For Roy Daniells, scholarship was his vocation and poetry his avocation. For, even though he will probably be remembered in the long run for his own two books of verse, it was another poet--Milton--who most engaged his attention.

Daniells was a lifelong and natural academic in the best sense. Born in London, England, to James and Constance Daniells, he came to Canada as a child and grew up in Victoria. This was a Plymouth Brethren household, and, as he recounts in a posthumously published autobiographical essay, "Plymouth Brother" (Canadian Literature, Autumn 1981), it took him almost a lifetime to reject the constraints of his early training. He was educated at the Universities of British Columbia (B.A., 1930) and Toronto (M.A., 1931; Ph.D., 1936) and taught first at Victoria College in Toronto (1934-1937) and then at the University of Manitoba, where he was head of the Department of English from...