Leon Surette

Leon Surette was born in Guelph, Ontario on Nov. 15, 1938 to Agnes (Née Langevin 1906-66) and Rudolph Surette (1907-2001), tool & die maker. He attended St. Agnes and St. Stanislaus Catholic separate schools, and the public high school, Guelph Collegiate and Vocational Institute, graduating in 1956.

After graduation he worked briefly as a trainee in the local branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, but soon secured a job as maintenance electrician at the Stelco factory in Hamilton, Ontario, commuting from his family home in Guelph to the Hamilton Steel works each day from the Fall of 1956 until the Fall of 1957.

He had saved enough to enroll in the Arts programme at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario in September 1957, graduating with an Honours (First Class) Degree in English and History in 1961.

He won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to pursue graduate studies, which he pursued at the University of Toronto, receiving an MA with a thesis on the “Conversation Poems” of William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge in 1963.

Before the degree was granted he was appointed lecturer in the English Department of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1962 to 1964. While at UBC he met and married (Sept. 11, 1963) Valerie Dawber of Montreal.

Persuaded that university teaching was a good option, Leon returned to the University of Toronto in the fall of 1964 to pursue a Ph D. He had no grants at this stage, but was self-supported from savings, and Valerie’s part-time job. His dissertation was entitled “The City in the Cantos of Ezra Pound,” and was supervised by Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye.

As an ABD he took a teaching position at the newly formed University of Guelph in 1966, where his two children (Alison July 6, 1967) and Philip (Dec. 16, 1969) were born. While at Guelph he completed his dissertation, and received the degree in the Autumn Convocation of 1969.

Dissatisfied with his teaching duties at Guelph (where he taught Romantic Literature, and did not have access to courses in Modern British Literature, his Ph D specialization), Leon applied for an opening at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. He was appointed Assistant Professor there in 1970, Associate in 1975, and Professor in 1980. He remained at Western until his retirement in June, 2004.

Most of his scholarly publications were achieved while at the University of Western Ontario. His first book was completed while on sabbatical in Oxford England (1975/76): A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1979. He published four more scholarly books from university presses before trying an E-book, Art in the Age of the machine.

For more of Leon Surette's publications see his Web page, Birth of Modernism https://sites.google.com/site/birthofmodernism/home