A Journey Towards Poetry

About the Book

John Mogan was born in Toronto and raised at Paris in western Ontario. After high school, he studied English language and literature at the University of Toronto, where he took his BA (1951) and his MA (1957). He taught English at Etobicoke Collegiate in Toronto and entered medicine in 1957. He went into family practice from 1963 until 1969, when he was awarded a Harvard Fellowship in psychiatry. He practiced in Massachusetts until his retirement in 1993 and then took locum tenens positions in Maine and Arizona until he moved back to Canada in 2008. He resides now in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This work reflects his lifelong interest in poetry.

About the Author

A Journey Towards Poetry begins with the author’s examination of the long history of efforts to define poetry. He moves through what poetry says to how poetry sounds. His approach examines not what poetry is so much as what poetry does and how it achieves that function. His entire lifework has brought him to the essential emotional component without which there is no poetry.