Gwladys Downes
Gwladys Violet Downes was a Canadian poet and academic born on April 22, 1915, in Victoria, British Columbia. She pursued higher education at Victoria College and the University of British Columbia, earning both a B.A. and an M.A., followed by a doctorate from the Sorbonne, where she focused on the works of Paul Valery. Her teaching career spanned several institutions, including Duncan High School and the University of British Columbia, and she became a Professor of French at Victoria College, now the University of Victoria, from 1951 to 1978.
As a poet, Downes published her first collection, "Lost Diver," in 1955, which featured formal poetry exploring themes of decay and psychological turmoil through the recurring image of a diver. Her work is characterized by its depth, often bridging literary criticism and personal exploration, with influences ranging from Renaissance culture to contemporary thought. Downes continued to publish poetry throughout her life, with notable later works including "When We Lie Together" in 1973 and "Out of the Violent Dark" in 1978, which showcased a shift towards a more introspective and less formal style. In 1999, she released "House of Cedars," further delving into the realms of subjective experience and poetic self-consciousness. Her contributions to literature reflect a profound engagement with both the psychological and mythic dimensions of human experience.
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Gwladys Downes
Poet
- Born: April 22, 1915
- Birthplace: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
- Died: September 17, 2005
- Place of death: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Biography
Gwladys Violet Downes was born on April 22, 1915, in Victoria, British Columbia. She attended Victoria College for a year before transferring to the University of British Columbia, from which she received a B.A. in 1934 and an M.A. in 1940. In 1953, she earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne, having written her dissertation on Paul Valery. In addition to these degrees, she earned teaching certificates from the University of British Columbia and the Sorbonne. She taught at Duncan High School in British Columbia between 1936 and 1939, and at the University of British Columbia in 1941-42 and again between 1946 and 1949. From 1951 to 1978, she was Professor of French at Victoria College, later the University of Victoria. As an academic, she wrote literary criticism on William Butler Yeats and Robert Finch, among others; her criticism is informed by wide learning, from Renaissance culture to contemporary trends.
In 1955, Gwladys Downes published her first book of poetry, Lost Diver, a collection of sixteen poems. Formal in their diction and their structure—they were written in couplets and quatrains; one was a Shakespearean sonnet—these poems contrasted artistic control with an awareness of bodily decay and psychological turmoil. The image of the diver or swimmer recurred throughout the collection. Some readers called the poems Symbolist; Gwladys Downes herself said that they were not Symbolist but Jungian. They explored mythic oppositions, for instance, innocence and experience, exile/the underworld and the garden.
In 1973, Gwladys Downes published When We Lie Together: Poems from Quebec and Poems by G. V. Downes. Ten of these poems were her translations from French originals by other poets; four were related original poems by Gwladys Downes with interesting relationships to the translations. Again in this volume the figure of the diver or swimmer appeared. In 1978, Gwladys Downes published Out of the Violent Dark: Poems and Translations, seventy-one poems of her own alternating with twenty-seven translations. Her poems in this volume were less strict formally and less remote in their voice than her early poems, but still concerned with exploring the inner world, although through new images. After the publication of this volume, Gwladys Downes continued to publish poetry in magazines. In 1999, she brought out House of Cedars, in which she focuses even more intensely on the subjective world and on poetic self consciousness.