William Wilfred Campbell FRSC
Inducted In
1972
William Wilfred Campbell, whose father was the rector of the Anglican Church at Berlin, where William was born, became one of Canada’s most famous poets, and was recognized as the leader of the Ontario poets of his generation.
He attended the University of Toronto and the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was ordained as a minister in the Church of England in 1886. He had a parish in New Hampshire and in 1988 became rector at St. Stephen, New Brunswick. He left the ministry in 1891 and entered the civil service.
His first volume of verse, Lake Lyrics, was published in 1889. He published five other books of poetry; four verse-plays; three novels and a descriptive work, The Canadian Lake Region, and edited the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Campbell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1893. One of his best-known poems was Indian Summer.