgement and determinations of value.
1996 - Clément Moisan, FRSC
Clément Moisan, Professor and former Director of the Department of Literature at Université Laval, is a world-renowned specialist on literary history [Qu'est-ce que l'histoire littéraire? (what is literary history?), P.U.L. 1987; L'histoire littéraire, collection "Que sais-je?", 1990), in comparative literature - Canadian and Québec (three works on this subject), and in literary didactics (collaborated on four research projects, the results of which have been published in three volumes). He is presently collaborating in the editing of a new history, La vie littéraire au Québec (literary life in Quebec), of which three volumes have already appeared. He has also published 9 books, the latest, Le phénomène de la littérature (the phenomenon of literature), appeared this year (1996); he has collaborated on 20 collective works and has edited more than 30 articles for scientific reviews. His work in the fields of literary history and comparative literature is of an exceptional merit.
1993 - Alice Munro
As one of Canada’s leading fiction writers in English, Ms. Munro has been recognized in Canada by two Governor General Awards and internationally through the Australia-Canada Prize, the Booker Prize nomination, and other honours. Her sensitivity to women’s roles in society, her care with her craft, and her subtle evocations of behaviour, relationships, and historical change all give evidence of a high order of talent.
1991 - Gilles Marcotte
Citation available in French only.
1989 - Maurice Lemire, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1986 - Rudy Wiebe
Rudy Wiebe is the author of five novels, a novella, a play and three collections of short stories, which exist not merely as individual works but as a substantial and coherent œuvre. He is also a distinguished teacher of Canadian literature and creative writing well-known for encouraging young Canadian talent. The main subjects of his fiction are the Canadian Mennonites, the Indians, and the Métis, all minority groups living close to the land. He writes about them all with historical responsibility and imaginative passion. Above all, his concern for the dignity of the novelist’s art has brought a new seriousness of purpose to Canadian literature as a whole, and he has done much to foster awareness of the debt we owe to our native peoples and early settlers.
1984 - Sheila Watson
Sheila Watson is best known as the author of The Double Hook, a strongly original and deeply moving masterpiece, one of the most impressive novels in Canadian literature. It has become a standard text on many courses, and has prompted a growing body of criticism. As a critic, a dedicated academic, and an inspiring teacher, she has contributed largely and always generously to the growth of ideas among her students and colleagues at the University of Alberta. As editor of the journal White Pelican, and as a member of Canada Council's evaluative committees, she has creatively served both the academic and artistic communities of Canada.
1982 - Malcolm M. Ross, FRSC
Malcolm Ross occupies a unique position among Canadian academics as editor, broadcaster, promoter of the study of Canadian literature, and not least as author of original and trenchant studies of other Canadian writers. Former editor of Queen's Quarterly, originator and general editor for many years of the New Canadian Library series, he is also known throughout the English-speaking world as the author of two brilliant and authoritative studies in Elizabethan and seventeenth-century literature, namely Milton's Royalism and Poetry and Dogma. In all his writing he has exhibited a consummate ability to penetrate to the heart of his subject, and to present his findings in a style that is both exact and vivid, often epigrammatic, always eloquent, and, it is hardly too much to say, that is often possessed of rare beauty. Throughout a long career he has known intimately and written about many fellow-Canadian poets, novelists, and critics. An Officer of the Order of Canada, former president of the Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada, he is rightly held in the highest esteem as an outstanding Canadian scholar and man of letters.
1980 - Antonine Maillet, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1978 - Carl F. Klinck, FRSC
Carl. F. Klinck is a native of Ontario, where he also received a large part of his education and has pursued most of his professional career. Few Canadians, however, have been less provincial, more concerned with, committed to, and aware of Canada as a whole. His chosen task has been to make his vision of Canada, through the gateway of Canadian literary history, visible to Canadians everywhere.
The arts of communication he has perfected through many years of mediating the values of literature - English, Canadian and American - to successive generations of students. His career has been one of faithful service to the cause of the humanities: service in many societies concerned with the ideals of humanism; the initiation and direction of a long list of graduate theses, researches into diverse fields of enquiry, which have won acclaim and support; articles and reviews in a growing momentum over the decades. This cumulation, when reviewed, is, even to those who know him best, astonishing. In addition to producing several notable books on his own account, he has undertaken the necessary and often neglected task of scrupulously editing at least a dozen more.
His crowning achievement has been to conceive and create the Literary History of Canada, dealing with English Canadian writing. Its first edition appeared in 1965, the greatly expanded and updated edition in 1976. It is, by common consent, the primary source of critical and historical information concerning Canadian writing in English.
He has been recognized and honoured, notably by the Order of Canada, of which he became an Officer in 1973.
No one who knows Carl Klinck would for a moment suppose, however, that a recital of this kind gets to the heart of the matter. The intimate gift he has given us must be otherwise described. He is honoured because he has been a pioneer, because he committed himself to expounding the literary values of a Canadian culture at a time when this was not fashionable, when few, even among prominent academics, seemed to think it worthwhile. His commitment was in a reciprocal relation with his perfect self-possession, his confidence from the beginning that the existing and expanding literary heritage of Canada was worth our profound attention. He was able, from the first, to encourage, advise, and direct others, especially those associated with the Literary History. It has been said that he was 'everyone's teacher,' that 'Not one of us but to Carl owes some gift that has enriched his prose.' To all this he has added a pervasive quality of self-effacement, never posing as an apostle, never claiming authority or putting forward demands. Yet he has conjured up in the minds of colleagues and associates the concept of excellence as necessary even in the most routine task of writing. Above all, he has evoked universal trust and very warm affection, those responses that are the final rewards of academic fellowship.
1976 - Douglas LePan, FRSC
Professor Douglas LePan is the only person ever to have won the Governor General's Award for both poetry and fiction. He is one of the most authentic and individual voices in Canadian writing. His output is of a quality seldom attained in this country or in our time. Professor LePan has written, as well, some penetrating essays on aspects of Canadian literature and has achieved a great academic reputation for his teaching, particularly in Renaissance studies and modern poetry. A great deal of his energy over the years has been given to executive and administrative work. He rose to senior rank in the Department of External Affairs before returning to an academic career in 1959. Since that time he has been professor of English at Queen's University, principal of University College and since 1970 University Professor at the University of Toronto. His poetry is praised and respected throughout the world of English. As a poet, Douglas LePan is thoroughly contemporary in his sensibility yet classically sure in his means of expression. Surely he is one of the half-dozen Canadians now writing whose work will endure.
1974 - Rina Lasnier, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1972 - W.C. Desmond Pacey
Desmond Pacey's services to Canadian literature are distinctive by their number, their variety, and their effectiveness. His Creative Writing in Canada (1952) was a pioneer work whose judicious and comprehensive view of English Canadian literature made it a standard reference. His study of Frederick Philip Grove served to locate and define Grove's important contribution to the pattern of Canadian fiction. He served as an associate editor and a distinguished contributor to the Literary History of Canada (1965). His unfailing concern for a proper elucidation and evaluation of Canadian writing has been evinced by many biographical and critical essays and introductions. Creation has complemented criticism, two collections of verse for children appearing in 1952 and a volume of short stories in 1958. The thread of endeavour binding these diverse accomplishments has been an unswerving faith - sustained through decades of social stress and uncertainty about the arts - in the vital role played by creative and critical minds in forming a distinctive Canadian culture. It is not the least of Desmond Pacey's claim to this present recognition that he knew and admired the man whose name the medal bears and has perpetuated the hope, the judicious enthusiasm, and the active energy so apparent in the life of Lorne Pierce.
1970 - Roy Daniells, FRSC
Roy Daniells is uniquely qualified for the Lorne Pierce Medal, since he alone has made a significant contribution to the development of Canadian literature as poet, critic, literary historian, administrator, and, last but by no means least, inspired and inspiring teacher. As a poet he is witty, allusive, impassioned, and technically deft. As a critic he is precise, perceptive, and eminently fair. As a literary historian he combines a detailed knowledge of and sympathy with English literature of the seventeenth century with an equally detailed and sympathetic acquaintance with Canadian writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As an academic administrator he has fostered the development of Canadian studies in his own universities of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Toronto as well as throughout the country, and indeed beyond its borders, by his memberships on councils and committees, his frequent and always memorable addresses at conferences and seminars, and his personal example of creative scholarship and disciplined but flexible humanism. As a teacher he has inspired his students for a period of nearly forty years by his own dedication and by the brilliance and clarity of his lectures, each one of which is truly a work of art.
