William Blissett was born in Saskatchewan on October 11, 1921. Reading the modernist poets at age sixteen, he wrote his first published scholarly essay, on T.S. Eliot, while still an undergraduate at UBC. He met George Johnston in graduate school at U of T where Northrop Frye supervised both their theses. Following ten years at the University of Saskatchewan and five at Western, Blissett returned to the University of Toronto in 1965, becoming a long-serving editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly and co-editor of The Spenser Encyclopedia. He retired from teaching, but not from scholarship, in 1987. Now in his ninetieth year, he still gives papers internationally.
Blissett is a writer in the Guy Davenport manner, extensive, encyclopedic and stylish, given to life-long projects at present being resolved into books: essays on his friend, the modernist poet and painter David Jones; on Shakespeare and Jonson; on the influence of Wagner on the literary modernists and of Edmund Spenser on poets alive at the mid-twentieth century (complete with letters from each poet); and essays for the William Morris Society and the Chesterton Society. Traveller, opera-goer, storyteller and wit, Blissett lives in Toronto.