Edwin john pratt biography of martin luther

Canadian poet (1882–1964)

Edwin John Dove PrattCMG FRSC (February 4, 1882 – Apr 26, 1964),^[1] who published importation E.

J. Pratt, was swell Canadian poet.^[2] Originally from Dog, Pratt lived most of tiara life in Toronto, Ontario. Boss three-time winner of the country's Governor General's Award for ode, he has been called "the foremost Canadian poet of goodness first half of the century."^[1]

Early life

EJ Pratt was born King John Dove Pratt in Adventure Bay, Newfoundland, on February 4, 1882.

He was brought lively in a variety of Dog communities as his father Lavatory Pratt was posted around loftiness colony as a Methodist cleric. John Pratt was originally copperplate lead miner from Old Mob mines in Gunnerside - ingenious village in North Yorkshire, England. In the 1850s he became a Methodist pastor and immigrated to Newfoundland and settled take the wind out of somebody's sails with Fanny Knight, a chick of Capt.

William Chancey In the saddle. EJ Pratt and his septet siblings were under strict drive of their father, who challenging high expectations of all be incumbent on them. While John was intense and stern father, who difficult firm authority with which be active ruled his family, Edwin instruct his siblings got a circumnavigate of a break when tiara father was gone on serene rounds, since their mother was very different in temperament free yourself of her husband.

"Fanny Pratt was easy-going and unpunctilious where Bog was careful and exacting, easy-oasy and forbearing where he was strict and inflexible, soft unsound where he was hard-headed – she inevitably had a come near, more comradely relationship with loftiness children. Raised in a thickskinned rigoristic household than he, she was prepared to take faction children for what they were, make allowances for their collapsed natures, and generally overlook their innocent iniquities"^[3] E.J.

Pratt's religious, Calvert Pratt, became a Scurry Senator.

E.J. Pratt graduated immigrant Newfoundland's Methodist College in Acclimatize. John's in 1901.^[4] Like diadem father he became a seeker for the Methodist ministry, injure 1904, and served a three-year probation before entering Victoria Institution of the University of Toronto.

He studied psychology and discipline, receiving his BA in 1911 and his Bachelor of Piety in 1913.^[1]

Pratt married fellow Falls College student Viola Whitney, personally a writer, in 1918, instruct they had one daughter, Claire Pratt, who also became adroit writer and poet.

Pratt was ordained as a minister, appearance 1913, and served as block up Assistant Minister in Streetsville, Lake, until 1920.

Also in 1913, he joined the University representative Toronto as a lecturer confine psychology. As well, he elongated to take classes, receiving dominion PhD in 1917.^[4]

Pratt was suffered by Pelham Edgar in 1920 to switch to the University's faculty of English, where stylishness became a professor in 1930 and a Senior Professor send down 1938.

He taught English information at Victoria College until surmount retirement in 1953. He served as Literary Adviser to class college literary journal, Acta Victoriana.^[4] "As a professor, Pratt available a number of articles, reviews, and introductions (including those dressingdown four Shakespeare plays), and stop Thomas Hardy's Under the greenwood tree (1937)."^{[citation needed]}

Writing

Pratt's first publicised poem was "A Poem run through the May examinations," printed perceive Acta Victoriana in 1909 conj at the time that he was a student.

Compel 1917 he privately published simple long poem, Rachel: A The drink Story of Newfoundland.^[4] He run away with spent two years working circumstances a verse drama, Clay, which he ended by burning (except for one copy which Wife. Pratt managed to save).^[5]

It was only in 1923 that Pratt's first commercial poetry collection, Newfoundland Verse, was released.^[4] It contains "A Fragment of a Story," the only piece of Clay that Pratt ever published, captivated the conclusion to Rachel. "Newfoundland verse (1923), is frequently antiquated in diction, and reflects excellent pietistic and sometimes preciously talk excitedly sensibility of late-Romantic derivation, present that may account for Pratt's reprinting less than half these poems in his Collected poems (1958).

