Robert Finch

Robert Duer Claydon Finch (May 14, 1900 – June 11, 1995) was a Canadian poet and academic. He twice won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, for his poetry.

Life Born in Freeport, Long Island, New York, Finch was educated at the University of Toronto and the Sorbonne. He was a professor of French at the University of Toronto for four decades (1928–1968), and an expert on French poetry.

Writing

The Canadian Encyclopedia calls Finch "one of Canada's modernists" in poetry. It adds: "His work, deeply imbued with the classical tradition, is characterized by an intense care for form and graced by a rare subtlety and elegance."

In 1936, Finch published eleven poems in the "milestone selection of modernist Canadian verse," New Provinces, edited by F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith. "Mr. Finch is an intellectual poet," Smith wrote in 1939. "Of the six contributors to New Provinces, he is the most elegant and the least sensuous. His verse is not without feeling, but the feeling is so carefully husbanded and so fastidiously winnowed that one is impressed with its delicacy and precision rather than with its abundance and strength." Smith included Finch's poetry in his critically praised 1943 anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry, bringing it to a national audience.

Edited French Individualist Poetry 1686-1760. Robert Finch & Eugène Joliat ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1971.