MacDonald, Wilson Pugsley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_MacDonald
Biography:
- Wilson Pugsley MacDonald (May 5, 1880 – April 8, 1967) was a popular Canadian poet who “was known mainly in his own time for his considerable platform abilities”as a reader of his poetry. By reading fees, and by selling his books at readings, he was able to make a living from his poetry alone. In the 1920s he was so popular that, according to writer John Robert Colombo, “his fame eclipsed that of Robert Service and Pauline Johnson.
- Wilson MacDonald was born in Cheapside, now part of the city of Haldimand, Ontario. He attended McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and graduated in 1902. He began publishing poetry in the Toronto Globe in 1899, while still a student.
- After graduating, MacDonald worked at a number of jobs. As he later wrote: “I have been, in my varied career, a view agent, seaman, cabin-boy, bartender (one night), school-teacher, actor, inventor, producer, playwright, composer, advertisement writer, newspaper reporter, editorial writer, columnist, banker, and poet. When my poetry would not sell, circumstances forced these other tasks upon me.”
- His first collection of poetry, Song of the Prairie Land, was published in 1918. In 1921 MacDonald self-published a book of Christian poetry called The Miracle Songs of Jesus.
- Because he refused to be anything but a fully committed poet, now that he had been published, in the early 1920s “MacDonald managed to” find a way to “supplement his income by engaging in lengthy and rather successful tours of readings and lectures”. He became what Doug Fetherling in the Canadian Encyclopedia called “a barnstorming versifier with an unbending faith in his own greatness”. MacDonald travelled both Canada and the northern United States reciting his poetry in large city and small town alike. “His personal shyness disappeared on stage, where he became dynamic; humming, chanting, and singing, he synchronized his whole performance to make poems come alive for his audience.”
- MacDonald was not the first Canadian poet to make a living from performance; Pauline Johnson had done so 30 years before. But he is the first noted for merchandising his tours. Fetherling noted, with an apparent shudder, MacDonald’s books that “he himself hawked at his ‘recitals'”. And not just books. MacDonald “was something of an artist, a designer. Frequently he illustrated his own poems and dabbled with illumination and typography.” There are many examples online of individual poems illustrated or calligraphed by MacDonald, which look like merchandising aimed at those unwilling or unable to buy a whole book
Other pieces of MacDonald’s work stand the test of time. The title poem of his collection Out of the Wilderness has something of the strength of Walt Whitman – “I, a vagabond, gypsy, lover forever of freedom, / Come, / Come to you who are arrogant, proud, and fevered with civilization – / Come with a tonic of sunlight, bottled in wild careless acres,/ To cure you with secrets as old as the breathing of men.”
Roberts said of that poem that MacDonald “has been so bold as to experiment frankly with Whitman’s peculiar form and content, and he has justified the experiment. He has succeeded at times in breathing into that harsh form a beauty of words and cadences which Whitman never achieved”.
The Wilson MacDonald Memorial School Museum near Selkirk in Haldimand (one of the schools MacDonald attended as a boy) has been designated a National Historic Site of Canada.
Third Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=6344
Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/96644409/wilson_pugsley-macdonald