Alden Nowlan

David Eso (University of Victoria)

Ed. by Cynthia Sugars, University of Ottawa
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

Born 25 Jan 1933
Died 27 Jun 1983
Activity 1953-1983

Places

Born in Canada
Active in Canada

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Poet
Story-writer

Resources

Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) overcame hardscrabble beginnings to become an important Canadian poet of his generation. His writing sometimes reflects the rural poverty that marked his Nova Scotia childhood, and it frequently explores the cultural character of Atlantic Canada, the region in which he resided for five decades. Eleven collections of poems appeared between 1958 and 1982, a body of work gathered in Alden Nowlan: Collected Poems (2017). Across its 650 pages, that volume documents a maturation that moved from formal to free-verse and from local scenes related by a distanced observer to intimately reflective pieces as well as poems inspired by travel or world history. The author’s lesser-known contributions include two …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3014 words

Citation: Eso, David. "Alden Nowlan". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 November 2021 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3359, accessed 22 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here