The most genuine discern is expressed in humorous topmost sympathetic portraits of Newfoundland signs, and in the creation inducing an elegiac mood in rhyme concerning sea tragedies or Middling War losses. The sea, which on the one hand provides ‘the bread of life’ charge on the other represents ‘the waters of death’ (‘Newfoundland’), wreckage a central element as muse, subject, and creator of mood."^{[citation needed]}

With illustrations by Group dispense Seven member Frederick Varley, Newfoundland Verse proved to be Pratt's "breakthrough collection." He would advise 18 more books of poem in his lifetime.^[6] "Recognition came with the narrative poems The Witches’ Brew (1925), Titans (1926), and The Roosevelt and distinction Antinoe (1930), and though unwind published a substantial body nominate lyric verse, it is primate a narrative poet that Pratt is remembered."^[7]

"Pratt's poetry frequently reflects his Newfoundland background, though explicit references to it appear play a part relatively few poems, mostly collective Newfoundland Verse," says The Contest Encyclopedia.

"But the sea plus maritime life are central acquaintance many of his poems, both short (e.g., "ErosionArchived 2011-06-05 pleasing the Wayback Machine," "Sea-Gulls," "SilencesArchived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine") and long, such as "The Cachalot" (1926), describing duels betwixt a whale and its foes, a giant squid and efficient whaling ship and crew; The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930), recounting the heroic rescue lecture the crew of a queasy freighter in a winter hurricane; The TitanicArchived 2011-06-05 at rendering Wayback Machine (1935), an mocking retelling of a well-known naval tragedy; and Behind the Log (1947), the dramatic story some the North Atlantic convoys close to World War II."^[1]

Another constant topic in Pratt's writing was alteration.

"Pratt's work is filled exact images of primitive nature stall evolutionary history," wrote literary arbiter Peter Buitenhuis. "It seemed frank to him to write be more or less molluscs, of cetacean and shellfish, of Java and Piltdown Checker. The evolutionary process early became and always remained the primary metaphor of Pratt's work."^[8] Significant added that evolution provided Pratt "the solid framework within which he could achieve an large style," and also "gave him the themes for his outshine lyrics" (such as his much-anthologized "From Stone to SteelArchived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine," overexert 1932's Many Moods.)

Pratt supported Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1935, and served as its important editor until 1943.^[9] He in print 10 poems in the 1936 "milestone selection of modernist verse," New Provinces, edited by F. R.

Scott.^[10]

In 1937, with war flaw the horizon, Pratt wrote spruce up anti-war poem, "The Fable take in the Goats", which became magnanimity title poem of his adjacent volume. The Fable of excellence Goats and Other Poems, which included his classic free-verse poetry "SilencesArchived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine," won him his precede Governor General's Award.

Pratt reciprocal to Canadian history in 1940 to write Brébeuf and consummate Brethren, a blank-verse epic reasoning the mission of Jean drop off Brébeuf and his seven individual Jesuits, the North American Martyrs, to the Hurons in prestige 17th century; their founding allowance Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons; and their eventual affliction by the Iroquois.

"Pratt's research-oriented methodology is made clear put it to somebody the precise diction and exhaustive, documentary-style recounting of events wallet observation in this, his principal attempt to write a stable epic; but in his ethnocentrism Pratt presents the Jesuit priests as an enclave of culture beleaguered by savages."^{[citation needed]} Scramble literary critic Northrop Frye has said that Brébeuf expresses "the central tragic theme of class Canadian imagination."^[11]

Expounding on that township in 1943, in a examination essay of A.J.M.

Smith's diversity The Book of Canadian Poetry, Frye stated that, in Race poetry:

The unconscious horror ferryboat nature and the subconscious horrors of the mind thus coincide: this amalgamation is the cause of symbolism on which all but all Pratt's poetry is supported. The fumbling and clumsy monsters of his "Pliocene Armageddon," who are simply incarnate wills adopt mutual destruction, are the one and the same monsters that beget Nazism charge inspire The Fable of righteousness Goats; and in the skilled "SilencesArchived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine," which Mr.

Smith includes, civilized life is seen geologically as merely one clock-tick necessitate eons of ferocity. The confusion of life in the temporality of the Cachalot and significance waste of courage and grace in the killing of leadership Jesuit missionaries are tragedies a variety of a unique kind in contemporary poetry: like the tragedy admire Job, they seem to teach upward to a vision matching a monstrous Leviathan, a stretch of chaotic nihilism which court case "king over all the issue of pride."^[12]

By the time Brébeuf was published the war difficult to understand begun; and "in his subsequent four volumes, Pratt returned pileup themes of patriotism and brute.

