"[1] Born at Ruscom (now part of Lakeshore), Ontario, near Windsor, Knister attended Victoria College at the University of Toronto,[2] but had to drop out after catching pneumonia.
[4] While in Toronto he contributed articles on Miguel de Cervantes and Robert Louis Stevenson to Acta Victoriana, the college literary magazine.
[citation needed] In 1919 Knister began writing and publishing stories and poems about Canadian farm life.
"[citation needed] In Toronto he became acquainted with writers Morley Callaghan, Mazo de la Roche, Merrill Denison, and Charles G.D.
The Knisters spent eight months researching Keats's life: the result was a 200,000-word, 700 page non-fiction novel, My Star Predominant.
[1] Grove read My Star Predominant, and encouraged Knister to enter the manuscript in the Graphic Publishers' Canadian Novel contest.
Besides his four novels, Knister wrote roughly one hundred poems, almost as many short stories and sketches, and dozens of critical works, including essays, editorials, and book reviews.
"[2] Set in rural Ontario, "The novel concerns a writer, Richard Milne, who returns home in order to make a final attempt to convince his childhood sweetheart, Ada Lethen, to marry him.
While the novel is usually and justly considered a work of realism, it has also been suggested that it contains elements of romanticism, and that the lyricism of some passages approaches prose-poetry.
He says that "a man's knowledge of his faults, so they do not paralyse his endeavors, is a good thing" (p. 160) and he recalls that as a boy he would have granted artists exemption "from the common tribulations of mankind" (p. 267).
In 2006 Black Moss Press published There Was a Mr. Cristi, a previously unknown novel discovered by Knister's daughter Imogen.
In it, Knister tells the tale of a woman who leaves her husband in 1930s Ontario, and moves to Toronto to open a boarding house.
[citation needed]Knister's imagist nature poetry includes "such poems as 'The Hawk,' 'Boy Remembers in the Field,' 'Lake Harvest,' 'A Row of Stalls,' and 'The Plowman,' which vividly depict rural experience and the Canadian landscape.
In both his poetry and his fiction Knister presented sharply realistic portrayals of everyday images and events in order to illustrate their exceptional qualities, and communicated these impressions in a conversational language style.
Knister served his literary apprenticeship in the American midwest and his poetry, like Carl Sandburg's, was regional and realistic.
Once again it is easy to see how Knister shared general characteristics, but difficult to perceive specific similarities because of his imagist style.
The complexity of Knister's work, like that of Robert Frost, has been overlooked because of its surface simplicity, bucolic tone, and emphasis on exactly what the poet felt.
The most important point raised in Knister's critical writings, one which is applicable to his own verse, was his rejection of the sublime in the language and thought of poetry.
In general Canadian taste favoured a style of writing which was "a refreshing haven of genuine romanticism to which the reader may retreat when he seeks an antidote to the intellectual tension imposed by the future progeny of 'The Wasteland' and 'Spoon River' "[21] Knister, however, valued plough horses above winged ones, and in the foreword to the Collected Poems he set out his objectives as a poet.
His primary aim was to make his poems 'real' and to escape the false tone which made most Canadian poetry of his day an inaccurate portrayal of life.
He ably described their cultural colonialism when he wrote of the "ideal Canadian litterateur" as a man who has been educated as an English gentleman, though certain New England Universities will pass; in addition he should know about Canada as accurately and sympathetically as possible from the point of view of an omniscient tourist who, after all, knows better things.
Arthur Stringer, in his opinion, was forced to become a writer of murder mysteries because the Canadian reading public refused to accept the innovative poetry in Open Water.
Another example he cited was Pratt, whose poem "The Witches Brew" could not find a Canadian publisher until after it had appeared in The London Mercury.
The injustice was perhaps, trifling; the quite modest merits of my efforts were adequately rewarded by the audience, fit though few, of the "little" magazines [sic].
("Canadian Literati," 162)Implicit in his comments was the conviction that this conservatism was a direct result of colonialism and the dulled appetite for sublimity.
Although many of Knister's contemporaries were equally unhappy with the state of Canadian poetry, only he dared to attack established writers by name.
In "Canadian Letter" Knister dismissed Carman, Maclnnis, Leacock, Roberts, and D.C. Scott with the comment that "their contributions were made at a time when any impulse in a backwater would have been valued" (p. 381).
Elsewhere he compared Lampman's style to "one of those rambling, barrack-like houses once common to New England and our own eastern landscapes,"[23] formerly stylish but now outdated.
We must remember that at this time Roberts and the others had the status of literary giants and that one dramatic way for a newcomer to get attention has always been to play the part of the iconoclast.
In his opinion, Canada needed a little magazine "devoted to creative work ... perhaps only a few pages every month, yet chosen for vital quality ... which should give a voice to what is actually being lived among us" ("Canadian Letter," p. 379).