It is my privilege to present, as a reward richly earned by a lifetime of high achievement, the Lorne Pierce Medal to Dr. Roy Daniells.
1968 - Robert Duer Clayton Finch, FRSC
I have the honour to present to you for the Lorne Pierce Medal in literature Professor Robert Duer Clayton Finch, of Massey College, University of Toronto. Though born at Freeport, Long Island, near New York City, Mr. Finch has spent nearly all his life in Canada. He graduated with honours in French literature at the University of Toronto in 1925, winning the Quebec Bonne Entente Prize and a Bourse d'Etudes from the Government of France. He then proceeded to graduate studies at the University of Paris. For the past forty years he has been a distinguished member of the Department of French at University College, Toronto. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1963.
His critical drive and erudition are best revealed in his volume The Sixth Sense: Individualism in French Poetry 1686-1760, published in 1966, in which he gives a closely documented analysis of the interplay of rationalism and sensibility in the work of individual authors from Le Génie of Charles Perrault to Le Génie of P. D. E. Lebrun. From this survey, he is inclined to reject clear-cut stereotyped distinctions between periods.
He has been equally distinguished as an original poet. Two of his six volumes of verse (Poems and Acis in Oxford) have won Governor-General's awards. Other volumes have been The Strength of the Hills, A Century Has Roots, Dover Beach Revisited and Other Poems, and Silverthorn Bush.
He is particularly aware of the past. Thus he has a vanished grove of trees in Southern Ontario voice its valedictory: "I am a dispossessed Ontario wood / That took the circling weather as my crown." And he finds its immortality in the world of literature: "Is there a poem where I blossom still?"
Professor Finch has also skilfully evoked the past in the difficult genre of verse for special occasions. Thus there is a fine mixture of urbanity, humour, and epigrammatic point in "The Corner-stone of University College speaks on October 19, 1956, at the Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of its Laying, October 4, 1856." Even one triplet from the long poem will hint at its quality: "In silence and in secrecy, all three, / A singular triangularity, / Not without apprehension, full of hope, laid me."
Mr. President, I submit to you the critical and imaginative gifts of Robert Finch as notable grounds for the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1966 - Arthur James Marshall Smith
I present to you Arthur James Marshall Smith, a man eminent not only as poet, scholar, and anthologist, but also as the principal founder of that revival of Canadian poetry which began in Montreal in the 1920's and has developed since in an ever broadening stream. Born in Westmount, Montreal, he took his B.Sc. and M.A. degrees at McGill, and his doctorate under Grierson at Edinburgh. While an undergraduate he began his literary career by editing a literary supplement to the McGill Daily, and then by founding the McGill Fortnightly Review, to which he contributed 44 poems and several critical articles. He was one of the editors of New Provinces in 1936, a collection which first introduced the new Canadian verse to a wider public, and revealed his discriminating taste as anthologist. Since then we have enjoyed three volumes of his own verse: News of the Phoenix, A Sort of Ecstasy, and Collected Poems; two major anthologies of Canadian Poetry in The Book of Canadian Poetry and The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse; a rare and delightful anthology of Serious Light Verse in The Worldly Muse; a collection of Canadian satirical verse which he co-edited in 1957 called The Blasted Pine; a collection of Canadian Prose; a general anthology, called Seven Centuries of English Verse; and a number of significant critical essays and articles.
It has been justly said of Arthur Smith that he made Canadian Literature academically respectable and gave it a true sense of its own identity. But we remember that he was first an innovator who broke with an earlier poetic tradition and introduced to a very surprised public what was then called "modern poetry." When he received the Governor General's medal for News of the Phoenix in 1943, a reviewer commented that an equivalent recognition would have been to have made Tim Buck Prime Minister of Canada. He has already received honorary degrees from McGill and Queen's, and I am proud to present him to you as recipient of this Society's highest literary award, the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1964 - Ethel Wilson
Ethel Davis Wilson is a distinguished writer who has made readers happily aware that British Columbia is home for her and for most of the characters who move through her fiction. The province, she says, chose her when she was a little girl of eight who had travelled far from South Africa, where she was born, and from England, where she had spent her early childhood. She went back to England for four years to attend boarding school, and then she returned to the Coast to be a teacher. She is married to Dr. Wallace Wilson, a Vancouver physician. Home, travel, familiar scenes, and, of course, people are her principal interests.
In 1937 Mrs. Wilson began her career as a writer of fiction by publishing a story in the New Statesman and Nation. Her first book was Hetty Dorval in 1947. Since that time she has published The Innocent Traveller, The Equations of Love, Swamp Angel, Love and Salt Water, and, recently Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories.
Mrs. Wilson professes modest diffidence before the academic critics, whom she calls "the falcons," but she has won them over by her skill and by her authoritative statements about the craft of fiction. There are memorable words in several articles which she published in Canadian Literature, the British Columbia journal. We must not look "to an earnest mediocrity amongst us," she declares, but to a personal incandescence," "an incandescence which takes place in a prepared mind where forces meet.
"Mrs. Wilson is a "born watcher," a novelist with unusual ability to observe, to understand, and to record for "the outward eye and the inward eye." Readers have found her special qualities to be enchantment, sensitivity, humour, warmth, and "forthright feminine feeling." The introduction to a little girl, Topaz, a character in The Innocent Traveller, is a favourite example. Topaz, "who could not be squelched," is "perched there on top of two cushions, as innocent as a poached egg."
Some readers, impressed chiefly by the delightful surface of her stories, have thought of Mrs. Wilson herself as "the innocent traveller." But those who recognize also her strong sense of place, time, and circumstance agree with Professor Watters when he pays tribute to her as "the experienced traveller." Avoiding the shallows of sentimentality, Mrs. Wilson offers not only vivacity, wit, and the play of social manners, but also an intelligent awareness of the deep entanglements in human relationships. She has the wisdom, the personality, and the art of a mature story-teller.
Because of her outstanding gifts, skill, and achievement, Ethel Wilson has been chosen for the award of the Lorne Pierce Medal. Mr. President, I present Mrs. Ethel Wilson.
1963 - Léo-Paul Desrosiers, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1962 - Francis Reginald Scott, FRSC
A stranger coming to Canada might suppose there were half a dozen leading citizens of the same name, for Frank Scott has not only been active in many fields, but has left in each of them evidences of a constructive mind, a liberal spirit, and a creative imagination. Born in Quebec City, of a family which has contributed strikingly to our cultural life, Frank Scott is a true specimen of that rare bird, the representative Canadian.
His academic career took him through Bishop's College, then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar, then back to McGill, where legal studies succeeded literary ones. After a year of practice, he joined the McGill Faculty of Law, of which Faculty he is now Dean. Dalhousie and Manitoba have honoured him with the LL.D.
Awards and distinctions have come to Frank Scott in never ending succession. He was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940. In 1952 he accepted the post of Resident Representative of the United Nations in Burma. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1947. Two years ago he was the recipient of a Canada Council Special Senior Award.
Conspicuous among Frank Scott's activities and involvements is a profound concern with politics and public service. He was one of the founders of the League for Social Reconstruction in 1932. He was co-author of Social Planning for Canada (1935) and Social Purpose for Canada (1962). He served as National Chairman of the C.C.F. Party from 1942 to 1950. He has written widely on Canadian constitutional questions and was Constitutional Adviser to the Government of Saskatchewan at the conferences between federal and provincial governments in 1950 and 1960.
Somewhat distinct from all this, and flourishing in its own right, is his literary life as a poet and critic of the arts. He was co-founder and co-editor of the McGill Fortnightly Review (1925-27) and of the Canadian Mercury (1928-29). He has served on the editorial staffs of Preview, Northern Review, Tamarack Review, and the Canadian Forum. He joined A. J. M. Smith to bring out two anthologies of Canadian poetry: New Provinces (1936) and The Blasted Pine (1957). In 1955 he organized and chaired the memorable Canadian Writers' Conference at Kingston. His own volumes of poetry - Overture (1945), Events and Signals (1954), The Eye of a Needle (1956) - are highly esteemed and, what is better, are read with delight.
The greatest tribute to the man whose record contains all these events and signals, who has done so much for us, so well and in so many ways, is the fact that this recital is quite unnecessary, either to introduce him to this assembly or to justify his receipt today of one of the most distinguished awards that a Canadian writer may hope to obtain. It would have been quite sufficient to say: Here is Frank Scott, whom all of us hold in affectionate esteem, and today he is to receive the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1961 - Robertson Davies, FRSC
I have the honour to present to you for the Lorne Pierce Medal, Robertson Davies, Visiting Professor of English Literature at Trinity College in the University of Toronto.
