Wilfred Watson, playwright, poet, teacher, and literary theorist, has steadily conducted a one man revolution in Canadian letters from the late 1950s to the present. As poet and experimental dramatist, he shows remarkable versatility in his inventive explorations of the media-conditioned sensibility of contemporary man. Watson's first gathering of poems, for which he received a Governor General's Award for 1955, gave but slight indication of the radical writing which was to follow. During the 1960s his controversial satiric verse plays alternately astonished, perplexed, and delighted Edmonton audiences; with more than a dozen such dramas, Watson ushered in an avant-garde in Canadian theater years before the rear guard had fully emerged. Throughout this period and since, he has continued writing poetry, notably lyric and satiric verse, that combines verbal and typographical intricacies in a highly disciplined, often dramatic, style.

Watson was born in Rochester, England, the oldest child of Frederick...