[What] I think would have fascinated me in Pratt's poetry, even if I had never known him, is the way in which, unlike any other modern poet I know, he takes on so many of the characteristics of the poet of an oral and pre-literate society, of the kind that lies immediately behind the earliest English poetry. There was no reason for Pratt to be this kind of poet except the peculiar influence of his Newfoundland and Canadian environment on him: I am quite sure that he was unconscious of this aspect of his work.

In an oral culture, which has to depend so much on memory, the poet is the teacher, the one who remembers…. It is he who knows the traditions of his people, its great heroic legends [and] the names of its kings…. Such a poet is a profoundly impersonal poet. He does not write...