In the twenty years since his return to his native Canada, Mr. Davies has become one of Canada's most versatile literary figures, achieving unquestioned distinction in each of his many literary roles: editor, essayist, novelist, playwright, and critic.
Since 1942, he has been editor of the Peterborough Examiner, which, under his guidance, has consistently maintained a standard of excellence which is an example for other Canadian journalists. It was in the columns of this newspaper that Mr. Davies first appeared in his role as essayist. His "Samuel Marchbanks" series, begun here, was to develop into two books, published in 1947 and 1949. These informal essays exposed a great many Canadian and North American follies and cultural shortcomings to the clear light of the author's intelligent, witty, and sometimes irreverent analysis.
In the fifties, Mr. Davies turned to the novels Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958) strike a note not often heard in Canadian fiction - the note of social satire. These seriocomic stories of a small Ontario city are amusing, sometimes even riotous; the author's ironic, witty, urbane, intellectual approach finds its fullest expression, perhaps, in the novel form. But the trilogy has at its core a serious and meaningful theme - that of the Canadian imaginative spirit and its struggle against its environment. The author's deep-felt love for the Canadian scene and his passionate desire for cultural and imaginative amelioration are evident through even the most biting satire.
It was as a critic that Mr. Davies returned to Canada in 1940, as Literary Editor of Saturday Night. Since then he has practised the art with amazing regularity and energy, considering his many other activities. His literary criticisms, book reviews, and commentaries on the allied arts have appeared in his newspaper; in many of the major Canadian periodicals; more recently, in a syndicated weekly newspaper column "A Writer's Diary", with national distribution; and most recently, with the publication in the United States and Canada (1960) and in England (1961) of A Voice from the Attic, in book form. The appearance of this book has gained for Mr. Davies an international reputation as an informed but unpedantic scholar, and as a sophisticated and intellectual observer who comments with wit and perception but without affectation, on the world of letters and the arts.
In the realm of the theatre, Robertson Davies' achievements have been equally remarkable. Following his professional activity in England as an actor, writer, and teacher, he has given freely of his talents at home. His advice and enthusiasm and participation have been real factors in the recent growth and expansion of both amateur and professional theatre in Canada. A Governor of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, he has written three books (in collaboration with Tyrone Guthrie) about Stratford's activities. He has also published a study of Shakespeare's theatre, and a guide for young actors. Most important, as a playwright he has published six plays, which have been produced, with real success, at home and abroad. His most recent play, Love and Libel, was produced on Broadway last fall, following a tour in Canada and the United States. It will be produced again in England this fall by the Theatre Guild.
In each one of his roles - as editor, essayist, novelist, playwright, critic – Robertson Davies' contribution to Canadian letters has been noteworthy. His combined successes in all five make his achievement almost unique. His recent acceptance of a new role - that of Master-Designate of Massey College at the University of Toronto - will undoubtedly prove fruitful both for him and for his fellow Canadians.
1960 - Morley Callaghan
With the appearance of Morley Callaghan's first novel Strange Fugitive in 1928, Canadian fiction could no longer be regarded as a pale extension of the English tradition. For with this book - and the short stories and novels that followed in the thirties - Callaghan broke open for us the egg-shell of our cultural colonialism. He went to Paris (instead of London), consorted with the international literary set and came home by way of New York.
However, he did come home, and his fiction, for all its sophistication of vision and technique, is instinct with place–our place–and with time–our time.
The author of eight novels, two plays, and several volumes of short stories, Mr. Callaghan is also widely known in Canada for his journalism and for his radio and television work. His novel The Loved and the Lost won the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1951. A selection of his best short stories was published in 1959, a new novel will appear this autumn, and still another novel nears completion.
Morley Callaghan is one of the very few Canadian writers to have earned a solid and sure international reputation and his work has been translated into several languages.
Never pretentious, indeed deceptively simple in structure and tone, Mr. Callaghan's fiction is informed by a deep sense of pathos and the dignity of the human condition, and controlled by a vision of life which might be called one of "compassionate irony." Here, surely, is an individual voice. Here, already, is a body of work which will endure.
1959 - Philippe Panneton
His Excellency Philippe Panneton, Her Majesty's Canadian Ambassador to Portugal, is unable to be present this evening, but I am authorized by the Council to read his citation and to ask you to present the Lorne Pierce Medal to his representative, M. Lebel.
In truth, however, it is not His Excellency, nor even Doctor Panneton, whom I honour in this citation; it is his third self, Ringuet. In Trente arpents (1938) Ringuet painted an enduring picture of the tranquil farm life of the old parishes of Quebec; a life so satisfying to the weatherbeaten habitants of the older generation and so exasperating to the restless young men of the new generation. Of it my colleague David Hayne writes: "It marked both the culmination of a quarter century of regionalistic fiction and the opening of a new era of realism in the French Canadian novel. His book thus reaches back to Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine, and points forward to the urban realism of Gabrielle Roy and Roger Lemelin." In his Le Poids du Jour (1949) Ringuet presented an even broader panorama of French-Canadian society, tracing the emergence of a new industrial middle class in the career of the tycoon Robert Garneau.
His ability as a writer of short stories is demonstrated in L'Héritage et autres contes (1946). His earliest venture in literature was as a parodist: « Littératures... à la manière de ... » (1924). Alternating between fiction and history he published Un Monde était leur empire in 1943, and L'Amiral et le facteur in 1954.
It is, however, Ringuet the novelist whom we honour by the award of this medal. It has been for me a great pleasure to prepare for this presentation; the pleasure was in the reading of Ringuet rather than in the writing of this inadequate citation. Mr. President, I ask you to present the Lorne Pierce Medal to M. Lebel representing Ringuet, alias His Excellency Philippe Panneton.
1958 - H. Northrop Frye
I have the honour to present to you for the Lorne Pierce Medal Professor Northrop Frye, Chairman of the Department of English in Victoria College in the University of Toronto.
Among Canadian literary scholars Professor Frye has won a unique place for himself during the last ten or a dozen years through his work in literary criticism. While he has occupied himself a good deal in the field of Canadian literature - including the publication of a volume on his old teacher, Pelham Edgar, and work done as chairman of the editorial board of the Canadian Forum – it is not for work of this specifically Canadian nature that he is chiefly famous. He is known throughout the English-speaking world as a literary critic dealing with themes which are of universal interest; uncovering, analysing, and criticising, with a sensitive subtlety, the symbols and myths in literary writing which so fascinate the twentieth-century mind.
His first main work - Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, published in 1947, gave him an international reputation. One proof of this in late years has been the frequency with which Harvard and other great American universities have made use of his services as a visiting professor. If he persists in remaining a Canadian, his persistence is certainly not due to the fact that his Canadian virtue has not been exposed to American temptation.
As all who have heard him or read him can testify, his wide popularity as a lecturer and teacher has not been due to any concessions he ever makes to the intellectual weakness or laziness of his audiences. A fine example of the high standards which he always maintains was the Convocation address which he gave last year when receiving an honorary degree from Carleton University, a beautifully written essay on "Culture and the National Will,” now beautifully printed by Carleton University. "In his hands," as one of his fellow literary critics declared when presenting him for the Carleton degree, "literary criticism is a tough and subtle discipline of the mind, a creative synthesis by which light is shed on both the work of art and on human nature and destiny."
Last year, 1957, his second great work - Anatomy of Criticism - appeared. This aims at providing a conceptual framework for literary discussion in the realm of pure criticism. It is an attempt to establish "a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organized." The author's immense learning, his thoroughness and his delight in classifications result, as one commentator has put it, in "a virtuosity of analysis and cross-reference that must leave most readers breathless." A mere historian can only report that he has been dazzled by the brilliant and witty insights which the author scatters through his pages, and made humble by the discovery of how much human experience is beyond the range of his own comprehension. When he reads reviews of the Frye work by literary specialists he is impressed by the obvious deference and sense of awe with which they approach the author. And he suspects that it will be some time before the full contents of this volume have been digested properly by Professor Frye's literary colleagues. With this feeling of breathlessness and awe I present Northrop Frye for the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1957 - Abraham M. Klein
I have the honour to present to you, as recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal, Abraham M. Klein, poet and novelist.
