by authors ranging from Darwin to Dickens. Lochhead completed his pre-medical Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943 and was accepted into medicine. But instead Lochhead joined the Canadian Army. He received training first, as an artillery officer, and then, in the infantry. He attained the rank of lieutenant, but the Second World War ended in Europe before he could be sent to the front. He then volunteered to fight in the Pacific War, but it too ended before he could be trained as a paratrooper.His experiences in the Canadian military formed the basis for his 1984 book, The Panic Field: Prose Poems in which he explores "the ways of men, caught up in the sprawling net of the army."<ref>{{cite web|author=Lochhead, Douglas|title=The Panic Field: Prose Poems|url=http://www.gooselane.com/books.php?ean=9780864920218|url-status=dead|publisher=Goose Lane|accessdate=March 28, 2016|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20160410181206/http://www.gooselane.com/books.php?ean=9780864920218|archivedate=April 10, 2016}}</ref> Lochhead was still in the army when he attended a friend's wedding in Toronto. He visited the University of Toronto campus and suddenly decided to pursue post-graduate studies there in English. He wrote his thesis on the British poets of the First World War earning his Master's degree in 1947. Marriage and library career After graduating from the U. of T., Douglas Lochhead drifted here and there from a job as an advertising copywriter to work as a government information officer. In 1948, he met Jean St. Clair Beckwith, a native of Cape Breton who was working as a librarian at the Toronto Public Library. They married the next year and at her suggestion, Lochhead enrolled at McGill University where he received his Bachelor of Library Science in 1951. The degree led to a career in the libraries of five universities. From west to east In 1951–52, Lochhead served as chief librarian at Victoria College, now the University of Victoria, in Victoria, British Columbia. When he wrote to Cornell seeking a job there because he had heard about the beauty of its library and campus, he received a telegram back offering him a job. He served at Cornell as cataloguing librarian until 1953, when he was offered the university or chief librarian's position at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After seven years in Halifax, Lochhead became the first director of libraries in 1960 at the fledgling York University in Toronto. He helped plan and organize two large libraries there. "I was so busy buying books, I had to work like blazes to spend the money," he told an interviewer