E. J. Pratt

E. J. Pratt is considered to be the poet who initiated the Canadian modernist movement. Yet, unlike his literary contemporaries, Pratt was attracted to the convention of epic poetry: Brebeuf and His Brethren (1940) and Towards the Last Spike (1952) are impressive examples of this style and are also ambitious attempts to forge a national mythology through verse. Edwin John Pratt was born at Western Bay, Newfoundland. As he grew up in this desolate coastal town, Pratt's association with the sea impressed him with an image that would later reverberate throughout his poetry. Although trained as a Methodist minister, Pratt evidently experienced a crisis of faith following his studies in philosophy and psychology at the University of Toronto, where he received a Ph.D. in theology. In 1920, largely because of his promise as a poet, he was given an English professorship at Victoria College, University of Toronto, a post from which he retired in 1953. Pratt's verse is aptly described by E. K. Brown as the "work of an experimenter who is continuing to clutch at a tradition although that tradition is actually stifling him."