George Benson Johnston (October 7, 1913 – August 2004) was a Canadian poet, translator, and academic "best known for lyric poetry that delineates with good-humoured wisdom the pleasures and pains of suburban family life.

Eliot, the early William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and added Alexander Pope as a personal favorite."

Seven of its poems were included in The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, edited by Charles Tomlinson.

[citation needed] In 1959 Johnston published his first book of his own poetry, The Cruising Auk, which was favourably reviewed by Eric Nicol and Northrop Frye, and by the American magazine Alphabet.

Alphabet, Chicago's Poetry magazine, and Canada's Tamarack Review, all became regular outlets for Johnson's new work.

[4] The Canadian Encyclopedia calls Johnston "best known for lyric poetry that delineates with good-humoured wisdom the pleasures and pains of suburban family life.

His finest technical achievement, I think, apart from his faultless sense of timing, is his ability to incorporate the language of the suburbs into his own diction.

Keith called "attention to the unfortunate — one is tempted to say scandalous — neglect" of Johnston's poetry by critics and anthologists "in the last twenty years or so.