Born in Montreal in 1909, he graduated from McGill University in 1930, and after studying law at the University of Montreal was called to the bar of Quebec in 1933.
The law may bring A. M. Klein his living, but it is four little books of poetry that have brought him to the notice of the nation, and to this platform this evening.
To describe his gifts in a few words is not easy, owing in part to his versatility. In one poem he writes with deceptively simple directness; in another he employs splendidly ornate mannerisms; and in both he is equally competent and equally at home. His themes are as versatile as his language. Proud of a great heritage, and imaginatively stirred by it, he reflects very vividly in his work the richness of that heritage, and the power of historic patterns of faith and ritual. And yet he is at the same time profoundly Canadian, greatly attached to his French-speaking fellow citizens; a thoughtful, witty, warmly generous observer of the human scene in his native city.
We feel confident that he is contributing a permanent page to the literature of this country.
Mr. President, I am proud to present A. M. Klein to receive the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1956 - Thomas H. Raddall, FRSC
I present to you Thomas Head Raddall for the award of the Lorne Pierce Medal in recognition of his distinction as a novelist, as a writer of stories, and as a historian. The late Professor Archibald McMechan, of treasured memory, maintained that the most remarkable thing about Nova Scotia was its Nova Scotia-ness. Its peninsular character is much more than a matter of geography; united to Canada, Nova Scotia continues to remain apart but not aloof in its habitation by the sea. A land whose frontier is the illimitable Atlantic Ocean cannot be adequately described as another Canadian province. Rather, the people of Nova Scotia have turned provinciality itself into the distinctiveness of a unique race that gives them a quality of their very own. This is the spell that has laid its enchantment on Mr. Raddall, giving wings to his imagination and inspiration to his hand. Sometimes an adopted child enters more deeply than native sons into the love and lore of an ancestral home, and in our author, Nova Scotia has gained just such a devotee - albeit, the latest of a long line of adventurers cast away on these ultimate shores to find it much more than a place in which to dwell. To the genius loci of Nova Scotia he has been a willing slave: his is the pen of the readiest of writers. Story after story, tale after tale have flowed from his fertile imagination drawing from that most ancient of sources - the sea and the adventures of men who do business in its great waters. With the fresh vigour of new inspiration he has exercised himself in the oldest of the arts, delighting the mind by the revival of heroic history, writing of things elemental and courageous to fire the heart in another and very different day.
It would be as tedious as it is unnecessary to begin here any recital of his works. Already his name and fame are fully established in the world of contemporary writing not only here in Canada, but in many lands. He has built and launched a vast and varied armada of literary craft to carry his merchandise into far harbours. Novels, short stories, literary articles, historical memoirs have appeared in sustained succession from his pen. We honour him as an authentic Canadian writer, adding this accolade of the Lorne Pierce Medal to honours and recognitions that have already acclaimed his capacity and his power.
1955 - William Bruce Hutchison, FRSC
I have the honour to present to you Mr. William Bruce Hutchison for the Lorne Pierce Medal. Mr. Hutchison was born at Prescott in 1901. In the course of his newspaper work he became a political reporter at Ottawa in 1925. Between 1944 and 1950 he was associate editor of the Winnipeg Free Press. Since 1950 he has been editor of the Victoria Daily Times. Mr. Hutchison's interests, however, extend far beyond the daily round of his profession.
He is the author of The Unknown Country: Canada and her People (1942) which was written in the belief that "Canada is, among the important nations of the world, the least known in its real content." The book, widely read, received the Governor-General's award as the outstanding non-fiction book of the year. In 1944 he ventured into the field of fiction with a volume entitled The Hollow Men. In 1950 his story of the Fraser River was issued as the forty-second volume in the American series on the Rivers of America. In 1952 came The Incredible Canadian: A Candid Portrait of Mackenzie King, his Works, his Times and his Nation. Recently his fascinating study of "The Struggle for the Border" has appeared in Maclean's and no doubt will be available in due course in book form.
Mr. Hutchison does not come from an unknown country nor is he an incredible Canadian, but is known to us as one of our most distinguished journalists, deeply interested in Canada, with an intimate knowledge of Canadian political affairs. Mr. President, Mr. Hutchison merits the high honour of receiving from the Royal Society of Canada the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1954 - Alain Grandbois
Citation available in French only.
1953 - Earle Birney, FRSC
The Lorne Pierce Medal has traditionally been awarded to a Canadian author whose critical or creative writing notably succeeds in interpreting Canadian life to the Canadian people. It has not necessarily been given for any one book or for the publications of any one year but has rather signalized the cumulative merit of a writer who has given to his fellows some measure of that rich self-consciousness and self-understanding which belong to a cultural heritage. This year the Society has chosen Alfred Earle Birney to be the recipient of the award. That Dr. Birney is unable to be present today is by no means inauspicious for he is during these months enjoying in the south of France an unaccustomed freedom to devote all his energies to creative writing, having received a Canadian Government fellowship to that end.
In the last decade Earle Birney has contributed much both to imaginative creation and to critical evaluation, in Canada. Through his editing of Canadian Poetry, through various forms of literary expression - poetry, the novel, radio drama - he has striven to enlarge our apprehension of the Canadian psyche and has enriched and strengthened Canadian currents of thought. And he has consistently, by example and by precept, by formal teaching and friendly encouragement, impelled others to make use of their talents to the same purpose. In such volumes of poetry as David and The Strait of Anian he has shown a great sensitivity in his interpretations of nature and man's place in nature and he has touched acutely upon the problems that arise out of the crises of depression and war. By the use of symbol and image, by a felicity of language and rhythm, he has impressed the quality of his vision upon the minds of his many readers. The choice of his subjects has ranged from the large public event to the significant private experience; his tone has run the gamut from biting satire to pure lyricism; his techniques have included metaphysical imagery and Anglo-Saxon versification.
In Turvey - certainly one of the most successful Canadian post-war studies in fictional form--Birney has portrayed with vast humour and in great good humour the experiences of the well-intentioned little man caught in the complications of army organization and government administration. In Turvey we find the Canadian Schweik; and we find ourselves.
In his striking and original radio drama, Trial of a City, Birney has portrayed with rich philosophical innuendo and with fine poetic feeling the pangs of a young, growing and vigorous city, caught in the shifting web of rapid change and afflicted by the grasping desires of those who seek to make its power and beauty subserve their own ends. In all of his writing--in prose and in poetry alike - he has shown a constant willingness to experiment and to grow; yet he has at the same time imposed upon himself a rigorous and effective discipline, which has given to the best of his work the brilliance and durability of a classic expression.
I have much pleasure, Mr. President, in presenting Dr. Birney for the award of the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1952 - Hugh MacLennan, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1951 - Edward Killoran Brown
It becomes my sad duty to ask you to confer the Lorne Pierce Medal posthumously upon Edward Killoran Brown.
Born in Toronto in 1905, Professor Brown was educated at the University of Toronto Schools and University College. At the latter he came under the guidance of one of Canada's greatest teachers and critics, the late Professor W. J. Alexander, and in the tradition of Alexander he was proud to stand. On graduating he proceeded, with a Massey fellowship, to the Sorbonne, where he later took the state doctorate with theses on Edith Wharton and Matthew Arnold. This, too, was a shaping experience, giving him equal command of a second language and literature, and perfecting him in methods of research and exposition. In 1929 he was appointed to the staff of University College, where his unique gifts as a teacher immediately commenced to bear fruit. There (save for two years as Head of English at Manitoba) he remained until 1941, adding to his academic duties the joint editorship of the University of Toronto Quarterly. These likewise were formative years, in which he was preparing himself for the last most productive decade of his life. Abating nothing of his effort in his chosen fields of the novel and Victorian literature, he commenced to give attention to Canadian writing, and especially to contemporary Canadian verse, which he assessed in a remarkable series of fifteen annual surveys in "Letters in Canada" (1935-49).
The last ten years he spent outside the Dominion, first as Chairman of the Department of English at Cornell, then as a Professor in the University of Chicago. But Canada never ceased to occupy a central place in his interest and affection. His roots were here and we may best think of his absence as that of an ambassador. During the war he returned to serve in the office of the Prime Minister, and again, a year before his death, he returned to give the Alexander Lectures in memory of his former teacher. This decade saw the production of On Canadian Poetry, his second book on Matthew Arnold, Rhythm in the Novel (his Alexander lectures), and a large number of important articles and reviews. His last months were spent for the most part in Toronto, working steadily and cheerfully on his life of Willa Cather, with a quiet heroism which should not go unrecorded.