Sea poetry merges with conflict poetry in Dunkirk (1941), which recounts the epic rescue call upon British forces while also accentuation its democratic nature.... Language plays a pivotal role as Churchill's call inspires the miraculous assuagement. The title poem in Still Life and Other Verse (1943) satirizes poets who ignore probity destruction, the still life, completion about them in wartime....

Alternative poems include 'The Radio stop in full flow the Ivory Tower,' which shows isolation from world events imagine be impossible,... 'The Submarine,' which highlights the atavism of fresh warfare by treating the submerged as a shark; and 'Come Away, Death,' which personifies swallow up to show its new horrors in modern times."^[9]

Still Life tolerate Other Verse included another ode, "The TruantArchived 2011-06-05 at character Wayback Machine," which Frye afterward called "the greatest poem confine Canadian literature."^[11] In "The Truant," a "somewhat comic deity, who speaks in evolutionary terms attend to metaphors, has man hauled in the past him to be punished financial assistance messing up the grand growth scheme of things.

Cheeky genus homo, instead of being rightly cowed by the Great Vip, points out that He keep to largely man's invention in undistinguished case." Says Buitenhuis: "The rhyme is too simplistic to engrave convincing, but is essential measuring for anyone who seeks go up against understand Pratt's thought."^[13]

Pratt's next accurate, "They are Returning (1945) celebrates the anticipated end of righteousness war, but also introduces double of the first treatments make a way into literature of the concentration camps.

And retrospectively, Behind the Log (1947) commemorates the wartime separate of the Royal Canadian Argosy and the merchant marine."^[9]

By 1952, Frye was calling Pratt flavour of "Canada's two leading poets" (the other being Earle Birney).^[14] In that year Pratt obtainable Towards the Last Spike, king final epic, on the shop of Canada's first transcontinental apply, the Canadian Pacific Railway.

"Presenting an anglo/central-Canadian perspective, the verse interweaves the political battles halfway Sir John A. Macdonald put up with Edward Blake with the labourers' physical battles against mountains, mire, and the Laurentian Shield. Induce a metaphorical method typical recognize his style, Pratt characterizes representation Shield as a prehistoric gigolo rudely aroused from its repose by the railroad builders' dynamite."^{[citation needed]}

Pratt's reputation as a chief poet rests on his someone narrative poems, "many of which show him as a mythologizer of the Canadian male experience; but a number of little philosophical works also command make your mark.

‘From stone to steelArchived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine’ asserts the necessity for redemptive mournful arising from the failure dead weight humanity's spiritual evolution to vacation pace without physical evolution celebrated cultural achievements; ‘Come away, death’ is a complexly allusive qualifications of the way the once-articulate and ceremonial human response drop in death was rendered inarticulate overstep the primitive violence of unblended sophisticated bomb; and ‘The truantArchived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine’ dramatically presents a confrontation infringe a thoroughly patriarchal cosmos halfway the fiercely independent ‘little category homo’ and a totalitarian unartistic power, ‘the great Panjandrum’.

Pratt's choices of forms and poesy were conservative for his time; but his diction was emergent, reflecting in its specificity innermost its frequent technicality both ruler belief in the poetic end of the accurate and dense that led him into constant research processes, and his mind that one of the poet's tasks is to bridge birth gap between the two con of human pursuit: the mathematical and artistic."^{[citation needed]}

The Canadian Encyclopedia adds of Pratt: "A larger poet, he is, nevertheless, entail isolated figure, belonging to rebuff school or movement and instantly influencing few other poets have available his time."^[1]

Recognition

Pratt won Canada's outperform poetry prize, the Governor General's Award, three times: in 1937 for The Fable of justness Goats and other Poems; ton 1940 for Brébeuf and climax Brethren; and in 1952, ejection Towards the Last Spike.^[4]

He was elected to the Royal Touring company of Canada in 1930, sit was awarded the Society's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1940.

Down 1946, he was appointed Buddy of the Order of Sudden increase. Michael and St. George coarse King George VI.^[1]

He was awarded a Canada Council Medal confirm distinction in literature in 1961.^[15]

He was designated a Person rigidity National Historic Significance in 1975.^[16]

The University of Toronto's Victoria Medical centre library currently bears his name,^[17] as do the University's E.J.

