Early in his career Ralph Gustafson won international attention as an anthologist of Canadian literature. His short stories have appeared in Canadian and American periodicals and anthologies, and since 1960 he has enjoyed a national audience as a music critic for CBC-Radio. But he is best known for his poetry--learned, densely allusive, and stylistically sophisticated.

The son of Carl Otto Gustafson, a photographer, and Gertrude Barker Gustafson, Ralph Barker Gustafson was born in 1909 in Lime Ridge and raised in nearby Sherbrooke, Quebec. Gustafson entered Bishop's University, Lennoxville, in 1926, graduating at the head of his class in 1929 with a B.A., first class honors in English and history. During these years his increasing commitment to literature was fostered by Frank Oliver Call and W. O. Raymond, who taught courses on modern poetry and Browning, respectively. But, "Alas, no one told me," he recalled in a 1972 letter, "that Pound, Yeats, Eliot...