[2] Leo Kennedy quit school at 14, after having to repeat Grade 6;[citation needed] "he took to the sea and held a variety of jobs.
[citation needed] By the time he appeared with Smith, Scott, Klein, Pratt, and Robert Finch in New Provinces in 1936, Kennedy had repudiated his early work and was seeking a poetry that could contribute to social and political reform.
"[citation needed] Pseudonyms he was known to use include Arthur Beaton, Leonard Bullen, William Crowl, Edgar Main, and Peter Quinn)"[2] After New Frontier closed down, Kennedy "left for the United States to pursue an advertising career,"[3] while "continuing to publish reviews and witty verse pseudonymously"[2] "In 1942 he moved to a Chicago agency and [also] freelanced as a book reviewer for the Chicago Sun.
"[citation needed] Kennedy spent the rest of his working life as a copywriter in the United States,[1] eventually settling in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he served as a staff writer for Reader's Digest.
[citation needed] The Shrouding "was reprinted in 1975 with an introduction by Leon Edel, who described Kennedy as the sprightly leader of Canada's ‘graveyard school’ of metaphysical poetry."
[citation needed] There "he worked on literary memoirs he was not to finish,"[3] spending his time writing "poems for children, satiric verse, and broadsides.
Eliot and Sir James Frazer, [Kennedy] wrote poems that sought salvation from the winter wasteland of death and oblivion by fusing Christian faith in the resurrection with the myth of renewal found in the order of nature: buried bones are like crocus bulbs awaiting the spring to sprout heavenward.
"[2] "By 1936, when his poems were included in the modernist anthology New Provinces, he was already turning his back on much of what he began, writing committed criticism of social realities for radical periodicals"[citation needed] In a New Frontier article called "Direction for Canadian Poets," Leo "Kennedy pointed to the impotence of members of the McGill group because they were still preoccupied with the concerns of the twenties.