Dictionary of Literary Biography on W. W. E. Ross

"The first poet in Canada to use real factual things unadorned by metaphor," critic Peter Stevens has called W. W. E. Ross. Ross was born in Peterborough, Ontario, on 14 June 1894 to Ralph and Nellie Creighton Ross. He grew up in Pembroke, Ontario, and earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1914. His interest in the natural world took him on two surveying trips in the summers of 1912 and 1913, both to northern Ontario wilderness regions--Algonquin and Algoma--later made famous by the paintings of the Group of Seven. He served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I as a private in the signal corps. On his return, he took up lifelong employment as a geophysicist at the Dominion Magnetic Observatory at Agincourt, Ontario, a few miles north of Toronto. He married Mary Lowrey on 3 June 1924, and they had two children. Mary Loretto and Nancy Helen. The family settled in Toronto at the Delaware Avenue house at which he died, of cancer, in 1966.

His earliest works, dated 1923-1925 by his editors, are written in free verse and reflect a knowledge of both imagism and Japanese poetry. Although acquainted with the works of numerous American writers, including William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Amy Lowell, his chief American influences were E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore. He objected to both difficult and ornate verse and found the conventional romanticism of Canada's Confederation poets particularly unappealing. His first publications were in Marianne Moore's Dial (in 1928) and in Poetry (Chicago). These were followed by two slim collections, Laconics (1930) and Sonnets (1932), both of which he signed with the initials E. R.

Laconics collects the imagist poems Ross is best known for, poems constructed of discrete two-stress lines and direct, factual images; many of these poems present the northern Ontario landscape in the stark manner of the Group of Seven. Sonnets reveals a lesser-known side of Ross--the classicist and traditional metricist concerned not only with factual reality but also with spiritual truth.

In the 1930s Ross's interest in things spiritual led him to translate work by the surrealist Max Jacob and to write prose poems influenced by Jacob and Franz Kafka; some of the prose poems were published in New Directions in Prose & Poetry for 1937. His work in this period incorporates elements of automatic writing, transcendentalism, mysticism, and archetypal imagery.

An extremely private man, Ross did little to bring his writing to attention and offered very little of it for publication. Most of his publications after 1930 were solicited by anthologists or magazine editors. Critic Barry Callaghan suggests that he wrote "only when strenuously urged by an anthologist or literature student." Such urging from poet Raymond Souster resulted in the collection Experiment, 1923-29, published in 1956 by Souster in a mimeograph edition under the Contact Press imprint. (Ross felt this collection misrepresented him in its emphasis on his imagist work.) Similar encouragement by Callaghan led to his writing of the poems included in the posthumously published collection, Shapes and Sounds (1968).

While Ross's private and somewhat trenchant nature, together with his diffidence toward publishing and the publicly lived literary life, caused him to be little known during his lifetime except to fellow poets, it could bring to his work an austerity of diction and simplicity of syntax close to the imagist ideal. His strongest work is undoubtedly this early imagist-oriented poetry, work that derives its strengths from his restrained, skeptical personality, from his scientist's preference for objective, factual material, and from his affection for the Canadian wilderness landscape. This is poetry which, as he wrote in "On National Poetry" (Canadian Forum, 1944), is "distinctly located" in a geographic "locale." Ross's writing became of special importance in the 1950s and 1960s when new generations of Canadian poets sought their precursors in the modernist goals of restraint, precision, organic rhythm, and the factual image.

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