Norwood, Robert Winkworth

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Henry Roper, “NORWOOD, ROBERT WINKWORTH,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/norwood_robert_winkworth_16E.html#citations
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Church of England and Protestant Episcopal clergyman, poet, and author; b. 27 March 1874 in New Ross, N.S., third child of Joseph W. Norwood and Edith Matilda Harding; m. 12 Sept. 1899 Ethel Cornelia McKeen (McKean) (d. 1959) in Baddeck, N.S., and they had a son, who predeceased him, and two daughters; d. 28 Sept. 1932 in New York City.
    • Robert Winkworth Norwood’s father, who was born in Halifax in 1843, led an adventurous early life as a seaman, a soldier in the Union armies during the American Civil War, and a missionary in Africa. Upon his return to Nova Scotia, Joseph married and, in 1874, he was made rector of the Anglican parish in New Ross. He remained there until 1880, when he was sent to Halifax County; he would subsequently serve churches in Maine, New York State, New Jersey, and the province of Quebec. In 1891 he and his family relocated to Hubbards Cove (Hubbards), N.S., when he was put in charge of St Luke’s Church. He died in 1901, a year after his retirement.
    • Upon his graduation from King’s, Norwood read for orders and was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1897 and priest in 1898. He was sent to serve St Andrew’s Mission at Neil’s Harbour, an isolated Cape Breton fishing village, where he gained a reputation for toughness and pugnacity. In 1898 he and Vernon privately published Driftwood: “virginibus puerisque,” a collection of their poems, which reflects the influence of Roberts and William Bliss Carman.
    • By this time Norwood had arrived at the theological views that inspired the poems in The piper and the reed (1917). His ideas were later developed in a study of St Paul, The heresy of Antioch (1928), in a novelistic examination of the life of Jesus, The man who dared to be God(1929), and in four collections of sermons and meditations, The steep ascent (1928), His glorious body (1930), Increasing Christhood (1932), and The hiding God: divinity in man (published posthumously in 1933).
    • The opinions expressed in these works stemmed from a spiritual crisis that Norwood had experienced as a young priest. He had been brought up in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, but he could no longer accept the dogma he had been taught. Instead, he found God in beauty, particularly the beauty of nature, and in the life and teaching of Jesus, whose presence he had experienced during his youth in a mystical event described poetically in Issa. For Norwood, Jesus was “the man who dared to be God” because he was “the supreme lover,” the person who had fully understood that the nature of the soul is love, which is the ground of human existence. God as love is within each person; history is the struggle of humankind to rise from ignorance to the realization of its divinity as manifested by Jesus. Roberts contributed a preface to Issa, in which he described it as “a mystical and spiritual autobiography. The vision of the mystic has an infinite perspective.… And Robert Norwood, whether he is eating his porridge, swapping robust yarns with fisher-folk, or swaying a rapt metropolitan congregation with his eloquence, is always and in the fibre of him a mystic.”
    • Although Norwood had become an American citizen in 1923, this change of allegiance diminished neither his close ties with Canada nor his contemporary reputation as a leading Canadian poet. The incumbent of St Bartholomew’s was not expected to spend summers in New York; from June through September he was free to live in Nova Scotia, where he kept up a hectic pace of writing, preaching, boating, and socializing.
    • Despite the demands of his position, Norwood still made time for poetry. He, Roberts, and Carman were benevolent presences behind journalist Andrew Doane Merkel’s creation of a poetry group, the Song Fishermen. Based in Hubbards Cove, they published their “catches” under the title The Song Fishermen’s song sheet; the first in the mimeographed series appeared in 1928. Merkel was a long-time friend; as a child he had been sent to stay with the Norwood family after his clergyman father’s death. It was through Merkel that Norwood had met the poet Kenneth Leslie a close friend who was greatly influenced by him, as well as Charles Tory Bruce, whose poetry he admired and promoted with typical enthusiasm.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=12665
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/256877604/robert-winkworth-norwood