Such, in brief, was the career of a Canadian who won for himself a secure place in the international world of literary scholarship, with his books on Edith Wharton and Matthew Arnold, his admirable introductions to Arnold's prose and to Victorian verse, and his various articles and reviews, to which we must add his most mature critical work, Rhythm in the Novel, published just before his death, and the almost completed official life of Willa Cather, shortly to be published by Knopf. It is proper that these works should take precedence in setting forth his claim to the Lorne Pierce Medal: first, because it was his own principle that Canadian writing must submit to an international, and not to a merely local, judgment, and that it must rise to an international standard of interest and of excellence; and, secondly, because it was in these wider fields of study that he secured the training, the insight, and the perspective which gave his writing on Canadian literature its peculiar value and authority. That writing is perhaps the most impressive achievement of its kind yet to appear. Besides his edition of Lampman, it includes his memoir of Duncan Campbell Scott (whom he knew and admired, and who may perhaps be reckoned the last of the moulding influences upon his mind); secondly, his book On Canadian Poetry, with its definitive chapter on the conditions of authorship in Canada, its account of the development of Canadian poetry (the most illuminating yet written), and its critical estimate of three major figures; and, finally, the fifteen annual surveys which furnish by far the best account available of poetry in Canada during the past decade and a half. Such scholarship and criticism are of incalculable value to Canadian letters, in themselves, and as an example.
Mr. President, this is the achievement of but half a lifetime. But it is enough.
1950 - Marius Barbeau, FRSC
In selecting Dr. Marius Barbeau as recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal for 1950, the Royal Society of Canada desires to honour one of the leading anthropologists on the continent of North America, who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1916.
After graduating from Laval University in 1903 with a degree in law, Dr. Barbeau went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and it was here that his interest in anthropology was first aroused. He pursued his studies further in this field in Paris at the Sorbonne, from which he received the degree of Doctor of Science in 1910. Dr. Barbeau was appointed Anthropologist at the National Museum of Canada in 1911, and ever since from this centre he has been ranging over the continent of North America in pursuit of his studies. Though he has recently retired from the National Museum, he is still working there with the assistance of a grant from the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia.
That a society outside of Canada should think it worthwhile to assist his studies is evidence of the wide recognition of his work, which has brought him many additional honours. He is a member of the American Academy of Science, one-time Co-Editor and President of the American Folk-Lore Society, and a corresponding member of the Société des Américanistes de Paris.
Time would not permit me to enumerate even a few of his numerous publications, which now number over 660 in something like 27 different journals and reviews of France, England, the United States, and Canada. These titles are listed in a special "Bio-Bibliographie" published in 1947 in honour of Dr. Barbeau in the Archives de folklore of Laval University. His studies include over 60 articles on the literature, ethnology, institutions, arts, manners, and mythology of various North American Indian tribes, especially those on the Pacific Coast, concerning which he is a principal authority. He has discovered and recorded some 8,500 texts and some 5,000 melodies of Indian, French, and English folk-songs of Canada which may well be the inspiration for a distinctive Canadian music of the future.
Le docteur Marius Barbeau, dans son domaine particulier un écrivain trés distingué, un conférencier brillant et animé, est, en même temps, un érudit canadien qui a jeté le jour sur la vie des premiers habitants de notre grand pays.
C'est donc avec un vif plaisir que je vous prie, monsieur le Président, de remettre la Lorne Pierce Medal au docteur Barbeau en reconnaissance de ses recherches; recherches de la première importance qui lui ont valu le titre de Doyen des Anthropologues américains.
1949 - John Murray Gibbon, FRSC
Dr. John Murray Gibbon, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in Section II since 1922, has lived an extremely busy life. His collected writings, ranging over poetry, fiction, history and aesthetics, would constitute a worthy output for the lifetime of the most industrious of authors; and the work which he has simultaneously performed during twenty-three years as General Publicity Agent of the Canadian Pacific Railway would entitle him to rank as one of the world's most productive and creative of publicity men.
During most of that lifetime two more or less related subjects have occupied a great deal of his attention, and it is, I think, for services in both of these fields that the Committee for the Lorne Pierce Medal has selected him as the person most worthy to receive that honour in 1949. One of these fields is the relation between lyric poetry (in the French and English languages) and the art of song. The other is the relation between the arts of Canada and the appeal which our country can make to the interested attention of the visitor from outside and indeed of our own people.
A native of Ceylon, a Scot by ancestry, an educational product of Aberdeen, Oxford, and Göttingen, and already a distinguished editor and writer in England when he came to this country in 1913, Dr. Gibbon immediately realized that in the arts, and especially the traditional and folk arts, of her people Canada possessed resources which she was grievously failing to exploit and almost completely failing to encourage.
Only those who can recall the manner in which these traditional arts were ignored by the "cultured" elements of the country before World War I can realize the extent of the revolution which was started by Dr. Gibbon when he set himself to make them an important and essential part of the picture of Canada as envisaged by the world at large. Today they are universally accepted as foreground material in that picture, but the change which has happened in a single generation is largely the result of the discernment, courage, and tenacity of this one man--backed up, it must be admitted, by the far-seeing directors of a great transportation system.
Time does not permit mention of the innumerable artistic activities which have benefited by the encouragement extended to them through Dr. Gibbon, but I cannot omit reference to the fact that he early discovered the immense riches of French Canada in this field of the folk and traditional arts, and that by making them better known to the English-speaking world he contributed powerfully to that mutual understanding between the peoples of the two languages in Canada which is one of the chief concerns of this Society.
In this field of what I may call the autochthonous arts nothing is more important than the folk-song; and from his study of folk-song Dr. Gibbon went on to examine the relationship between the two arts of poetical composition and musical composition when combined in the production of a lyric. His earliest researches on this subject were submitted to this Society in 1929, in a paper on “The Influence of Music on Metre” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was followed by a volume entitled Melody and the Lyric which pioneered on a new field of aesthetics.
In an age in which poetry has developed a very general tendency to address itself to the reader's eye, Dr. Gibbon has steadfastly maintained that its proper duty is to address itself to the listener's ear, and that it should not ignore the aid which music offers towards that endeavour. He has been able to bring to the support of this thesis an immense knowledge of the relations between the two sister arts throughout the Christian era, and his own experiments in the adaptation of verbal to musical sound are still continuing.
I have the honour, Mr. President, to present John Murray Gibbon as a worthy recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1948 - Gabrielle Roy, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1947 - Dorothy Livesay (Mrs. Duncan Macnair)
The Lorne Pierce Medal is awarded this year to Dorothy Livesay (Mrs. Duncan Macnair) of Vancouver, for her distinguished work in poetry.
Dorothy Livesay was born in Winnipeg. She graduated from the University of Toronto in 1931. During her second year at college she was awarded the Jardine Memorial Prize for her poem, "City Wife." After receiving her B.A. degree, she engaged in postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne, Paris.
Three collections of her poems have been published: Green Pitcher in 1928, Signpost in 1932, Day and Night in 1944. A fourth book of her poetry, Poems for People, is shortly to be printed.
The growth of Dorothy Livesay's poetic technique has been marked by a transition from a slightly modified traditionalism to frankly modernistic handling of her themes. In the course of this development the influences of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, of the French and English symbolists, and of American women poets such as Emily Dickinson and Elinor Wylie, may be traced.
The evolution in content of Dorothy Livesay's poetry is at least as significant as the evolution in form. In her early verse a sensitive portrayal of nature is linked with the presentation of subjective and inner experience. The most marked change in her later verse is the passion which leads her to voice the sufferings of the common people, the injustices of society, and to hold up the ideal of a new and better social order.
It was while she was studying at the Sorbonne that Dorothy Livesay's interest in working men and their conditions of life was kindled: this was heightened afterwards by a year's course in the Department of Social Service at the University of Toronto, followed by a year of field work in Montreal. Her concern with social issues was implicit from the outset in her poetry, but it was in such a poem as "The Outriders" and in her most recent volume of verse, Day and Night, that these issues became a central motif. The content of her poetry becomes objective and it gains in strength of fibre and breadth of human interest through its devotion to a great cause.
