"[1] Smith was born in Montreal, but lived in England from 1918 to 1920, where he "studied for the Cambridge Local Examinations, 'and failed everything except English and history' (he later wrote)."
"[2] "The McGill Fortnightly drew to it other young writers – among them A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel – on whom, as well as on Scott, Smith had an enduring influence.
"[citation needed] "While still at McGill," Scott later noted, "Smith had poems accepted by the Dial, then in the last days of its glory as an expounder of new aesthetic values, and which only a few years previously had printed Eliot's Waste Land.
"[citation needed] He became well known as both a scholar and an author of poetry, with many of his best known works focusing on Canadian themes (for example his 1929 poem "The Lonely Land", which was inspired by a 1926 Group of Seven exhibition).
For instead of confining his reading to previous compilations, as most anthologists do, he has made a first-hand study of the whole English field with unflagging industry and unfaltering taste.