Earle Birney

Canadian poet

• Born: May 13, 1904
• Birthplace: Calgary, Alberta, Canada
• Died: September 3, 1995
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Biography

Alfred Earle Birney was among the most important Canadian poets of his generation. He was born on May 13, 1904, in Calgary, Northwest Territories (now Alberta), Canada, a rugged region of cattle ranches and wheat farms bordered on the south and west by the Rocky Mountains. His father, Will Birney, was a farmer and later a sign-painter and decorator; his mother, Martha Robertson Birney, was Scottish, with strong musical and religious interests. Both were self-educated. Earle worked as a bank clerk, mosquito controller, paper hanger, and mountain guide before entering the University of British Columbia in 1922. He took an honors B.A. in English in 1926 and, from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in 1927. With an academic specialty in Old and Middle English, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Utah before taking his Ph.D. (with a thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer’s irony) in 1936 from the University of Toronto. Birney’s verse was marked from the beginning by a strong sense of the spoliation of beautiful natural places such as Alberta by modern civilization. His verbal ability, no doubt honed by his academic work in medieval English language and poetry, was also evident.

Beginning in 1929, Birney’s experiences of the Depression drew him into the leftist political circles of Toronto, where he became known as a Trotskyite. He was active in the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party. At this time also, a first marriage was annulled, and Birney subsequently married Esther Bull; they had one son and were divorced in 1977. Out of these years, personally and socially turbulent, came Birney’s first published poems, which began to appear in periodicals in the late 1930’s. By 1942, he had assembled his first collection, David, and Other Poems, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for verse and a warm but mixed review by Northrop Frye, who praised the strong, heroic narrative of the title poem but disliked some of Birney’s free-verse mannerisms. Thoroughly Canadian and even regional, Birney was always a modernist, cosmopolitan poet.

With the coming of World War II, Birney went on active duty with the Canadian army in 1942 and served in Belgium and Holland as a major in personnel selection. His second volume of verse, Now Is Time, appeared in 1945, and his third, The Strait of Anian, in 1948. These collections show the influence of his wartime experience. Notable poems include “The Road to Nijmegen,” with its powerful elegiac tone and its sense of the bleak destructions of history: “the bones of tanks / beside the stoven bridges; old men in the mist / knifing chips from a boulevard of stumps.” In 1952 came Trial of a City, and Other Verse, in which Birney developed one of his most characteristic themes, the decay and desperate plight of urban civilization. In its long title poem, a drama mingling verse and prose, and bringing witnesses from the present and the past, the city on trial is Vancouver, and the issue is simply whether it should continue to exist. A verdict is scarcely needed: The city is seen as gripped in its own death wish, the capitalist exploitation of human and natural resources.

By the end of the 1940’s, Earle Birney had been firmly established as a major Canadian poet. During the 1950’s, he turned aside somewhat from his poetry to work on two novels, to edit the important anthology Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry, and to develop as a scholar and a teacher at the University of British Columbia, where he was a professor of medieval English literature and later chairman of the Department of Creative Writing. In his first novel, Turvey, Birney created a satirical extravaganza about military life which also, in its darker passages, sees war as a metaphor for all human activity. Birney’s second novel, Down the Long Table, deals with the political milieu in Canada during the 1930’s from the perspective of a radical professor whose past is being investigated by a government committee in the McCarthyite atmosphere of the early 1950’s.

In the rich outpouring of Canadian verse in the later postwar period, Birney’s voice reached its full power. Ice Cod Bell or Stone and Near False Creek Mouth were triumphs of a senior poet projecting a more personal tone and content; these poems used the experiences of his many and extended visits to foreign countries. An example is the discursive “Cartagena de Indias” from Near False Creek Mouth, with its South American setting, its sympathy with the victims of centuries-long colonial exploitation, and its humor (“Where gems and indigo were sorted / in shouting arcades / I am deftly shortchanged”). A sense of history and a strong sense of place mix skillfully with an equally strong sense of himself as outsider in this representative poem. Birney’s most important volume of this period was his Selected Poems of 1966, judged “the major work of Canada’s major poet” by Bruce Nesbitt.

Birney was writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo, Ontario, before retiring from academic life in 1968. He continued to publish extensively and to travel widely. His extended visits to the United States, South America, the Caribbean, Australia, Africa, and Asia influenced his poetry markedly. In the mid-1970’s, he also started writing about the changes in Canadian literature that he had observed during his lifetime. Birney died in 1995 at the age of ninety-one.

