Kirkconnell, Thomas Watson

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_Kirkconnell
  • Biography:
    • Watson Kirkconnell, OC FRSC (16 May 1895 – 26 February 1977) was a Canadian literary scholar, poet, playwright, linguist, satirist, and translator.
    • Kirkconnell was born in Port Hope, Ontario into a proudly Scottish-Canadian family descended from United Empire Loyalists and more recent immigrants from the British Isles. After his university studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, Captain Watson Kirkconnell was extremely disappointed to be classified as medically unfit for active service when he was only days away from being shipped to the Western Front with the Canadian Corps. He instead spent the rest of the war guarding Central Powers POWs at Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camps in rural Ontario.
    • Following the 1918 Armistice, he entered a university faculty career and became an internationally known poet, translator of poetry, and literary critic. After learning enormously from what he taught about world literature to his students, Kirkconnell made radical teaching innovations and also became an enormously influential public intellectual, who publicized and denounced human rights abuses under Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.
    • For his many many translations of their national poetry and that by “New Canadian” poets who composed in immigrant languages, Kirkconnell remains very well known in Iceland, Poland, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, and Ukraine. For his original poetry, verse dramas, and light operas, Kirkconnell drew upon both Canadian and world history and while skillfully emulating poets and playwrights from throughout World Literature. He was also a highly skilled satirist, as seen in his verse parodies of Robert Burns and, in “Rain on the Waste Land”, of T.S. Eliot.
  • Second Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=3360
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/213822821/watson-kirconnell