E. J. Pratt

E. J. Pratt (1882-1964), Canadian poet, considered by many the leading poet in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. Pratt is best known for his narrative poems depicting the struggles between humanity and nature and the building of the Canadian nation. He was one of the few Canadian writers of epics.

The son of a Methodist pastor, Edwin John Pratt was born in Western Bay, Newfoundland, and raised in a number of coastal Newfoundland villages. His proximity to the sea and the life-and-death struggles associated with seafaring life strongly influenced his later poetry. Pratt trained for the ministry and was ordained in 1913, but he never practiced as a minister. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he received a B.A. degree in 1911, an M.A. degree in 1912, a bachelor’s degree of divinity in 1913, and a Ph.D. degree in theology in 1917. He began publishing poetry in the 1910s while teaching psychology at the University of Toronto. In 1920, based on his strength as a poet, Pratt was hired by the department of English at the university, where he remained until his retirement in 1953. From 1936 to 1943, Pratt edited Canadian Poetry Magazine and was an important mentor for emerging poets.

Pratt’s first book of poetry, Newfoundland Verses (1923), collected his early short lyric poems about the harsh life at the edge of the sea. His early poems showed a gift for narrative that became central to Pratt’s longer works, beginning with The Witches' Brew (1925), a comic sea yarn about the effect of alcohol on fish. Pratt continued his tales of the sea in Titans (1926), a pair of epic poems imagining the evolutionary struggles between species, and The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930), the story of an ocean rescue. His sea poems culminated in The Titanic (1935), which retold that sea disaster’s lesson of human pride conquered by nature.

In shorter lyrics such as “From Stone to Steel” in Many Moods (1932), as well as in the longer poems of Titans, Pratt explored his ongoing interest in natural and technological evolution. This interest is also evident in “The Truant,” a long poem from Still Life and Other Verse (1943). “The Truant” is the comic account of a power struggle between a cold, mechanistic universe and a mere human, a “biped, rational, six feet high.” In the poem, the human’s triumph reflects Pratt's conviction that a Christian, humanistic perspective is the only way to make sense of the universe.

During and after World War II (1939-1945), Pratt devoted a number of works to poems about the war, including Dunkirk (1941) and Behind the Log (1947). Perhaps his best-known works are his late epics about the settlement of Canada. Brébeuf and His Brethren (1940) described 17th-century Jesuit missionaries among the indigenous people of Canada, and Towards the Last Spike (1952) concerned the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. These narratives present the building of the Canadian nation as a heroic effort by the forces of civilization. The Collected Poems of E. J. Pratt appeared in 1958. Pratt received three Governor General's Literary Awards for poetry, for Fable of the Goats and Other Poems (1937), Brébeuf and His Brethren, and Towards the Last Spike.