It would of course be a flagrant artistic heresy to estimate the merit of Dorothy Livesay's verse by her proletarian enthusiasm rather than by the aesthetic values of her poetry. It is a matter of indifference in connection with the award of the Lorne Pierce Medal, whether her idol is Karl Marx or Queen Victoria. There is perhaps a little too insistent intrusion of the propaganda of social reform in several of the pieces in Day and Night. In the main, however, the volume is free from the drabness, vulgarity, and boisterousness which have been the upas growths of proletarian verse. In the noble elegy for Garcia Lorca, the depth of feeling evoked by the death of one of Freedom's martyrs is happily conjoined with maturity of thought and felicity of expression. This poem and the fine "Prelude to Spring" seem to me to represent the height of Dorothy Livesay's achievement in poetry.
Whether she deals with nature or man, her art is never static or merely photographic. Professor E. K. Brown has written that her special power is energy, fiery and at times smoky energy. Her individual quality is revealed in the dash and originality of her poetic imagery. Sharpness of outline, vivid colouring, impressionistic flashes of lyricism, are characteristics of her work. Yet her intuitive flair does not run into romantic extravagance, but is disciplined by a careful and conscientious artistry. Her poetry is aesthetically as well as ethically sincere; and the dedication of her imaginative gifts to popular causes does not impair that beauty of pattern and rhythm which is one of the most attractive qualities of her verse.
Mr. President, it gives me great pleasure to present (although unavoidably in absentia) Dorothy Livesay, the second woman poet to receive this award, as the recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal for 1947.
1946 - Charles N. Cochrane, FRSC
It is my honour and pleasure to present Mr. Hugh David Cochrane, that he may receive from you the Lorne Pierce Medal awarded by the Council to his father, the late Professor Charles Norris Cochrane.
Hitherto this medal has been given for original contributions to literature, not for achievements in scholarship such as those on which Professor Cochrane's great reputation stands secure. But there are moments when the distinction between creative writing and scholarly writing vanishes. The fact that so many works of erudition are drab mounds of lifeless detail must not obscure another fact, that scholarship at its highest is one form, though perhaps the least usual form, of genius. The truly great scholar, for whom ideas are not merely a subject but a passion, can impart that rapture of adventurous life among the doings and destinies of the soul which is the most precious, as it is the most delightful, boon that art bestows.
Such reflections must occur to anyone who peruses, for the first time or the tenth, the writings of our lamented friend, especially his book on Thucydides and the already famous Christianity and Classical Culture. In them lies plain to view his rare, individual, and priceless blend of learning, profound and thoroughly digested, his common sense, sturdy and (at need) defiant, his acute and unfaltering mastery of that most fundamental theme – What are the things that matter and why do they matter?
Until the lectures are published which he delivered at Yale last year, Christianity and Classical Culture must be looked on as Professor Cochrane's finest achievement, wherein he expounded the basic difference between pagan and Christian political philosophy, between belief in perfection attainable through the expedients of statesmen, and belief in divine guidance working through the fully integrated will: in short, between machinery and character. There we observe the man's full stature-spiritual as well as intellectual; for no good history, still less great history, is written with the brain alone; the author's soul must pass into it, or it withers upon the page. He not only made the dry bones live; he clothed them with flesh and caused them to walk and act before our eyes. People of the olden time become our contemporaries in an ageless scene. But this power does not stop at persons; it gives vibrant life and urgency of significance to thoughts, feelings, and institutions that in lesser historians remain irretrievably abstract. For Professor Cochrane's most notable achievement is that he manipulated immense masses of fact and theory with an utter mastery that molded them into a form complex indeed, yet organic. He has won our gratitude and admiration by presenting the vast pageant of ancient religion and politics with the wisdom of a philosopher and the skill of a consummate artist.
1945 - Félix-Antoine Savard, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1944 - Audrey Alexandra Brown
The Lorne Pierce Medal is awarded this year to Miss Audrey Alexandra Brown, of Victoria, British Columbia, for her distinguished work in poetry. Miss Brown is a native of Nanaimo, British Columbia. She has contributed to various periodicals, and has published three volumes of verse and one of prose. The prose work is of an autobiographical character and is called The Log of a Lame Duck.
Miss Brown's first book of poems - A Dryad in Nanaimo-appeared in 1931. This collection marked her at once as one of our finer poets. Besides thirty other contributions, it includes "Laodamia," a long, legendary poem containing some seven hundred lines. This is generally regarded as her chief work, for it best illustrates both her reach and her grasp. The substance of the invention is found in the story of Protesilaus and his wife Laodamia, as related by the ancients and revived by Wordsworth. Our Canadian poet is thus free to explore and embellish it and to see and feel it freshly and intimately.
So successful is Miss Brown's treatment of this romantic and sacrificial theme that "Laodamia" was one of seven poems to be reprinted in her second volume, The Tree of Resurrection (1937), which offers also thirty-six new pieces, mostly lyrical. The mystical title-poem itself, "Lammastide," "Waste," "The Roman Sentry at Pompeii," and "Death Goes Walking" are poems to be remembered. Time, no doubt, will sift her work, as the works of all are sifted, but to judge her by her best, as she is entitled to be judged, she is a poet, delicately responsive to the symbolic aspects of life and to the music of language. "Her verse is remarkable," writes an English critic, "for its melodious richness and rhythmical ease."
Miss Brown's third volume Challenge to Life and Death appeared last year (1943). The best of its poems is "The Phoenix," which takes high place as a poetic argument and deserves comparison with Emerson's "Sphinx." She has been deeply moved by the tragic conflict of today and has touched it with pity and passion in such objective war-poems as "Withdrawal from Crete," "The Harvest," and "Reported Missing." Her intense sympathy with the Polish people is reflected in the dedication and in the apostrophe to Chopin.
Much more might be said of the quality of this poet's muse were it not that citations must limit their length. We in Canada are fortunate indeed to be able to number her among our poets. She is a singer richly endowed with poetic sensibility, a conscientious craftsman, an observer of the human scene both detached and participant, a human being of unusual worth.
Mr. President, it gives me great pleasure thus to present (in absentia) Miss Audrey Alexandra Brown, the first woman poet to receive this award, as the recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal for 1944.
1943 - George H. Clarke, FRSC
It is for me a very rare honour to have the opportunity of presenting the 1943 recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal, George Herbert Clarke, Professor of English, Queen's University. My reason for esteeming this privilege so highly is securely based on the foundation, now nearly fifty years deep, of intimate friendship and personal knowledge.
In George Herbert Clarke I present a true Canadian, and yet cosmopolitan, Man of Letters. He is at once poet, essayist, teacher, editor, critic. Though he himself abhors clichés, I venture to use an ancient one in describing him also as "guide, philosopher and friend," if only in order to say what affection, admiration, and gratitude would prompt his many friends and former students in Canada and the United States to say on such an occasion as this had they the opportunity to say it.
As a poet George Herbert Clarke deals, as his several volumes of verse and separate poems reveal, with significant themes that range over the vast space lying between the two poles of the world of humanity–on the one hand, the highest interests of collective society and the sublimest thought of the individual, and, on the other, the lowly but vital affairs of heart and hearth. The passing of a great sovereign, meditation upon things eternal, the golden day of a great university, a vision of mankind's common enigma, Life and Death–it is themes of this lofty order that kindle his finest and most sustained inspiration. His intimate briefer poems at once reveal the poet's own genuine spirituality and engender in his readers the love of that same quality.
As editor alike of literary and learned journals George Herbert Clarke has had a long and a rich experience. His influence upon his publications has invariably worked towards the improvement of their literary tone and of their readableness, a not-too-common editorial virtue. The annotations of his editions of great English authors are marked by a rare relevancy and satisfying clarity. His anthologies of war verse are outstanding for the strictness with which he has applied his high criteria of selection.
But the story of his work is not of the past only. Like a long-established firm of sound shipwrights he continues unceasingly to plan and to build; he has many other ships on his stocks which soon will be added to the argosy of Canada's literature.
It is most fitting that this award is given to George Herbert Clarke tonight in his Alma Mater, for it was in halls which formerly bore her name that he lived under the shaping influence of a real Master of Letters, the late Theodore Harding Rand, eminent Canadian poet and anthologist. Having had the privilege of knowing both master and pupil, I can see much of the master living again in the pupil.
I have the honour, Mr. President, to present to you George Herbert Clarke, Doctor of Letters, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, for the award of the Lorne Pierce Medal.