Author Works

Poetry:

David, and Other Poems, 1942

Now Is Time, 1945

The Strait of Anian, 1948

Trial of a City, and Other Verse, 1952

Ice Cod Bell or Stone, 1962

Near False Creek Mouth, 1964

Selected Poems, 1940-1966, 1966

The Poems of Earle Birney, 1969

Pnomes, Jukollages, and Other Stunzas, 1969

Rag and Bone Shop, 1971

What’s So Big About Green?, 1973

The Bear on the Delhi Road, 1973

The Collected Poems of Earle Birney, 1975

The Rugged and the Moving Times, 1976

Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems, 1920-1976, 1977

Fall by Fury, 1978

The Mammoth Corridors, 1980

Copernican Fix, 1985

Last Makings, 1991

Long Fiction:

Turvey, 1949

Down the Long Table, 1955

Short Fiction:

Big Bird in the Bush, 1978

Drama:

The Damnation of Vancouver: A Comedy in Seven Episodes, pb. 1952

Radio Play:

Words on Waves, 1985

Nonfiction:

The Creative Writer, 1966

The Cow Jumped over the Moon: The Writing and Reading of Poetry, 1972

Spreading Time, 1980

Essays on Chaucerian Irony, 1985

Edited Texts:

Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry, 1953

New Voices, 1956

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry, 1962

Bibliography

Adams, Ian. “Marginality and Tradition: Earle Birney and Wilson Harris.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24, no. 1 (1989): 88. Several works from Birney and Guyanese poet Wilson Harris are discussed. Both writers are generally credited with a major role in the establishment of a modern literature authentic of their region, and both view themselves as doing so out of a position of cultural marginality.

Aichinger, Peter. Earle Birney. Boston: Twayne, 1979. This introductory study looks at Birney’s criticisms of capitalism, modern culture, and militarism. Divided thematically with chapters on biographical background, satire, love and death, myth, nature, poetic technique, and politics, the book concentrates on Birney’s poetry over his criticism and prose fiction. The cynicism, raunchiness, and invective in Birney’s later work are considered in a negative light.

Aichinger, Peter. “Earle Birney.” In Canadian Writers and Their Works: Poetry Series. Vol. 5., edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1985. Contains a short introduction to Birney’s life, his traditions and worldview, and a critical overview. Looks specifically at the alliterative verse, lyric poetry, experimental verse, and the narrative poems.

Cameron, Elspeth. Earle Birney: A Life. Toronto: Viking, 1994. Shows Birney as a poet, novelist, soldier, journalist, academic, and world traveler. Cameron also covers his romantic life. In so doing, she calls upon the copious materials (including hundreds of letters) archived at the University of Toronto.

Fink, Howard, et al. Perspectives on Earle Birney. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1981. A reassessment of Birney by eminent critics and authors, this collection was originally published as a special issue on Birney in Essays on Canadian Writing 21 (Spring, 1981). Pieces of Birney’s poetry are interspersed with observations on his radio drama, Chaucerian scholarship, and political prose.

Latham, David. “From the Hazel Bough of Yeats: Birney’s Masterpiece.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 21 (Fall/Winter, 1987): 52-58. Latham traces the influence of W. B. Yeats’s “Song of the Wandering Aengus” on Birney’s “From the Hazel Bough,” a poem Birney considered his masterpiece.

Lecker, Robert, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley, eds. Canadian Writers and Their Works. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1985. This collection of essays includes an article on Birney by Peter Aichinger, which contains a short introduction to Birney’s life, his traditions and worldview, and a critical overview. It looks specifically at the alliterative verse, lyric poetry, experimental verse, and the narrative poems. Includes extensive notes that contain bibliographical references and a select bibliography that lists primary and secondary sources.

Nesbitt, Bruce, ed. Earle Birney: Critical Views on Canadian Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Contains both positive and negative reviews and critical essays on Birney’s craft and creativity mixed with a number of his prose pieces. The useful introduction gives an overview and appreciation, while in an epilogue, Birney himself reflects on his career and responds to some of the critical appraisals.

Noel-Bentley, Peter. “Earle Birney: An Annotated Bibliography.” In The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors, edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David. Vol. 4. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1983. The standard bibliography of Birney’s works.

St. Pierre, Paul Matthew. “Earle Birney.” In Canadian Writers, 1920-1959, Second Series, edited by W. H. New. Vol. 88 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. A helpful overview of Birney’s life and career.