Pratt's first published poem was "A Poem on the May examinations," printed in
Acta Victoriana in 1909 when he was a student. In 1917 he privately published a long poem,
Rachel: A Sea Story of Newfoundland. It was only in 1923 that Pratt's first commercial poetry collection,
Newfoundland Verse, was released. "Recognition came with the narrative poems '''''The Witches' Brew
(1925), Titans'''
(1926), and The Roosevelt and the Antinoe'' (1930), and though he published a substantial body of lyric verse, it is as a narrative poet that Pratt is remembered." "Pratt's poetry frequently reflects his Newfoundland background, though specific references to it appear in relatively few poems, mostly in
Newfoundland Verse," says
The Canadian Encyclopedia. "But the sea and maritime life are central to many of his poems, both short (e.g., "Erosion," "Sea-Gulls," "Silences") and long, such as "
The Cachalot" (1926), describing duels between a whale and its foes, a giant squid and a whaling ship and crew;
The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930), recounting the heroic rescue of the crew of a sinking freighter in a winter hurricane;
The Titanic (1935), an ironic retelling of a well-known marine tragedy; and
Behind the Log (1947), the dramatic story of the North Atlantic convoys during
World War II." He added that evolution provided Pratt "the solid framework within which he could achieve an epic style," and also "gave him the themes for his best lyrics" (such as his much-anthologized "From Stone to Steel," from 1932's
Many Moods.) Pratt founded
Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1935, and served as its first editor until 1943. He published 10 poems in the 1936 "milestone selection of modernist verse,"
New Provinces, edited by
F. R. Scott. Expounding on that theme in 1943, in a review essay of
A.J.M. Smith's anthology
The Book of Canadian Poetry, Frye stated that, in Canadian poetry: :The unconscious horror of nature and the subconscious horrors of the mind thus coincide: this amalgamation is the basis of symbolism on which nearly all Pratt's poetry is founded. The fumbling and clumsy monsters of his "Pliocene Armageddon," who are simply incarnate wills to mutual destruction, are the same monsters that beget
Nazism and inspire The Fable of the Goats; and in the fine "Silences," By the time
Brébeuf was published the war had begun; and "in his next four volumes, Pratt returned to themes of patriotism and violence. Sea poetry merges with war poetry in
Dunkirk (1941), which recounts the
epic rescue of British forces while also emphasizing its democratic nature.... Language plays a pivotal role as
Churchill's call inspires the miraculous deliverance. The title poem in
Still Life and Other Verse (1943) satirizes poets who ignore the destruction, the still life, all about them in wartime.... Other poems include 'The Radio in the Ivory Tower,' which shows isolation from world events to be impossible,... 'The Submarine,' which highlights the
atavism of modern warfare by treating the submarine as a shark; and 'Come Away, Death,' which personifies death to show its new horrors in modern times." which Frye later called "the greatest poem in Canadian literature." Pratt's next book, "
They are Returning (1945) celebrates the anticipated end of the war, but also introduces one of the first treatments in literature of the
concentration camps. And retrospectively,
Behind the Log (1947) commemorates the wartime role of the
Royal Canadian Navy and the
merchant marine." In that year Pratt published
Towards the Last Spike, his final epic, on the building of Canada's first transcontinental railroad, the
Canadian Pacific Railway. "Presenting an anglo/central-Canadian perspective, the poem interweaves the political battles between Sir
John A. Macdonald and
Edward Blake with the labourers' physical battles against mountains, mud, and the
Laurentian Shield. In a metaphorical method typical of his style, Pratt characterizes the Shield as a prehistoric lizard rudely aroused from its sleep by the railroad builders' dynamite." Pratt's reputation as a major poet rests on his longer narrative poems, "many of which show him as a mythologizer of the Canadian male experience; but a number of shorter philosophical works also command recognition. 'From stone to steel' asserts the necessity for
redemptive suffering arising from the failure of humanity's spiritual evolution to keep pace without physical evolution and cultural achievements; 'Come away, death' is a complexly allusive account of the way the once-articulate and ceremonial human response to death was rendered inarticulate by the primitive violence of a sophisticated bomb; and 'The truant' dramatically presents a confrontation in a thoroughly patriarchal cosmos between the fiercely independent 'little genus homo' and a totalitarian mechanistic power, 'the great Panjandrum'. Pratt's choices of forms and metrics were conservative for his time; but his diction was experimental, reflecting in its specificity and its frequent technicality both his belief in the poetic power of the accurate and concrete that led him into assiduous research processes, and his view that one of the poet's tasks is to bridge the gap between the two branches of human pursuit: the scientific and artistic."
The Canadian Encyclopedia adds of Pratt: "A major poet, he is, nevertheless, an isolated figure, belonging to no school or movement and directly influencing few other poets of his time." ==Recognition==