Edwin John Pratt was born in 1882 in a Newfoundland Outport to a Methodist Minister Father and as many a lad has done followed in his Father’s footsteps though he never served in a parish, choosing instead to become a teacher of Psychology and English Literature at U of T’s Victoria College. He taught there until 11 years before his death in 1964. Until I embarked upon reading his selected poems I knew of him only as a Canadian Poet added to an Anthology taught in my High School Curriculum. I have a copy of that text which I studied forty years ago just 2 years after the author’s death. The poem in question was Dunkirk—a fitting subject for a Canadian given the number of Canadian boys killed, injured and captured in that debacle.
It is interesting to note that although Pratt lived well into the second half of the Twentieth Century, his poetic style is rooted in the Nineteenth. And, although he studied theology his personal philosophy tended toward agnosticism in his latter days. His poetry, though lyrical, leans toward historical and technical matters—he wasn’t a writer of love poems.
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