1942 - Watson Kirkconnell, FRSC
The Lorne Pierce Medal has been awarded this year to Professor Watson Kirkconnell, the Head of the Department of English in McMaster University, Hamilton. The outstanding quality of Professor Kirkconnell is his amazing versatility, combined with the highest technical competence. Beginning as a gold medallist in Latin and Greek, he has extended his linguistic studies to cover almost the entire field of European literature. His earliest publications in comparative literature, European Elegies and An Outline of European Poetry, both included his own translations from every literature of the Continent, from Gaelic and Basque to Finnish and Turkish. He then undertook more intensive studies in Icelandic, Magyar, and Polish, issuing in important volumes of carefully edited verse translation. A by-product of these studies was his pioneer work in discovering, evaluating, and translating extensive literatures written in Canada in languages other than English and French; and since 1935 he has prepared an annual survey of such literatures for the University of Toronto Quarterly.
Recognition of his learning and literary power has come from a number of countries. He has been made an honorary fellow of the Icelandic Society of Letters, Reykjavik; Poland has bestowed on him the Silver Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature and the cross of a Knight Officer of the Order of Polonia Restituta; in France, he received the Great Silver Medal of the Institut Historique et Héraldique de France; in Hungary, he has been awarded the Medal of honour of the P.E.N. Club of Hungary, an honorary doctorate from the University of Debrecen, foreign membership in the Petöfi Society, and corresponding membership in the Kisfaludy Society; while in England he has been made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1936.
Since the present war broke out, his scholarship has produced, in such volumes as Canada, Europe and Hitler (1939) and Twilight of Liberty (1941), invaluable studies of the political attitudes of Canada's European minorities; and he has acted in an advisory capacity to the Department of National War Services.
In addition to this he has published three major volumes of poetry, The Tide of Life, chiefly lyrical; The Eternal Quest, a philosophical poem in twelve books; and The Flying Bull a collection of narrative poems running a wide gamut from humour to stark horror. This poetry is the effective focussing of a very full and vigorous life and is the main ground of the present award.
1941 - Léon Gérin, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1940 - E.J. Pratt, FRSC
I have the honour to present to you for the award of the Lorne Pierce Medal Professor E. J. Pratt of Victoria University.
Dr. Pratt ranks among the foremost poets of Canada, having published since 1923 nine books of memorable verse. The first of these is Newfoundland Verse, containing several poems of the sea. Then came the gyrating glees of The Witches' Brew. The poem called "The Roosevelt and the Antinoe" has not only the power of the event and of the sympathy and admiration that the event evokes, but its own unmistakable power too. Its greater passages must always stir the pulses of lovers of poetry and lovers of the sea.
Among Dr. Pratt's more important recent works are The Titanic and The Fable of the Goats. Both of these have met with wide favour,–the first because of this poet's intimate knowledge of the sea and of ships and the finely imaginative sympathy with which he is endowed; the second, because of the equally capable handling and the skillfully sustained allegory which relates itself to our present social and political struggles. Both of these poems have the narrative vigour and creative power which we have learned to expect from Dr. Pratt.
The lively humour, the quick, subtle sympathy, and the increasing mastery of method that distinguish Professor Pratt's poetry have won for it a sure place in Canadian literature. He is a poet of stature, an admired teacher, and a man of rare human worth.
1939 - Wilfrid Bovey, FRSC
In awarding Colonel Bovey the Lorne Pierce gold medal, the Royal Society of Canada pays tribute to his wonderful versatility. Some thirty years ago, the American Bar Review published a contribution of his on a legal subject. Then after the war, when he was awarded the Reconnaissance Française, he resumed his pen to write a book on life insurance law which was published in 1921 in New York. Later he turned to military history commencing with a study of "Secret Service in the American Civil War" and continuing with articles on Canadian military history. Since then Colonel Bovey has ventured into various fields, from the Scandinavian, with a study of the Vinland voyages, to the religious, with one on the Book of Job. A series of lectures given to the Canadian Clubs across Canada is perhaps responsible for Colonel Bovey's latest works. While Doctor Carrel was cogitating on "Man, the unknown," Colonel Bovey was devoting his attention to one of the least known citizens of our modern times, the French Canadian. The result of his study was a book Canadien. That it was conceived in a friendly and sympathetic spirit cannot be denied, when we consider that it met with such expressions of gratitude as honorary degrees from both French Canadian universities, Laval and Montréal, and from France, a promotion in the Legion of Honour, and a medal from the University of Paris.
Since then, always in the same field, Colonel Bovey has published a number of articles on Canadian handicrafts and their educational value, and on Canadian history and politics. These were a prelude to what is, so far, his magnum opus, The French Canadians To-day, where his former studies were pushed more deeply and further afield. Published a year ago, this book prophesied the visit of the King, a European crisis, and the Canadian Government's decision regarding conscription.
After such exertions to promote the entente cordiale between the two great races which people this country, it was fitting, I believe, that this recognition from the Royal Society of Canada, the Lorne Pierce Medal, be presented to Colonel Bovey by the only French-Canadian member of the Section of the Society to which he belongs.
1938 - Mazo De La Roche
Miss Mazo De la Roche was born in Toronto, Canada, and was educated at Parkdale Collegiate and the University of Toronto.
It was while she was studying art as a young girl and beginning a career as a designer that she began to write. Her first real book was about children. It was entitled Explorers of the Dawn, and was published in 1922. Her first novel Possession was published simultaneously in New York, London, and Toronto and received high praise from the critics, the critic of The Times Literary Supplement finding the material comparable to Hardy's. This novel was followed by Low Life and Come True, two one-act plays.
In 1927 Miss De la Roche submitted Jalna to The Atlantic Monthly competition where 11,000 authors from all over the world were entered. She won the $10,000 prize and the novel was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly.
Jalna was followed by Whiteoaks (1929), Finch's Fortune (1931) and The Master of Jalna (1933). In between these Jalna books Miss De la Roche wrote several others, some of them being: Delight (1926), Lark Ascending (1932), Portrait of a Dog (1930), Beside a Norman Tower (1934), Young Renny (1935), and Whiteoak Harvest (1936) - the two latter being further chronicles of the Whiteoak family. In 1937 The Very House, another children's book, was published.
In 1937 the play Whiteoaks was performed in London and ran over 800 performances; it was produced in that city by Miss Nancy Price, who also played the role of the old grandmother. This same play is now running in New York, with Miss Ethel Barrymore playing the leading role. It has had presentations also in Toronto and Montreal.
Miss Mazo De la Roche lived in Toronto until the publication of Jalna, after which she went to England and has made her home there. Before this time, however, she lived in Toronto in the winter, and in a small cottage at Clarkson in the summer, this latter place being the scene of her Jalna books.
It is obvious that the award of the Lorne Pierce Medal has been made to an author of the highest distinction. Her fellow Canadians will follow Miss De la Roche's future career with interest and pride.
1937 - Stephen B. Leacock, FRSC
A sane economist, an authority on Canadian history, a critic and essayist of international repute, a lecturer of magnetic personality, a teacher who has profoundly influenced many generations of students and, above all, a writer and speaker who is the incarnation of humour. Stephen Leacock has won for himself a unique place in the Canadian scene. Adding lustre to the staff of McGill University for thirty-four years, his genius has been acknowledged with honorary degrees from Brown University, Queen's University, his alma mater of Toronto University, Bishop's College, Lennoxville, and his own university in Montreal. Author of many books on many subjects, he has illuminated with clear thinking and pungent phrase whatever theme he chose for his pen. Generous of his time and talent in helping many good Canadian causes, he has contributed greatly to the growing reputation of Canadian letters.
It is, therefore, the privilege of the Royal Society of Canada to award the Lorne Pierce Medal for the year 1937 to Stephen Leacock.
1936 - Pelham Edgar, FRSC
The Society has the pleasure of awarding the Lorne Pierce Medal this year to a man who has had the most active association with the literary life of this country - Pelham Edgar.
Professor Edgar's interests have taken many directions. As a Professor of English literature, he had rendered services of the highest distinction to Victoria College and the University of Toronto. Not only in the performance of his lecture schedules in class-rooms and on public platforms, but by his scholarly contributions to academic journals, he has made a vital contact with the student mind of Canada. And in the field of literary criticism he has won wide acclaim by the publication of two major volumes - his study of the work and personality of Henry James, and a still greater achievement, The Art of the Novel, which ranks with the best produced in the creative interpretation of fiction.
Moreover, as a friend to young writers striving to achieve their ambitions, as a counsellor in many organizations attempting to give shape to literary energies and enthusiasms, and as the first president of the association of Canadian Bookmen, he has been a sane and healthy influence upon the cultural life of the Dominion.
