"Fanny Pratt was easy-going and unpunctilious where John was careful and exacting, lenient and forbearing where he was strict and inflexible, soft hearted where he was hard-headed – she inevitably had a closer, more comradely relationship with the children.

[4] "As a professor, Pratt published a number of articles, reviews, and introductions (including those to four Shakespeare plays), and edited Thomas Hardy's Under the greenwood tree (1937).

The most genuine feeling is expressed in humorous and sympathetic portraits of Newfoundland characters, and in the creation of an elegiac mood in poems concerning sea tragedies or Great War losses.

The sea, which on the one hand provides ‘the bread of life’ and on the other represents ‘the waters of death’ (‘Newfoundland’), is a central element as setting, subject, and creator of mood.

"[citation needed] With illustrations by Group of Seven member Frederick Varley, Newfoundland Verse proved to be Pratt's "breakthrough collection."

"But the sea and maritime life are central to many of his poems, both short (e.g., "Erosion Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine," "Sea-Gulls," "Silences Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine") and long, such as "The Cachalot" (1926), describing duels between a whale and its foes, a giant squid and a whaling ship and crew; The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930), recounting the heroic rescue of the crew of a sinking freighter in a winter hurricane; The Titanic Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine (1935), an ironic retelling of a well-known marine tragedy; and Behind the Log (1947), the dramatic story of the North Atlantic convoys during World War II.

"Pratt's work is filled with images of primitive nature and evolutionary history," wrote literary critic Peter Buitenhuis.

"[8] He added that evolution provided Pratt "the solid framework within which he could achieve an epic style," and also "gave him the themes for his best lyrics" (such as his much-anthologized "From Stone to Steel Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine," from 1932's Many Moods.)

The title poem in Still Life and Other Verse (1943) satirizes poets who ignore the destruction, the still life, all about them in wartime.... Other poems include 'The Radio in the Ivory Tower,' which shows isolation from world events to be impossible,... 'The Submarine,' which highlights the atavism of modern warfare by treating the submarine as a shark; and 'Come Away, Death,' which personifies death to show its new horrors in modern times.

"[11] In "The Truant," a "somewhat comic deity, who speaks in evolutionary terms and metaphors, has man hauled before him to be punished for messing up the grand evolving scheme of things.

[14] 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.

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.

"[citation needed] 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 Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine’ 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 Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine’ 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.

"[1] 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.