Jay Macpherson

Jean Jay Macpherson (1931-2012) was an award winning Canadian poet. She was born in 1931 in London, England, to James Ewan Macpherson and Dorothy Macpherson. She immigrated to Canada in 1940 with her mother and younger brother Andrew as a “war guest”, living in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with a local family for four years before joining her mother and brother in Ottawa where her mother worked for the National Film Board.

She received a BA in classics, German, and philosophy from Carlton College in 1951, followed by a Library Science degree from McGill University. She obtained her MA in English in 1955 and PhD in 1964 from the University of Toronto where she was mentored by Northrop Frye, with whom she later co-wrote Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. She spent her career teaching in the Department of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto.

Jay Macpherson's work was heavily influenced by her mentors Northrop Frye, George Johnston, and Robert Graves. She published her first poem at age 15 and her poems regularly appeared in Canadian poetry magazines such as Contemporary Verse and The Fiddlehead. In the 1950s and early 1960s she ran her own small press, Emblem Books, and produced eight chapbooks by emerging poets, starting with her own O Earth Return in 1954. Her publications include Nineteen Poems, 1952, The Boatman, 1957, Welcoming Disaster, 1974, a high school mythology textbook Four Ages of Man, 1962, The Spirit of Solitude: Conventions and Continuities in Late Romance, 1982, as well as numerous papers on the connections between The Magic Flute and Freemasonry.

She has received the E.J. Pratt Medal, the Levinson Prize, and the Governor-General's Literary Award for her poetry.