WILLIAM FRANK "BILL" BLISSET

William Frank Blissett, FRSC (October 11, 1921-October 8, 2025) William "Bill" Blissett died peacefully in the evening, just short of his 104th birthday. He is mourned by the congregation of Saint Mary Magdalene church where he worshipped, by colleagues in the University of Toronto English department where he taught, by the staff of the Robarts Library where over the years he hosted a community of researchers at "elevenses" daily, and by former students worldwide whom he introduced to English drama in the age of Shakespeare. His gentle, sparkling and irrepressible wit never left him. Bill was born in East End, Saskatchewan, to a Canadian veteran of the First World War, Ralph Blissett, postmaster, and his English wife Gladys (née Jones), whom Bill described as witty, literate, and musical. At age seven, on doctor's advice, his mother removed him to southern California, where he acquired his passion for baseball. Back in Canada, he attended Victoria College and the University of British Columbia, taking his B. A. in 1941. Invalidated for combat in World War II, he did war work in the Civil Service in Ottawa. In 1946 he entered the graduate school of the University of Toronto, from which, in 1950, he would take his Ph.D. under the supervision of Northrop Frye. There he met his lifelong friend, the poet George Johnston, with whom he kept up a regular literary correspondence for the next fifty years. The letters are edited with commentary in Inward of Poetry (Porcupine's Quill, 2011) by Sean Kane. From 1950 to 1960 Bill taught at the University of Saskatchewan and from 1965-1970 at Huron College, University of Western Ontario. In 1965 he returned to Toronto, serving for the first eleven years as editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly, and retiring from teaching in 1987. A collection of essays by admiring colleagues, Craft and Tradition (Calgary, 1995), edited by H. B. de Groot and Alexander Leggatt, was published in his honour. He published many articles on Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson; edited a collection of essays on Jonson; and was a major editor of The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto, 1990). He also published regularly on T. S. Eliot; Richard Wagner; the Victorian intellectuals Walter Pater and William Morris; and the poets of "the Great War," especially the Anglo-Welsh artist and poet, David Jones, whose In Parenthesis, W. H. Auden called the greatest book on the First World War. A world authority on Jones, Blissett donated his collection of first editions and artworks to the University of Toronto's Fisher Rare Book Library. Bill regularly visited the reclusive Jones in his "dugout," a basement apartment near Hampstead Heath, until the poet's death in 1974. Their discussions-of English and Welsh poetry, of modern painters, of the Catholic Church and its liturgy-are affectionately remembered in The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones (Oxford, 1981), the only close portrait of this great twentieth-century poet-painter. Blissett's last essay, completed when he was 102, was on Eliot's play, The Confidential Clerk. His last book, published when he was 100, was The Porpoise and the Otter: The Literary Friendship of Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterton (Rock's Mills Press, 2022). Bill travelled widely, spending frequent intervals in Venice; he delivered scholarly papers internationally; and he was an enthusiastic attendee of the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. He was an even more enthusiastic attendee of performances by the Canadian Opera Company and of Blue Jays games, often inviting students and friends to share his passion for the Toronto team from his regular seats along the third base line. From 1945, Bill was a regular parishioner of Saint Mary Magdalene Anglican church in Toronto, known for its traditional liturgy and famous for its music. Bill recalled his first attendance there at evening prayer on Ascension Day, 1945, when "the heavens opened" to the choir singing the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis with antiphonal harmony from a second choir in the gallery. His spirits were kept up in his later years by fellow parishioner, Conrad Bergschneider, who attended him with generous and affectionate care. A Requiem Mass will be sung for him at Church of St Mary Magdalene, 477 Manning Avenue on November 15th at 10:00 a.m. Reception to follow. Condolences may be forwarded through www.humphreymiles.com.