CANADA AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY
Anne Wilkinson
Also known as: Anne Cochran Gibbons, Anne Gibbons
Anne Cochran Wilkinson, a Canadian poet and writer was born in Toronto, Ontario at Craigleigh, the Rosedale home of her maternal grandfather, the banker and Ontario politician Sir Edmund Boyd Osler. The middle child of Mary Osler and lawyer George Gibbons, she grew up in privileged society in London, Ontario and, after her father's early death from multiple sclerosis in 1919, in Toronto and California, and at her grandfather's country estate at Roches Point on Lake Simcoe. Wilkinson was part of the modernist movement in Canadian poetry, one of only a few prominent women poets of the time, along with Dorothy Livesay and P. K. Page. By 1946 several of her poems had appeared in literary journals, and subsequently she published two collections of poetry, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955), the latter of which was flagged by Northrup Frye as a volume of "poetry of particular importance" that year. She also published two books of prose before her untimely death from lung cancer in 1961: Lions in the Way (1956), a history of her maternal family, the Oslers, and Swann and Daphne (1960), a modern fairy tale for children. A founding editor and patron of the literary quarterly The Tamarack Review, her work appeared in several prominent Canadian publications of the day, including Northern Review. It was anthologized in The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (ed. A.J.M. Smith, 1960), The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (ed. Ralph Gustafson, 1975), Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960 (ed. Brian Terhearne, 2010, was broadcast on CBC Radio's Anthology, and was recorded on the album Six Toronto Poets, alongside the poems of W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Souster, Margaret Avison, James Reaney and Jay Macpherson. Her close friend A. J. M. Smith edited and introduced The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir, which was posthumously published in 1968. Her writing was celebrated by artist/filmmaker Joyce Wieland and author Michael Ondaatje, and set to music by composer Oskar Morawetz. In the early 1990s it was re-examined by Joan Coldwell, who edited a new edition of the poems, as well as a volume of Wilkinson's autobiographical writings. (Information gathered from several sources.)
Most acclaimed
Heresies
1982
Gray sees our faith in progress - "the Prozac of the thinking classes"--As the illusion that underlies the most egregiously mistaken political and social policies of the present day. Certainly there is such a thing as progress, but it is a fact only in the realm of science, while "in ethics and politics it is a superstition". Throughout his work Gray hammers relentlessly against the notion, first advanced in the Renaissance and reified in the Enlightenment, that history moves inexorably in a straight line, and that human nature will necessarily improve as our knowledge accumulates. The prescience of his views on such topics as Iraq and Tony Blair's political career is remarkable. One does wonder what the magazine's readers made of the contention that Donald Rumsfeld's Hobbesian pragmatism is to be preferred to Bill Clinton's impulsiveness, that "in intellectual terms atheism is a Victorian fossil", or the baleful but gracefully expressed reminder that "the human animal is itself only a passing tremor in the life of the planet."