In the Montreal of the 1920s, a small group of young radicals - Leo Kennedy, Frank Scott, A. M. Klein, and A. J. M. Smith - transformed Canadian poetry with enthusiasm, talent, and the creation of a modern alternative press.

Kennedy was born in Liverpool in 1907 to Irish immigrant parents and moved with his family to Montreal when he was still very young. Although his formal education ended at Grade six, his intelligence, imagination, and wit, coupled with an intense love of language and learning, opened many doors and allowed him to become a part of Montreal's circle of privilege. He was, though, to remain always the outsider.

Kennedy's choices in religion, friendship, marriage, and business were deeply influenced by the same yearning for justice and defence of humane values that informed his verse, stories, and essays. A successfully published poet at the age of 26 (The Shrouding, 1933), Kennedy soon left his literary world for that of the emerging business of advertising to support his family in the Depression.

1. Acknowledging Kennedy's tendency to embroider the facts of his life - a tendency rooted in the same talent that made him an important poet as well as an extremely successful advertising copywriter in corporate America - Patricia Morley traces the roots of Kennedy's preoccupations and the development of his art from his birth in England to his self-described "exile" in the United States.

His return to Montreal in 1976 brought renewed public recognition of his place among the "Montreal Poets." Kennedy experienced culture shock, yet he thrived and, in blackly comic letters, raged against the youth culture of his grandsons and the ironies of aging.