Prewett, Frank

(1893-1962)

   Born near Mount Forest, Ontario, he was brought up on a farm near Kenilworth, Ontario, and was educated at the University of Toronto but left to enlist as a private in the Canadian Army. Commissioned into the British Army, in the Royal Field Artillery, he was present at the third Battle of Ypres in France. Invalided out in 1917, he was rehabilitated at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon (see entry). After graduating B.A. (1922) and M.A. (1928) from Christchurch College, Oxford, he taught in the University School of Agriculture and Forestry in Oxford. During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force, staying on in the Air Ministry until 1954. Retiring because of poor health, he farmed near Abingdon until his death. He was the only Canadian poet represented in Georgian Poetry 1920-1922, edited by Edward Marsh and published by the Poetry Bookshop (1922). Some of his poems: "I Shall Take You in Rough Weather," "If I Love You," "Plea for Peace," "The Pack," "The Red Man in the Settlements," "The Red-man."

   Sources: An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry. Marcus Graham, ed. The Active Press, 1929. Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. Duane Niatum, ed. Harper and Row, 1988. Native American Authors Project; Frank Prewett (http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/bin/browse.pl/A398). http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/meyer/bio.html). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Selected Poems of Frank Prewett. Bruce Meyer and Barry Callaghan, eds. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1987. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).