the first treatments in literature of the concentration camps. And retrospectively, Behind the Log (1947) commemorates the wartime role of the Royal Canadian Navy and the merchant marine." By 1952, Frye was calling Pratt one of "Canada's two leading poets" (the other being Earle Birney). In that year Pratt published Towards the Last Spike, his final epic, on the building of Canada's first transcontinental railroad, the Canadian Pacific Railway. "Presenting an anglo/central-Canadian perspective, the poem interweaves the political battles between Sir John A. Macdonald and Edward Blake with the labourers' physical battles against mountains, mud, and the Laurentian Shield. In a metaphorical method typical of his style, Pratt characterizes the Shield as a prehistoric lizard rudely aroused from its sleep by the railroad builders' dynamite." Pratt's reputation as a major poet rests on his longer narrative poems, "many of which show him as a mythologizer of the Canadian male experience; but a number of shorter philosophical works also command recognition. ‘From stone to steel’ asserts the necessity for redemptive suffering arising from the failure of humanity's spiritual evolution to keep pace without physical evolution and cultural achievements; ‘Come away, death’ is a complexly allusive account of the way the once-articulate and ceremonial human response to death was rendered inarticulate by the primitive violence of a sophisticated bomb; and ‘The truant’ dramatically presents a confrontation in a thoroughly patriarchal cosmos between the fiercely independent ‘little genus homo’ and a totalitarian mechanistic power, ‘the great Panjandrum’. Pratt's choices of forms and metrics were conservative for his time; but his diction was experimental, reflecting in its specificity and its frequent technicality both his belief in the poetic power of the accurate and concrete that led him into assiduous research processes, and his view that one of the poet's tasks is to bridge the gap between the two branches of human pursuit: the scientific and artistic." The Canadian Encyclopedia adds of Pratt: "A major poet, he is, nevertheless, an isolated figure, belonging to no school or movement and directly influencing few other poets of his time." Recognition Pratt won Canada's top poetry prize, the Governor General's Award, three times: in 1937 for The Fable of the Goats and other Poems; in 1940 for Brébeuf and his Brethren; and in 1952, for Towards the Last Spike. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1930, and was awarded the Society's Lorne Pierce Medal