Poets

Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium.

He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields".

Biography

McCrae was born in McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario to Lieutenant-Colonel David McCrae and Janet Simpson Eckford; he was the grandson of Scottish immigrants. He attended the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute and became a member of the Guelph militia regiment. The background of his family is military.

McCrae worked on his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto in 1892–93. While there, he was a member of the Toronto militia, The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada. He was eventually promoted to Captain and commanded the company. He took a year off his studies at the university due to recurring problems with asthma. Among his papers in the John McCrae House in Guelph is a letter he wrote on 18 July 1893 to Laura Kains while he trained as an artilleryman at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. "...I have a manservant .. Quite a nobby place it is, in fact .. My windows look right out across the bay, and are just near the water’s edge; there is a good deal of shipping at present in the port; and the river looks very pretty." He was a resident master in English and Mathematics in 1894 at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.

He returned to the University of Toro..