Skip to main content

Melita Hume Obituary

Melita Hume presenting trophy to young athlete


Melita Hume, who has died at the age of 91, on December 27, 2012, was born in June, 1921 in Matapedia, Canada, the daughter of William and Mary Fraser.  She spent most of her life in Quebec: on the Gaspe Peninsula, then in Melbourne, St-Lambert and Richmond.  Melita was married to the late Ian Hume, an athletics coach and sporting figure, for 64 years. Trained as a teacher at Macdonald College, McGill, she had a lifelong thirst for knowledge and a great love of reading and collecting books that she passed on to all her children and grandchildren, with whom she was a curious mixture of the stern and the imaginatively playful. Melita was characterised by a great sense of composure, integrity, patience and intellectual curiosity. Melita was always willing to debate any idea or issue, often over a hearty home-cooked meal grown from her garden.  She loved to walk or ski in her woods, and was a naturalist, with an expert command of the names of all the flora and fauna of her region. Over the decades she compiled a personal library of tens of thousands of books, which she carefully categorised – Canadian writing and Russian literature were among her favourites.  In her country home she might be found by a roaring fire reading Speak, Memory by Nabokov, or the latest anthology of Eastern Townships poetry; nearby would be annotated issues of Books In Canada.  She wrote out by longhand thousands of index cards, consisting of biographical and critical notes, for a vast project (so far unpublished), which would be an encyclopaedia of Canadian literature. Her love of poetry, books, and global literature has made her the ideal person to name a major international poetry prize after.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A  poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...
15 comments
Read more

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
3 comments
Read more