In their memoirs, writers such as Dorothy Livesay, P. K. Page, Ethel Wilson, and George Robertson have remembered Alan Crawley for his speech, his bearing, his features, and especially his energy and his sensitivity. Eloquent, aquiline, hawklike, Spanish-looking: such are their adjectives. His voice showed traces of private-school accent, yet he disparaged the imitation Britishness that many Canadians of his generation identified with class. A champion of the Canadian voice, and of its relevance to literary modernism, he was, as editor of Contemporary Verse , one of the leading forces that reshaped Canadian poetry in the 1940s. Despite his physical blindness, he had insight--"the blind eyes still seeming alive as they looked downward at a book," remembered Dorothy Livesay--and a generous enthusiasm for the new poets of his time.

Born on 23 August 1887 in his maternal grandparents' home in Cobourg. Ontario, he was the third child (the first two...