Jay Macpherson

Born in London, Canadian poet Jay Macpherson immigrated to Newfoundland in 1940 as a “war guest” and settled with her family in Ottawa in 1944. She earned a BA at Carleton University, a BLS at McGill University, and a PhD at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where she studied with the literary critic Northrop Frye.
 
Macpherson’s formal, allusive, and often wry lyric poems invigorate myth and fable, blending contemporary and archetypal imagery. Macpherson is the author of several poetry collections, including Nineteen Poems (1952); The Boatman (1957), which won the Canadian Governor General’s Award; and Welcoming Disaster (1974). Her scholarly work includes the textbook Four Ages of Man: The Classical Myths (1962), Pratt’s Romantic Mythology: The Witches’ Brew (1972), and The Spirit of Solitude: Conventions and Continuities in Late Romance (1982).
 
Macpherson won Poetry’s Levinson Prize in 1957. She was a founding publisher of the now-defunct literary press Emblem Books, and she was a professor emerita at Victoria College.