1935 - Edouard Montpetit, MSRC
Citation available in French only.
1934 - Frederick Philip Grove
Frederick Philip Grove, born in Sweden in 1872, educated in France, Germany, Italy and England, a student of Classics and Classical Archaeology. Before coming to Canada in 1892, he had travelled widely in northern and eastern Asia and northern Africa.
He came to Canada merely to see the country - and has remained here ever since. Impressed with the importance of understanding the problem of the European settler in Canada, he attacked it with characteristic thoroughness, gaining first-hand knowledge by working as a casual labourer in the towns and a farmhand in the country. The results were embodied in his thought-provoking novel, A Search for America, published in 1927. Other novels, dealing with various aspects of the same general theme, are Settlers of the Marsh, Our Daily Bread, The Yoke of Life and Fruits of the Earth. Mr. Grove is also the author of three volumes of essays, Over Prairie Trails, The Turn of the Year, and It Needs to be Said. He took an honours degree in Moderns in the University of Manitoba in 1922; and last year was appointed Lecturer in English Literature by the Carnegie Foundation.
Because Mr. Grove has written books that are at one and the same time literature and a very real contribution to our knowledge of an important subject, the Society considers it a privilege to award him its Lorne Pierce Medal.
1932 - Archibald MacMechan, FRSC
Archibald MacMechan, born seventy years ago, graduated from the University of Toronto, with Honours in Modern Languages, in 1884. He studied German at Johns Hopkins University, and obtained the degree of Ph.D. in 1889. The same year he became George Munro Professor of English Languages and Literature at Dalhousie University and occupied that chair for forty-two years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1920, and the same year the University of Toronto conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D. He has been Vice-President of the Maritime Branch of the Canadian Authors Association, and President of the Nova Scotia Historical Society. He has edited two volumes of the archives of Nova Scotia, as well as several English classics, has contributed to two important Canadian series, "Canada and its Provinces", and the "Chronicles of Canada", and is also responsible for a scholarly survey, "Headwaters of Canadian Literature", but he will be remembered principally as the author of several volumes of essays, remarkable alike for the interesting character of their matter and the rare charm of their manner. Canada can as yet count among her men-of-letters very few that deserve to be called essayists, but Dr. MacMechan is one of that few.
1931 - Judge Adjutor Rivard, FRSC
Born in the countryside, son of a notary and a professor in a university, Adjutor Rivard combines happily in his personality, the outstanding qualities of the élite of his province, love of the soil, fidelity to tradition, a fine culture. A bachelor of science, he entered upon the study of law in Laval University over forty years ago. In 1891, he was called to the bar. His industry and legal disposition of mind rapidly gained for him a well-deserved reputation, which led first to the chair of international law in his own university and afterwards to a seat on the bench of the Provincial Court of Appeal. Created a chevalier of Saint-Gregoire, he was elected in 1908 to membership of the Royal Society and afterwards received the degrees of Doctor of Letters and Doctor of Law of the University of Laval. His attendance in the university and in the court did not, however, prevent him from finding time to devote himself to special studies in the science of language and philology.
During that time he published a whole series of works: Le Manuel de la Parole, 1897; Les Parlers de France au Canada, 1908; Chez nous, 1910; Chez nos gens, 1912; La liberté de la presse, 1918. In addition to these, he contributed numerous articles to periodicals on law and philology. Above all, he devoted himself with M. Louis Philippe Geoffrion to the study of French language in Canada. From these scholarly labours has developed that enduring monument: "Le glossaire du parler français au Canada." Upon this man, eminent both in his legal career and in philology, the Royal Society is proud to bestow the Lorne Pierce Medal for his remarkable scientific works, and his literary publications, which enrich and honour all Canadian literature.
1930 - Sir Andrew Macphail, FRSC
In presenting the Lornee Pierce Medal to Sir Andrew Macphail, the Society is conferring it on one in every way worthy of the honour, and fitted to take his place among those to whom this distinction has already fallen. Sir Andrew Macphail has had a career in which success and honour have come to him in various spheres - in the profession of medicine, in letters, and in the defense of his country under arms. He was born in Orwell, Prince Edward Island, of Scottish stock, and was educated in the schools of his native province and at McGill University. He received from McGill his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1888, and his degree of M.D. in 1891, and Hon. LL.D. in 1921. He entered on the practice of medicine in Montreal, where he also filled a position in the Medical Faculty of Bishop's College. He found time also, both during his college course and the earlier years of his medical practice, for much literary work in current newspapers and journals, which served to bring out his marked ability in the field of letters. The closing of the Bishop's Medical School transferred Andrew Macphail to the staff of McGill University as Professor of the History of Medicine, a position which he still holds.
In 1905 appeared in Boston Macphail's first book, "Essays in Puritanism", a book of a singular erudition and of a style as original as it is alluring, such as has marked all the writer's work. This book was followed by other volumes of essays, and by a novel, "The Vine of Sibmah", depicting with wonderful accuracy the times and the types of puritan days. During the years from 1907 till the war, Macphail's principal activity and interest was found in editing the "University Magazine". This publication he raised from the status of an almost unknown academic periodical to the rank of a national political and literary magazine of the first class.
At the outbreak of the War, though at an age at which most men would have been unable to take the field, Macphail at once offered his services to his country. He went overseas with the 6th Field Ambulance, served in France for two years, and at Headquarters in London till the end of the War. His return to Canada as Sir Andrew Macphail testified to his fellow citizens his Sovereign's appreciation of his service.
Since the War Sir Andrew has carried on with unremitting zeal his professional and literary work. His "History of the Medical Services" was undertaken and published in 1925 at the invitation of the Canadian Government. His "Three Persons" - a biographical revelation of General Sir Henry Wilson, of Woodrow Wilson (through the windows of the mind of Colonel House), and of Lawrence, in and out of Arabia - was one of the literary successes of London and New York in 1929.
The gift of the David Prize for Prose in 1925 was a tribute to Sir Andrew Macphail's literary achievements, which are now recognized in an even more notable way in the present award.
1929 - Camille Roy, FRSC
As Vice-President of the Society it is my privilege to present the Lorne Pierce Medal to our esteemed President, Camille Roy. In the first place I think I should explain that, although Mgr. Roy is a member of the Lorne Pierce Medal Committee, the decision was practically forced upon him by his colleagues on the Committee, who met independently and sent him a round-robin insisting upon their choice being accepted, and over-riding all his objections.
Mgr. Roy has won distinction not only as an educationalist and an eminent ecclesiastic, but also as an essayist and an authority on the literature of French Canada. Among his many published works in this field are Essais sur la littérature canadienne, Nos origines littéraires, A l'Ombre des érables, Erables en fleurs and Etudes et croquis. By a coincidence that has in it something peculiarly appropriate, one of the finest published tributes to Mgr. Roy as scholar and man-of-letters appeared in Queen's Quarterly a few months ago, and the writer was the donor of this medal. I cannot do better than quote Dr. Pierce's concluding words:
And so I salute le grand seigneur of French-Canadian literature. I can see him in his study in the ancient seat of learning, walled in with books and mementoes of the heart. The window faces south, commanding a view of garden, terrace and river, and beyond, the shores of Lévis. Near at hand are the memorials of the old régime, and yonder are the spires vocal with bells, whose music is echoed by other chimes down the valleys of the Laurentians, calling to the faithful in manor, cottage and counting-house. Mgr. Roy would have the writers of his people shepherd all the beauties for which these things stand, and make them articulate in such a manner that the very words would gain immortality upon the lips of his countrymen. "Qu'il écrive, prêche ou dirige, il persuade et convainc, s'addresse tout ensemble à la tête et au coeur." Mgr. Roy has been doing that for a quarter of a century, and his reward is in the literary annals of his people.
1928 - Bliss Carman (corresponding member)
The previous recipients of this Medal were Charles G. D. Roberts (1926) and Duncan Campbell Scott (1927). It is eminently proper that the Medal should go this year to Bliss Carman, who shares with Dr. Roberts and Dr. Scott the reputation of having contributed more than any other living Canadians to the purely intellectual literature of Canada. Dr. Carman's first book of verse, Low Tide on Grand Pré, was published thirty-five years ago. Since then, he has issued more than a score of volumes of verse, of admirable quality, verse in which he has expressed the many-sided spirit of his native land. Long may he live to add fresh laurels to his reputation!
1927 - Duncan C. Scott
(No citation)
1926 - Charles G.D. Roberts
(No citation)