Patrick Anderson was an English expatriate journalist, travel writer, autobiographer, and poet who for some time wrote in and about Canada and became a major force in the shaping of Canadian poetry in the 1940s and 1950s. As the primary mover and a founding editor of the Montreal little magazine Preview, Anderson was at the center of a group concerned to assimilate the modernist influences of such poets as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and C. Day Lewis and yet "make a Canadian voice." The cofounders of Preview remember him as a poet who was not happy unless he had spent three or four hours a day at his verse and whose professionalism shamed and encouraged them at the same time. As Bruce Ruddick recalls: "He was the conscience of our poetry, and the conscience of our working at poetry." Though his own style was...