The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen both for their representativeness and for their intrinsic value.

The purpose of The Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt is to introduce Pratt's poems to the college and university student, to provide the kind of information needed for an informed reading of the poems. The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen on the joint basis of representativeness and intrinsic value. This includes the major long poems, The Witches' Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, BrTbeuf and His Brethren, Towards the Last Spike, and important shorter lyrics including 'Newfoundland,' 'Come Away, Death,' and 'From Stone to Steel.' The editorial approach has been historical, chronological and biographical. The introduction locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his early modernist contemporaries, concluding that E.J. Pratt remains the most important and influential Canadian poet up to the mid-fifties. As such, he has been an key figure in shaping the Canadian literary imagination of his day and the later poetics of landscape adopted by Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood. The reader is provided with annotations, textual notes, a biographical chronology, and an introduction which locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his modernist contemporaries. The printed volumes is supplemented by the electronic resources of the Selected Pratt website at http://www.trentu.ca/pratt/selected.

Towards the Last Spike was written in 1952 by Canadian poet E. J. Pratt. It is a long narrative poem in blank verse about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad line in Canada, that of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), from 1871 through 1885. Excerpt: "It was the same world then as now—the same, Except for little differences of speed And power, and means to treat myopia To show an axe-blade infinitely sharp Splitting things infinitely small, or else Provide the telescopic sight to roam Through curved dominions never found in fables. The same, but for new particles of speech..."