SOURCE: Noonan, Gerald. “Earle Birney (1904-1995).” Malcolm Lowry Review, no. 40 (spring 1997): 28-33.

In the following essay, which first appeared in The Literary Review of Canada in 1996, Noonan reflects on the half-century career of Earle Birney as a literary figure and cultural ambassador for Canada.

Over the past fifty years, Earle Birney (13 May 1904 - 3 September 1995), in his creation of some of Canada's most admired poetry, has so pervasively nurtured human progress that his death inspires not so much a look back at his efforts to better our world as a look forward to the nature of our continuing survival.

The loss of the poet, and of his long, energetic and sensitive wrestle with life and words, is softened by the hope that, as Auden said of Yeats, the words of the dead will go on growing in the guts of the living.

Birney very early expressed his concern for...