Edwin John Pratt

REVIEW ARTICLES Edwin John Pratt The conjunction of Canada's leading poet and her leading critic in the second edition of E. J. Pratt's Collected Poems, edited with an Introduction by Northrop Frye (Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1958, pp. xx, 395, $5.00), is so fortunate as almost to forbid anything but celebration, at least under native skies. But, as Arnold said of Wordsworthians, those whose admiration has no limits are DOt usually the best supporters of a reputation; and the appearance of this volume, drawing together the poetry of a long lifetime (Pratt is now in his seventy~sixth year) is too important an event in Canadian literature not to deserve serious critical attention. Since the 1930's Pratt has been as Northrop Frye says a "kind of unofficial poet laureate"; he has enjoyed the warmest popular and critical approval in this country, and has lived to see his poetry imbibed enthusiastically by young Canadian poets not even dreamed of when he concocted his first witches' brew. The judgment of time on this book will fall not only on Pratt, but on Canadian poetry as a whole and on Canadian taste, both popular aod educated. It is a little difficult now to appreciate the strength and originality, in the Canadian scene, of Pratt's first published collection, Newfoundland Verses (1923) , but a glance at the contemporary poetry of D. C. Scott, Carman, Roberts, or Pickthall, for example, will give some sense of that sudden increase in emotional and intellectual vitality, in range of subject-matter, and in robustness of expression which constituted a virtual revolution. Add to this The Witches' Brew (1925), that comically irreverent rehearsal of what were to be some of Pratt's central themes, and we recognize a new voice unaggressively but undeniably asserting itself as the late-Romantic school was becoming exhausted. However, if we tum to the younger poets of the 1920's (Pratt was then in bis early forties), we see a simultaneous revolution of a very different kind taking place. A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott, and A. M. Klein looked upon themselves as the purveyors of the modern post-World War I critical spirit. and claimed to introduce Yeats, Eliot, and Sitwell and their interests and innovations into Canadian poetry. Pratt's Newfoundland Verses appear in certain respects plainly nineteenth-century by comparison, and his later development was out of the main stream. For Pratt was individualistic enough not only to break with tradition, but also to continue on his way 78 F. W. WATT without apparent concern for those of his fellow Canadian poets who enthusiastically entered the cosmopolitan stream and, using the literary techniques of imagism, free verse, complex metaphor, logical discontinuity, and so on, travelled through the Waste Land into the new provinces of radicalism or Anglo-Catholicism or the subconscious. Depending on one's sympathies , Pratt stands out in recent Canadian literary history like a fossilized Tyrranosauros or like an untamed free-swimming Monarch of the Seas. It has never really been possible to accuse Pratt of being out of touch with his immediate time and place. Not only are there, to bear witness to his openness to the present, the echoes of World War I in Newfoundland Verses ("Ode to December, 1917" and "A Fragment from a Story"' are lett out of the Collected Poems), but there are in later years the long poems based on World War II: Dunkirk (1941), Behind the Log (1947)-the story of wartime convoy service-and They are Returning (the last also uncollected). In other volumes there are frequent direct reflections of international and domestic history between the wars: the Great Depression; the rise of totalitarianism ; Italian, German, and Japanese aggression; and, more generally, the brazen triumphs of the modern machine over humanity. Pratt has held the mirror up to his society for four decades, and a lively record of its perversities , its sins, and its shame, as well as it courage and achievements, is to be read in his poetry. He has shown at times that he could be as adept at satire and irony as many of his more Audenesque contemporaries. His snapshot...