The Gigantomachy of E.J. Pratt

F.W. WATT The Gigantomachy of E.J. Pratt ... the giants could never be killed by any god, but onlyby a single, lion-skinned mortaL... (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 1,131) The Greeks had a word for it. Or rather, two words - gigas (giant) and mache (battle) - which became one big word: gigantomachia, the struggle between the giants and the gods. In time, reaching from the world of myth into the world of nature, the definition broadened to encompass metaphorically any war between giant powers. When Iclose my eyes and try to summon up a general impression of the poetry of E.]. Pratt, its Gestalt, as it were, and put a single label on that impression, the monstrous word Gigantomachy is as close as I can come. The purpose of the discussion to follow is to show how appropriate the term is for the prominent surfaces of Pratt's verse, but also to suggest how fully it takes us into the inner life of this poet's imaginative universe. But first, a comment on the Canadian literary context andthe place in it which Pratt began to assert for himself with the publication of Newfoundland Verse in 1923. Readers still differ as to what level of genuine poetic achievement the pioneer tradition of poetry-making in British North America and Canada reached during its first hundred years. But most would at least agree that by the 1880s, the decade of Pratt's birth, much of its colonial imitativeness and amateur gaucherie had been outgrown. The century-long progress of colonial and early Canadian poetry was in the direction of two seemingly opposite goals. First, there was the movement towards detailed, accurate, and recognizable depiction of the native natural environment in a poetic language suitable to the task: the gradual, often discouragingly inept and laborious adaptation of forms and cadences , phrases, and images, drawn from European models, at first neoclassic and then Romantic and Victorian, to serve the radically different subject matter of the New World. In the work of the Confederation poets, Roberts, Carman, Lampman and Scott, the terrain of northern North America consistently takes on specific, recognizable, regional characteristics , emerging as if newly invented to displace the vaguely sublime and generalized vistas created by the conventional rhetoric and poetic diction of their predecessors. In the 1880s and 1890S the simple goal of photographic realism or 'hi-fidelity' natural description was within reach for the first time. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1984/85 128 F.W. WATT But these poets before Pratt were also aiming at a second and more difficult goal: the imaginative wedding of the natural and the human, so that their poetry could express the moral or spiritual meaning of human life while at the same moment revealing the human significance of nature. If the first goal is that of the poetic reporter or documenter of perceived reality, the second is that of the myth-maker: that is, the teller oftales and the seer of visions that bridge the gap between the human and the natural, the subjective and the objective, the reporter and the reported. In the end, the two goals cannot be considered entirely apart. No poem can remain pure documentation of perceived reality, just as no poem can be pure myth, doing without any reference to the world of ordinary perceptions. Yet poets and poems obviously do exhibit opposing tendencies . At one extreme are the accurate renderings of Lampman's Ontario countryside or of Roberts's Maritime settings, which make us. feel the heavy atmosphere of a hay-making day ('Heat') or recognize the fresh beauty of a coastal farm-scene in early summer ('The Pea-Fields'). At the other extreme are the lyric mysticism and subjective intensities of Crawford or Carman which transform a dense wilderness forest into the body of a sleeping Indian chief ('Malcolm's Katie') or the lengthening shadows of an autumn sunset into an ominous stalking giant (,The Eavesdropper'). These two main tendencies continue into the twentieth century, through Pratt and beyond, as indeed they tpust, being two essential and perennial features of the creative urge. Different as his daily perceptions are, Raymond Souster...