E. J. (Edwin John Dove) Pratt (February 4, 1882 – April 26, 1964) was an important Canadian poet. He was born in Newfoundland, where his father was a Methodist minister. Pratt himself studied for the ministry, and then continued more advanced studies at Victoria College of University of Toronto, and pursued an academic career, first in the psychology and then in the English Department at Victoria College. Although he is better known for his narrative...
E. J. (Edwin John Dove) Pratt (February 4, 1882 – April 26, 1964) was an important Canadian poet. He was born in Newfoundland, where his father was a Methodist minister. Pratt himself studied for the ministry, and then continued more advanced studies at Victoria College of University of Toronto, and pursued an academic career, first in the psychology and then in the English Department at Victoria College. Although he is better known for his narrative poems, "From Stone to Steel" shows his characteristic interest in human nature in relation to psychology, religion, and evolution.
Pratt wrote "From Stone to Steel" in 1932. It consists of five four-line stanzas written in iambic tetrameter rhymed ABAB. The meter and rhyme scheme are quite regular. The poem refers to human evolution in terms of the apparent distance between the Java man (now more commonly known as "homo erectus") and modern man, or "Geneva man" (referring to the urbane and cosmopolitan city of Geneva in Switzerland). The poem argues that the million-year old fossil of the Java man probably had the same emotions and interior life as modern man, and that both ancient and modern man participate in a raw emotional life (or sin) and also moments of spiritual redemption, as symbolized by Gethsemane where Jesus and his disciples prayed on the night before the Crucifixion.
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