"My why and how are me," George Johnston wrote in an early poem. Unusual qualities in the way he maneuvers words into verse and puzzles about the motivations for these maneuvers have kept interest in Johnston's poems high over the past thirty years.

George Benson Johnston was born in 1913 into an "urban scene" in Hamilton, Ontario, son of an Irish father, Benson Edward Johnston, and a fourth-generation-Canadian mother, Margaret Black Johnston. He has one sister; a younger brother died in infancy. The family moved to the Toronto outskirts in 1923. Visits to Peterborough and Stoney Lake strengthened and influential friendship with Gordon Roper, later a professor of Canadian literature and critic; before finishing high school Johnston knew that he wanted to be a writer.

At Victoria College, University of Toronto, Johnston entered, in 1932, a heady atmosphere; under the guidance of E. J. Pratt and Pelham Edgar, he read T...