Brebeuf and His Brethren

by E.J. Pratt

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Genres: Canadian Literature

80 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Edwin John Dove Pratt, who published as E. J. Pratt, was "the leading Canadian poet of his time." He was a Canadian poet originally from Newfoundland who lived most of his life in Toronto, Ontario. A three-time winner of the country's Governor General's Award for poetry, he has been called "the foremost Canadian poet of the first half of the century."

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars on the Canadian Scale.
I was not terribly surprised to discover when I consulted the "Brébeuf and his Brethren" page of GR that I would be only the second person to rate the work and the first to review it. When I arrived at Victoria College of University of Toronto in 1982 where he taught and where a beautiful library bearing his name is located, Pratt had already been relegated to what Trotsky referred to as the "garbage bin of history" despite the fact that he had only been dead for 18 years. Although, Pratt had taught at Victoria College for over 30 years, none of his works were any of the courses and no one at the College uttered a word to encourage any student to read anything that he had written. Seldom has a great author been forgotten so quickly. "Brébeuf and his Brethren" is indeed an utterly abysmal work. Nonetheless it has a place of importance of in the evolution of literature or so Margaret Atwood has argued.
Success and celebrity came quickly to Pratt who by the end of the 1930s was the unofficial poet laureate of Canada. Having this role thrust upon him, Pratt dutifully set out to create a national mythology. Brébeuf was a worthy subject. He was highly intelligent, the author of Jesous Ahathonhia (a.k.a. the Huron Carol) and the compiler of the first Huron dictionary. More importantly, as Margaret Atwood stresses, he was a martyr or in other words a loser rather than a winner. The fact that Pratt chose Brébeuf as a hero was profoundly symptomatic of the tendency of Canadian writers to present Canadians as victims.
Atwood's interest in the work motivated me to read it. As an attempt to create a Canadian hero it fails miserably. In my views, the problem is not that it is about a French catholic who was roasted and eaten as result of his missionary efforts. The true problem is that it is written in blank verse which as Pratt's fellow faculty member Northrop Frye has pointed out is a literary form for a culture that no longer believes in heroes.
"Brébeuf and his Brethren", however, is not without its merits. Pratt who had a degree in divinity and was a practicing Methodist minister for a number of years before becoming a professor of literature demonstrates a superb understanding of the nuances of Brébeuf's Jesuit theology and late Renaissance world view. He chooses his moments very well to make to make references to works of Thomas à Kempis and Ignatius of Loyola. Pratt is also very clever in the way that he suggests ways in which the geography and wildlife in the regions where the missions were located might have influenced the emotional and spiritual states of the Jesuits.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have on my desk as I write two particular books. One is Peter Caddick-Adams’ thousand-page history of D-Day. The other is a little epic poem of just sixty pages, E. J. Pratt’s Brébeuf and His Brethren. This pairing of books on my desk has meaning for me as I consider one of the pair and work up the courage to read the other.

While I only became aware of Pratt’s poem – and, indeed, of Pratt – a few weeks ago, I have been well aware of Jean de Brébeuf and his history since the 1960s when I was in elementary school. Contrary to some contemporary descriptions of the pedagogy of Canada’s schools in those distant days, in the Ontario public schools I attended, we were taught quite a large amount of the history of the relations between the English, the French, the Haudenosaunee (they were called the Iroquois back then), the Wendat (the Huron in that distant time). School field trips went to the then-just-newly-reconstructed living history museum Sainte-Marie-Among-the-Huron near Midland, Ontario. I can still vividly remember the graphic lesson taught in filmed re-enactments of the disastrous depredation of small-pox on the people of the First Nations. And, I learned of the life, mission, torture, and death of Brébeuf and his fellow Jesuits as they tried to peacefully follow their likely hopeless vocation in a land torn apart in an apocalypse of disease, violence, warfare, and massive population decline. This is the world described by Joseph Boyden (before he vanished) in The Orenda – a description defended on Canada Reads by the present Premier of Manitoba, Wab Kinew.

The story of Brébeuf and his Jesuit Brethren seems to bracket my life.

Somehow, however, it was only in the last month or so I learned of E. J. Pratt’s short epic poem on Brébeuf, found a copy of the first American edition (1942), and read it with great pleasure and wonder. I found myself excitedly agreeing with Northrop Frye: “Brébeuf is not only the greatest but the most complete Canadian narrative[poem]” (“The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry”, in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination [Toronto: House of Anansi, 2017] p. 155). Pratt’s blank verse treatment of Brébeuf as hero facing the darkest of dark hearts is breathtaking. Contrary to too many of the few online reviews, the verse is nothing like “turgid” – it is, in fact, richly flowing, especially when read aloud, as epic poetry should be. The few times I paused my silent reading over a line I thought might not scan, I spoke the line aloud, and it turned out to be perfectly metrical. Most of the time I read the poem quietly aloud. . . .

If you would like to read the rest of my review, which ends: "For all the moments Pratt “nods” in Brébeuf and His Brethren, I would argue it is a tremendous, at times sublimely beautiful piece of minor epic. Pratt’s masterpiece is such a beautiful rarity, not just in Canadian Literature, but in English language literature of the last century and more, that it must not be neglected any longer"

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