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McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Robert Elwood Bly was born on December 23, 192, in Madison, Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, son of parents of Norwegian ancestry.
He was an American poet, essayist, translator, activist, and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. He spent two years in the Navy (1944-1946). After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard (B.A., 1950). He lived in New York City for a few years. In 1954, he attended the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1956, he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. In 1968, he won the National Book Award for "The Light Around the Body," the book of poetry focusing on politics, the Vietnam War, and the events in the America of the late 1960s. He published more than 40 collections of poetry, edited many others, and published translations of poetry and prose from Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu. He received the McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000, and the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2002. His book “The Night Abraham Called to the Stars” (2002) was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. He also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners). In 2008, Bly was named Minnesota's first poet laureate and in 2013, he was awarded the Robert Frost Medal, a lifetime achievement recognition given by the Poetry Society of America.
In 1955, he married Carolyn M. "Carol" McLean (1930–2007) and divorced in 1979. In 1980, he remarried Ruth Counsell. He died on November 21, 2021, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Boa, Helen Gilmour, 1887-approximately 1968
Helen Gilmour Boa of St Laurent, Québec, attended Granby High School, and received her diploma from the McGill Normal School in 1906.
Board of Trade of Metropolitan Toronto
Boardman, George Dana, 1828-1903
George Dana Boardman was born on August 18, 1828, in Tavoy, Burma (now Myanmar).
He was an American clergyman. The son of the Baptist missionaries George Dana Boardman Sr. and Sarah Hall, he returned to the U.S. as a boy and attended first Worcester Academy (1846), then Brown University, where he graduated in 1852. In 1855, he graduated from the Newton Theological Institution and became pastor of the Baptist church in Barnwell, South Carolina. His views on the slavery question impelled him to exchange his charge in 1856 for a church further north. He was pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, until 1864, and pastor of the First Baptist Church, Philadelphia, from 1864 to 1894. In 1899, he established the permanent lectureship known as the "Boardman Foundation in Christian Ethics" at the University of Pennsylvania. He belonged to several American and European peace organizations, e.g., the Pennsylvania Peace Society; the Universal Peace Union; the British National Peace Society; La Société de la Paix, France; the International Bureau de la Paix, Berne, Switzerland; and the International Arbitration and Peace Association. Boardman sent his 1890 pamphlet, “The Disarmament of Nations,” to the czar of Russia, Queen Victoria, and the archbishop of Canterbury. He was also president of the American Baptist Missionary Union and a founding member of the Brotherhood of the Kingdom in 1892, a group of the leading thinkers and writers of the Social Gospel movement at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
In 1855, he married Ella Catharine Covell. He died on April 28, 1903, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.