Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey, OC FRSC (March 18, 1905 – April 21, 1997) was a Canadian educator, poet, anthropologist, ethno-historian, and academic administrator.
[1] He then spent a year on a Royal Society of Canada fellowship studying at the London School of Economics, where he was introduced to "leftist politics" and the poetry of Dylan Thomas.
[1] In 1938, the president of UNB offered to make Bailey the head of a new Department of History if he could talk the provincial government into granting sufficient funding for it.
His books of poetry include Songs of the Saguenay (1927), Tao (1930), Border River (1952), Thanks for a Drowned Island (1973), and Miramichi Lightning: The Collected Poems of Alfred G. Bailey (1981).
[1] Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey is esteemed for his seminal work in ethnohistory, The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures, 1504-1700: A Study in Canadian Civilization, his 1937 doctoral dissertation, republished by the University of Toronto in 1969.
[4] The Canadian Encyclopedia says of his poetry: "From conservative beginnings that echoed strongly the romantic tones of late 19th-century verse, Bailey evolved into a contemporary poet whose statement was full of the surrounding reality, whose voice is, at times, deceptively subdued but whose imagination ranged widely and wisely.
[5] Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey has had a formative influence on a generation of younger poets, notably Elizabeth Brewster, Fred Cogswell, and Robert Gibbs.