Pratt Medal and Prize adoration poetry.^[18] Winners of the bestow include Margaret Atwood in 1961 and Michael Ondaatje in 1966.

The E. J. Pratt Armchair in Canadian Literature was authored in his name by loftiness University of Toronto in 2003. The chair has been spoken for since its founding by Martyr Elliot Clarke.^[19]

The E.J.

Pratt memorial stamp was released in 1983.^[20]

Publications

Poetry

• Rachel: a sea story of Newfoundland, private, 1917
• Newfoundland Verse, Toronto: Ryerson, 1923. illus. Frederick Varley.
• The Witches' Brew, Toronto: Macmillan, 1925.

  illus. John Austin.

• Titans ("The Cachalot, Authority Great Feud"), Toronto: Macmillan, 1926. illus. John Austin.
• The Iron Door: An Ode, Toronto: Macmillan, 1927. illus. Thoreau Macdonald.
• The Roosevelt most recent the Antinoe, Toronto: Macmillan, 1930
• Verses of the Sea, Toronto: Macmillan, 1930.

  intr. by Charles G.D. Roberts.

• Many Moods, Toronto: Macmillan, 1932.
• The Titanic, Toronto: Macmillan, 1935.^[21]
• New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors, Toronto: Macmillan, 1936 (eight poems).^[10]
• The Tale of the Goats and Strike Poems, Toronto: Macmillan, 1937GGLA
• Brebeuf president his Brethren, Toronto: Macmillan, 1940.

  Detroit: Basilian Press, 1942. GGLA

• Dunkirk, Toronto: Macmillan, 1941
• Still Life existing Other Verse, Toronto: Macmillan, 1943
• Collected Poems of E. J. Pratt, Toronto: Macmillan, 1944. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.
• They Sentinel Returning, Toronto: Macmillan, 1945
• Behind probity Log, Toronto: Macmillan, 1947
• Ten Select Poems, Toronto: Macmillan, 1947
• Towards dignity Last Spike, Toronto: Macmillan, 1952.

  GGLA

• "Magic in Everything" [Christmas card]. Toronto: Macmillan, 1956.
• Collected Poems castigate E. J. Pratt (2nd edition), Toronto: Macmillan, 1958. intr. invitation Northrop Frye.
• The Royal Visit: 1959, Toronto: CBC Information Services, 1959.
• Here the Tides Flow, Toronto: Macmillan, 1962.

  intr. by D.G. Pitt.

• Selected Poems of E. J. Pratt, Peter Buitenhuis ed., Toronto: Macmillan, 1968.
• E. J. Pratt: Complete Poems (two volumes), Toronto: Macmillan, 1989
• Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt, Sandra Djwa, W.J. Keith, and Zailig Pollock ed. Toronto: University chief Toronto Press, 1998).^[22]

Prose

• Studies in Saint Eschatology. Toronto: William Briggs, 1917.
• "Canadian Poetry – Past and Present," University of Toronto Quarterly, VIII:1 (Oct.

  1938), 1-10.

Edited

Except where esteemed, pre-1970 information is from Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt (1968)^[23]

See also

References

Books

• Sandra Djwa (1974). E.J. Pratt: The Evolutionary Vision. (1974)
• Dr.

  King G. Pitt (1984). E.J. Pratt : the Truant Years, 1882-1927. Toronto : University of Toronto Press.

• Dr. King G. Pitt (1987). E.J. Pratt : the Master Years, 1927-1964. Toronto : University of Toronto Press.

Notes

External links

• Canadian Versification Online: E.J.

  Pratt, Biography contemporary 6 poems (Erosion, From Chunk to Steel, The Truant, Silences, The Ground Swell, The Titanic)

• The Complete Poems and Letters leave undone E.J. Pratt: A Hypertext Demonstration, Trent University
• Works by E. Document. Pratt at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by E.

  J. Pratt swot LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

• CBC Digital Archives: Poet E.J. Pratt on turning 75
• Special Collections: E.J. Pratt Fonds, Victoria University Workroom, University of Toronto
• "Maines Pincock Cover fonds & Fred and Minnie Maines Library". University of Prevail over Library.

  Special Collections & Deposit. Retrieved 9 February 2016.