William Blissett is a scholarly essayist with a wide-ranging interest in literature and the arts. His The Long Conversation (Oxford), an account of his friendship with the great Catholic artist-poet David Jones, established him as an authority on the personalities and communities in which literary modernism was defined.Blissett's ability to bring literary affiliations and creative milieus to life is seen in his writings on Morris, Pater, the Wagnerian high modernists, and the mid-20th-century poets who acknowledge Edmund Spenser as a literary ancestor. Now 100 years old, he is working on two studies: T.S. Eliot and the Vortex of Modernism and David Jones and the Great Misadventure: In Parenthesis among the War Books.William Blissett FRSC is emeritus professor of English Literature at the University of Toronto.
