Milton Acorn; The People's Poet

Milton Acorn

The People's Poet

Milton Acorn is to Prince Edward Island’s poetry what Lucy Maud Montgomery (author of Anne of Grenn Gables) is to its fiction.

However, although Milton Acorn, dubbed as PEI’s greatest poet, was born in Charlottetown in 1923 and died there in 1986, he spent most of his poetically productive years in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. He participated in the Second World War and sustained injuries because of which he collected disability pension. He left the island in the late forties supporting himself partly as a carpenter and partly with his pension.

Milton Acorn, who was awarded the title of “the People’s Poet” by his friends, had a leftist ideology. He considered himself the common labourer’s poet and called himself a “Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, and Canadian nationalist,” but towards the end of his life, he resigned from all the leftist groups he had participated in and disagreed with the ideology.

Milton who had a bipolar disorder eventually returned to the island in 1981 and lived there until his death (of heart attack and complications due to diabetes) in 1986.

What I Know of God is This

by Milton Acorn

What I know of God is this:
That He has hands, for He touches me.
I can testify to nothing else;
Living among many unseen beings
Like the whippoorwill I'm constantly hearing
But was pointed out to me just once.

Last of our hopes when all hope's past
God, never let me call on Thee
Distracting myself from a last chance
Which goes just as quick as it comes;
And I have doubts of Your omnipotence.
All I ask is... Keep on existing
Keeping Your hands. Continue to touch me.