E. J. PrattE.J. Pratt was a well-known and celebrated Canadian poet. Some of his work was very good, and some of it was passable, but a few pieces really stick out in my mind. I've listed some. He was half from the modern school, and half from the 19th-century tradition of controlled metre. His LifeE.J. Pratt was born on January 4th, 1882 in Newfoundland. His father was a clergyman from Yorkshire. He grew up in the remote Newfoundland outports. This harsh lifestyle is largely gone today due to the collapse of the Atlantic fish stocks from over-fishing. He went to school in the outports and in St. John's served as a draper's assistant for three years. He later went on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto. In 1912 he got his M.A. from Victoria, and wrote his thesis about Demonology. Be earned a B.D. (Bachelor of Divinity) degree in 1913 and was ordained a Methodist minister, taught psychology and was a practicing minister for some time. He earned a Ph.D. in 1917. This Ph.D. thesis was "Pauline Eschatology". After marrying Viola Whitney in 1918, he landed an English teaching job with Victoria College, his alma mater. He had one child. As a successful teacher, he travelled the country. He won numerous awards, including "Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George" in the King's Honour List. He was also given two Governor General's Awards. He retired in 1953. He died in Toronto on April 26th, 1964 His PoetryPeter Buitenhius sais this about E.J. Pratt in 1967: "Fred Cogswell has called Pratt "the last-born literary child of frontier (north) America", and there is a good deal of truth in that jocular observation. He belongs in a tradition that is far more (north) American that British, and far more western than eastern, for all his Atlantic-seaboard birth. In his philosophical outlook, at least, Pratt is close to the Californian writers Jack London, Frank Norris, and Robinson Jeffers, particularly the two novelists. They tended to see human relations in terms of force, nature in terms of tooth and claw, and history in terms of growth. In the still primitive conditions of the Far West and the Canadian eastern seaboard, the wilderness of plain, desert, sea, and rock gave a meaningful setting to the clash of forces taking place within society too. Pratt's work is filled with images of primitive nature and evolutionary history." Source for text and information: "Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt", edited w/introduction by Peter Buitenhuis. Toronto: The Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1968. |