Peter Trower: A Poet Laureate For British Columbia

While poet, author, and musician Peter Trower has been part of the literary community of Canada for over forty years, his work has largely been ignored by academics. This thesis attempts to rectify this deficiency by presenting Trower’s poetry as crucial to understanding aspects of British Columbia’s history and culture, and the flow of poetic tradition from Europe to Canada in the twentieth century. Further, this project delineates the unique poetic of Trower and how it affirms typically negative human experiences such as absence and sorrow. For contemporary readers, Trower’s poetry addresses concerns of gender; it reveals how masculinity is constructed in terms of a systemic hegemony as well as how the view of masculinity as homogenous and inevitable is inadequate. This project solidifies Trower’s proper location and importance in the literary and academic community.