Charles Tory Bruce was born in Port Shoreham, Nova Scotia on 11 May 1906; he died in Toronto, Ontario on 19 December 1971.

Upon graduating from Mount Allison University in 1927, the year his first book of poetry Wild Apples appeared, Bruce began his life long profession as a journalist, first with the Halifax Morning-Chronicle, and then with the Canadian Press’s New York Bureau (1928–33). In Halifax, Bruce began his affiliation with the Song Fisherman Circle, a relationship that shaped his second book of poems, Tomorrow’s Tide (1932). In 1933, Bruce transferred to Toronto, where he published four more books of poetry: Personal Note (1941), Grey Ship Moving (1945), The Flowering Summer (1947), and The Mulgrave Road (1951), which won the Governor General’s Literary Award (1951).

Though Bruce’s regional poetics are not generally regarded as avant-garde, A. J. M. Smith included him in the seminal Book of Canadian Poetry (1943) on the basis that his work ‘represent[s] a certain “aspect” of the modern movement’ in its ‘simplification of technique’.