30 Facts About Douglas Lochhead

Douglas Grant Lochhead FRSC was a Canadian poet, academic librarian, bibliographer and university professor who published more than 30 collections of poetry over five decades, from 1959 to 2009.

Douglas Lochhead was a founding member and vice-chairman of the League of Canadian Poets and was elected its first secretary in 1968.

Douglas Lochhead served as president of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, and was a member of bibliographical societies in the US and Britain.

Douglas Lochhead received the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts in 2001 and the following year, became the first poet laureate for the town of Sackville, New Brunswick, where he had lived since joining the faculty at Mount Allison University in 1975.

Douglas Lochhead was born March 25,1922, in Guelph, Ontario, where his father, Allan Grant Lochhead, worked as a microbiologist and research scientist at the Malt Products Company of Canada.

The family moved the next year when Grant Douglas Lochhead landed a job as Dominion Agricultural Biologist at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa.

Douglas Lochhead's mother, Helen Van Wart, was an accomplished pianist and piano teacher who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick.

Douglas Lochhead agreed that although he lived and went to school for most of the year in Ottawa, as a boy, his heart was in Canada's Maritime provinces.

In 1939, Douglas Lochhead enrolled in the pre-medical program at McGill University following in the scientific footsteps of his microbiologist father and his paternal grandfather William Lochhead who taught botany, genetics, geology and zoology at Macdonald College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, and who, in 1908, had founded the Quebec Society for the Protection of Plants from Insects and Fungous Diseases.

Douglas Lochhead remembered spending many enjoyable hours in his grandfather's library reading his scientific papers, his collection of 19th century poetry and books by authors ranging from Darwin to Dickens.

Douglas Lochhead completed his pre-medical Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943 and was accepted into medicine.

Douglas Lochhead received training first, as an artillery officer, and then, in the infantry.

Douglas Lochhead attained the rank of lieutenant, but the Second World War ended in Europe before he could be sent to the front.

Douglas Lochhead then volunteered to fight in the Pacific War, but it too ended before he could be trained as a paratrooper.

Douglas Lochhead was still in the army when he attended a friend's wedding in Toronto.

Douglas Lochhead visited the University of Toronto campus and suddenly decided to pursue post-graduate studies there in English.

Douglas Lochhead wrote his thesis on the British poets of the First World War earning his Master's degree in 1947.

Douglas Lochhead served at Cornell as cataloguing librarian until 1953, when he was offered the university or chief librarian's position at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Douglas Lochhead helped plan and organize two large libraries there.

In 1963, Douglas Lochhead was recruited by writer Robertson Davies, Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, to found the library there.

Douglas Lochhead had first become interested in bibliography, printing and the history of the book at Dalhousie.

Douglas Lochhead developed those interests at Massey College as he and Davies built its bibliographical collection so that the Massey library would be useful to the whole university.

Douglas Lochhead left Massey College in 1975 to become Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Douglas Lochhead told an interviewer later that he spent his first two years teaching and finding a centre for the program.

Douglas Lochhead extended its curriculum and, as always, continued writing poetry inspired by the unique geography around Sackville.

Douglas Lochhead retired from teaching at Mount Allison in 1987 to accept a three-year appointment as the university's first writer-in-residence.

Douglas Lochhead was named Sackville's first poet laureate in 2002 in recognition of his status as a writer whose work reflected an intense interest in and sensitivity to local places.

In 1977 Douglas Lochhead received the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal.

Douglas Lochhead was a recipient of the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts.

The Red Jeep and Other Landscapes: A Collection in Honour of Douglas Lochhead, edited by Peter Thomas, appeared on his retirement in 1987.