The English Library of the University of Toronto presents information on Canadian poet Edwin John Pratt (1882-?). The library offers biographical information on Pratt, the full text of several of Pratt's poems, and a bibliography of his works.
This work is a result of the fourth symposium in the University of Ottawa Symposia series following those on Canadian writers Grove (1973), Klein (1974), and Lampman (1975). Scholars, friends, and readers gathered on May 1-2, 1976, to discuss "Ned Pratt", otherwise known as E.J. Pratt (1883-1964), the man and the poet. The two day event featured a biographical panel led by Fred Cogswell and various papers intended to establish the literary identity of the distinguished Canadian author. Other contributors include Glenn Clever, Elizabeth Brewster, Ralph Gustafson, Carl F. Klinck, Germaine Warkentin, Peter Stevens, Peter Buitenhuis, Sandra Djwa, Peter Hunt, Agnes Nyland, Robert Gibbs, Louis K. MacKendrick, and Lila Laakso.
E.J. Pratt was the premier Canadian poet of the first half of the 20th century. He was an author of 13 volumes of poetry and one of Canada's most prominent literary figures by the 1940s. Newfoundland Verse, published in 1923, was one of his first poetic collections.
The purpose of The Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt is to introduce Pratt's poems to the college and university student, to provide the kind of information needed for an informed reading of the poems. The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen on the joint basis of representativeness and intrinsic value. This includes the major long poems, The Witches' Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, BrTbeuf and His Brethren, Towards the Last Spike, and important shorter lyrics including 'Newfoundland,' 'Come Away, Death,' and 'From Stone to Steel.' The editorial approach has been historical, chronological and biographical. The introduction locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his early modernist contemporaries, concluding that E.J. Pratt remains the most important and influential Canadian poet up to the mid-fifties. As such, he has been an key figure in shaping the Canadian literary imagination of his day and the later poetics of landscape adopted by Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood. The reader is provided with annotations, textual notes, a biographical chronology, and an introduction which locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his modernist contemporaries. The printed volumes is supplemented by the electronic resources of the Selected Pratt website at http://www.trentu.ca/pratt/selected.
Towards the Last Spike was written in 1952 by Canadian poet E. J. Pratt. It is a long narrative poem in blank verse about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad line in Canada, that of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), from 1871 through 1885. Excerpt: "It was the same world then as now—the same, Except for little differences of speed And power, and means to treat myopia To show an axe-blade infinitely sharp Splitting things infinitely small, or else Provide the telescopic sight to roam Through curved dominions never found in fables. The same, but for new particles of speech..."