Elias Wolf Mandel, important to contemporary Canadian literature as poet, critic, and anthologist, was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and grew up there, in the rural Jewish communities of its vicinity, and in Regina. His family and ethnic backgrounds have consistently informed his poetry, and he has turned frequently in the last two decades to his regional roots as a focus for his poetic and prose musings on the nature of time and the imagination.

World War II interrupted Mandel's formal education: he went overseas in 1943 with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, and after his return home at war's end he completed both his B.A. (1949) and M.A. (1950) degrees at the University of Saskatchewan. He then enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Toronto and graduated in 1957 with a dissertation on the eighteenth-century English mystical poet Christopher Smart. By 1957 Mandel's academic career was...