SOURCE: Pollock, Zailig. “Earle Birney.” In Profiles in Canadian Literature, Jeffrey M. Heath, pp. 89-93. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Dundurn Press Ltd., 1980.

In the following essay, Pollock offers a biographical and critical overview of the first four decades of Birney's literary career.

For the last forty years, Earle Birney has been widely recognized as one of the most important of Canadian poets. One reason for his importance to Canadian readers is that he provides us with an extremely wide-ranging picture of the Canadian experience in the middle years of the twentieth century. When Birney records his personal responses to war and peace, to the city and the wilderness, to the United States, Mexico and more distant parts of the globe, and, of course, to his fellow countrymen, good, bad or indifferent, at least part of his purpose is to speak as a representative Canadian and to interpret Canada to...