LIVESAY, DOROTHY

born Oct. 12, 1909, Winnipeg, Man., Can. Canadian lyric poet whose works range from angry protest (Day and Night, 1944) to intensely personal evocations (Selected Poems, 1957). She was educated at several schools, including the Sorbonne in Paris (193132), where a study of French Symbolist poets influenced her own work. A second formative element was her experience in Montreal as a social worker during the Depression, and an affinity for the social gospel of such liberal poets of the 1930s as C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and W.H. Auden. Other collections include Poems for People (1947), Call My People Home (1950), New Poems (1957), and Beginnings: a Winnipeg Childhood (1976). In 1947 she received the Lorne Pierce Medal, Canada's greatest literary honour. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1972.