Pursuits Amateur and Academic: The Selected Prose of EJ Pratt

Paul Hjartarson is an associate professor of English at the University
of Alberta.

This latest volume in the Collected Works of E.J. Pratt—which also
includes E.J. Pratt on His Life and Poetry (1983), E.J. Pratt: Complete
Poems (1989), and the two-volume biography of the poet E.J. Pratt: The
Truant Years (1984) and E.J. Pratt: The Master Years (1987)—is a
companion volume to E.J. Pratt on His Life and Poetry. In the earlier
text, Susan Gingell combined Pratt’s limited autobiographical writing
with the poet’s commentaries on his own poems, the latter culled from
Pratt’s unpublished notebooks and correspondence and from his
occasional published comments. The focus of the first text was thus on
Pratt as a poet; the majority of the material in the volume had never
previously appeared in print. Pursuits Amateur and Academic is concerned
with the “other” Pratt: that is, the poet’s activities as a
storyteller, theologian, essayist, editor, columnist, reviewer, and
teacher. Moreover, with the exception of the university lectures and
addresses, all the material has previously appeared in print. While the
earlier volume will remain the mainstay of students and scholars
studying Pratt’s poetry, this volume will prove of considerable
interest to those seeking to place the poetry in the context either of
the poet’s life or of the period in which he lived. Although the notes
are detailed and the text is well indexed, this volume demands a fuller
introduction than Gingell provides. Readers seeking to use the volume as
a guide to Pratt’s prose will want to consult the descriptive
biography of the poet’s writing as published in the Complete Poems.