write an essay about Stephen leacock poems
Answers
The author of thirty-five volumes of humor and twenty-seven works on history, biography, criticism, economics, and political science, Leacock is best known for satirical sketches that poke fun at human foibles. Leacock's acknowledged masterpiece, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, is a collection of related stories that satirize the provinciality and pettiness of the inhabitants of a small Canadian town. It is the best example of his craft, and uses humor to contemplate the incongruities of life as well as human hypocrisy and pretense. The tone of Leacock's other major work, the collection Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, is slightly darker but still uses amiable humor to attack corruption, self-interest, and concern with money and power in big city in North America. Leacock's conservative political stance is reflected in his humorous sketches of individualism, materialism, and worship of technology. Leacock's distinctive comic style, with its combination of British nonsense humor and understatement and American wit and exaggeration, made him the most popular humorist writing in English between 1910 and 1925. However, for many years his literary importance was overlooked by scholars, and some commentators considered his work lacking in seriousness and complexity. Critical reevaluation of his work has shifted this opinion, earning Leacock the reputation of Canada's comic master. Author and critic J. B. Priestly found Leacock's humor to express an essential Canadian quality, and the novelist Robertson Davies has called him “a humorist of distinguished gifts, with a range and brilliance not often equaled.”
Biographical Information
Leacock was born in 1869 in Hampshire, England. In 1876 he moved with his family to a 100-acre farm a few miles south of Lake Simcoe near the village of Sutton, Ontario. Life on the farm with his ten brothers and sisters was strenuous. Leacock's father's heavy drinking, wanderings, and eventual disappearance compounded the family's financial difficulties. Leacock's mother, however, was determined to give her children a good education, and Leacock attended Upper Canada College in Toronto. Leacock then entered the University of Toronto on scholarship in 1887 to study modern and classical languages and literature. However, his studies were cut short because his mother needed financial assistance to help raise eight siblings. In 1888 Leacock enrolled in a three-month training course to qualify for teaching high school. After his training he taught first at Oxbridge High School then at Upper Canada College—an engagement that allowed him to continue his studies at the University of Toronto—where he completed his B.A. in 1891.
After earning his degree, Leacock began publishing humorous articles in periodicals. His first piece appeared in the Toronto humor magazine Grip, in 1894. He continued to publish humorous sketches in Canadian and American magazines throughout the 1890s. Leacock's interest in the writings of Thorsten Veblen led him to pursue graduate studies in political science and economics under Veblen at the University of Chicago in 1899. While a student at Chicago, Leacock married Beatrix Hamilton, an aspiring actress from Toronto. He completed his Ph.D. in 1903 and began lecturing at McGill University in Montreal. He was appointed full professor and chair of the political science and economics department in 1908, a post he held until his retirement in 1936.
In 1910, with the financial assistance of his brother George, Leacock published Literary Lapses, a collection of previously published writings. The volume sold extremely well and was followed the next year with Nonsense Novels, a compilation of parodies of some of the most popular genres of literature, which established his fame. In 1912 Leacock published Sunshine Sketches of Little Town, a work based in part on his summers spent in Orillia and on his own childhood experiences. It was immensely popular in Canada and the United States, and cemented Leacock's reputation as the foremost humorist in Canada. Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, published in 1914 was also a major critical and popular success. In 1925, Leacock's wife died of breast cancer, and he thereafter committed himself to fundraising drives for cancer research.