MacDonald, Wilson, 1880-1967 : Wilson MacDonald, poet and playwright, born at Cheapside, Ontario, was the eldest of two sons and two daughters of Alexander and Anna Maria Pugsley (1855-1887). His mother played the piano and sang in the church choir. His father, a tailor, became a baptist minister after the death of Wilson's mother. Music and poetry were passions of his parents, and these loves instilled in Wilson the dream of becoming a poet. By the age of four, MacDonald was already reading and writing, skills taught him by his mother. When only seven years old, his mother died. This was a traumatic blow to the boy.
He then went to live with his maternal grandfather, Rev. William Pugsley, a baptist minister, and his grandmother, in Port Dover. Wilson was an outstanding student educated at the Port Dover public school. This proficiency continued throughout his terms at Woodstock College where he completed four years in three. He then attended McMaster University for two years. MacDonald claimed that from the fifth grade he wanted to become a poet. At McMaster, his English teacher, Theodore Harding Rand, himself a recognized poet, convinced Wilson of his life's ambition.
After leaving university, MacDonald travelled extensively throughout eastern and southern Ontario selling stereoscopic views, and in the northern United States and Ontario selling advertisements. Although successful at advertising, he did not enjoy the work. He would save some money, then spend his time writing poetry, and when he ran out of funds, return to sales. In 1902, he worked on a horse-boat to pay his passage to England where he hoped he might be more successful with his writing. Three months later, unsuccessful, he returned to Canada and the United States and his advertising career.
His experiences on the horse-boat and in England are chronicled in The Song of the Undertow. In Newport, Rhode Island, in 1908, he gave the first recital of his poetry. In Montreal, at the Y.M.C.A. in 1909, he gave the first recital of his poetry to a paying audience. In 1912, he travelled to western Canada where he wrote poetry and presented more readings. He taught school. He impressed audiences with his sleight of hand artistry. While in Vancouver and Victoria, he began writing plays and wrote an opera. From 1918-1923, while still writing poetry, he worked his way eastward, producing and performing in his opera in many towns and cities. In 1918, his first book of poetry was published (Songs of the Prairie Land).
Since then, other collections have been published. These include: Out of the Wilderness, A Flagon of Beauty, Armand Dussault, Comber Cove, The Song of the Undertow, Caw-Caw Ballads, Greater Poems of the Bible, Pugwash, The Angels of the Earth, and The Lyric Years, some of which have been published in his own handwriting and illuminated with his own artistic designs. Also to his credit are more than fifty musical numbers, both songs and operas. He has lectured extensively in universities in Canada, the United States and England giving recitals and addressing students in many Ontario high schools. Two thousand five hundred people attended one of these lectures at Yale University.
MacDonald was also an athlete excelling in hockey, lacrosse, soccer, tennis and athletics. At eighty years of age, he still skated and played tennis. Extending the scope of his creativity, he had some inventions patented. In 1935, he married Dorothy Ann Colomy of Massachusetts. In 1939, their only child, Ann Meriden (later Mrs. Gordon McLauchlan) was born.
