Poems
Raymond Knister's poems were published alongside literary giants of his age and are admired to this day for their ability to capture a sense of "the rich brown earth of southwestern Ontario." Some of these poems are included in this exhibit alongside photos of artifacts and images to give context for their subject matter. The poems are all listed directly under the main menu at the top of the page.
Portrait of Raymond Knister, ca. late 1920s.
“Knister was a remarkable man who had written much in the course of a ten-year span, and who, during that time, had tried honestly to reconcile the countervailing forces which invested his creativity. On the one hand he had to make a living, and here he was faced with the reasonably attractive possibilities of literary journalism; on the other hand, Knister was a literary artist with the strongest desire to devote himself to serious, and perhaps unprofitable, writing. The result of this struggle was that Knister produced poems, reviews, potboiler articles and sketches, critical material, several novels and some avant garde short stories.”
From Selected Stories of Raymond Knister edited and introduced by Micheal Gnarowski. (Ottawa:University of Ottawa Press, 1972, page 11)
“Characteristically, he wrote from the heart, from direct experience. Better than people, he knew sun and snow, spring and autumn; he knew a boy’s job of farm chores; he knew animals.”
From "Raymond Knister. A Memoir" by Dorothy Livesay, in The Collected Poems of Raymond Knister. (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1949, page xvii)