A transitional Victorian or an early modern in thought, Pratt, like [Sir Charles G. D.] Roberts and like Samuel Butler, wrote essentially from the impulse to reconcile Christianity and evolutionary thought. His poetic cosmology explicitly embodies the evolutionary ethics of T. H. Huxley's famous Romanes lecture, "Evolution and Ethics" (1893), with the exception that Pratt identifies the highest evolution of ethical man with Strauss' historical Jesus and describes the act of ethical choice in terms of Wilhelm Wundt's mechanistic psychology.

Strongly influenced by his Newfoundland experiences of continued struggle against an implacable nature, a struggle which he characterizes in The Book of Newfoundland (1937) as "the ironic enigma of Nature in relation to the Christian view of the world", and by his early training in theology, much of Pratt's poetry can be seen as the attempt to make man more equal to the struggle against nature. Nature, in this sense, implies both external nature and man's own tendency to revert to primitive self-interest, a tendency which Pratt sometimes identifies with original sin. The central concern of Pratt's poetry is often the problematic nature of human progress and the danger of man's reversion to an earlier and more primitive stage of behaviour. (p. 414)

The development of Pratt's poetry suggests a series of evolutionary parables in which ethical man, or his surrogate in the giant animal or machine, is pitted against T. H. Huxley's "cosmic process". The cosmic process is evolution, but it is a later and Darwinian extension of Tennyson's nature "red in tooth and claw" in which evolving nature encompasses both external and human nature. Other than the primary revelation of the cruelty of the struggle for survival, the general effect of Darwinism upon Pratt, as upon Samuel Butler and T. H. Huxley, was the gradual breaking down of boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, between the human and the animal, and the discovery of similarities between these categories not previously recognized. (p. 415)

Ironically, Pratt's early movement towards the animal past is a devolutionary step in terms of man's ethical development; similarly, the latter movement towards the machine can also be a devolutionary step in ethical terms although it may be a step forward in terms of man's scientific progress. Like Samuel Butler in Erewhen, Pratt views the machine as one step above the animal on the evolutionary ladder…. The tremendous advantage of the machine is that it is better equipped to battle nature than are any of the natural creatures. The horror of the machine is that (like the iceberg from The Titanic, like the ship itself, and like the grand Panjandrum) it is activated by "mechanism" rather than the moral sense. (pp. 415-16)

Nature, in Pratt's view, is not that benign Romantic nature which embodies deity…. Pratt's nature is Huxley's post-Darwinian nature, profoundly inimical to man and his moral values…. Because Huxley's cosmic process is fundamentally amoral, the representative man of Pratt's poetry who differs from the rest of nature (or who can be a "truant" from it by virtue of his evolved reason and the moral sense) must forever struggle against it by opposing the cosmic process with human and moral values. (p. 419)

Like Samuel Butler whose thought his most resembles, Pratt was a sensitive man greatly troubled by the Victorian conflict between Science and Religion (or, more specifically, between evolution and ethics) and his poetry continually explores the possibility of finding some acceptable compromise between the two. (p. 422)

Despite the Eliot-like rattle of a jazz tune in The Titanic and a prevailing ironic perspective, Pratt is not a modern poet in the sense that his vision of the world is informed by The Waste Land but neither is he a simplistic primitive. Rather, he is a transitional Victorian, firmly rooted in the evolutionary ethic of the 1890s, and working out a fairly complex evolutionary structure. Like Samuel Butler, Pratt is attempting a compromise between the old teleology of received religion and the Darwinian world without design, ultimately insisting that design resides within the organism, within the blood and nerve cells of man. Pratt's particular vitalism wedded two of the theories of Wilhelm Wundt's evolutionary psychology to maintain that the mechanical act of "perception" (associated with the automatic will to action) can be informed by "aperception", the spontaneous recognition of a moral truth which can be transmitted through habit from generation to generation. (pp. 423-24)

Pratt was, in the best sense, a poet of the people as his poetry grew out of the Canadian experience. Darwin's evolution and Huxley's cosmology may have provided the intellectual outlines of Pratt's poetic world, but Canadian history, Canadian geography and Canadian cultural experience, as well as Pratt's good heart and his moral vision, give substance to this world. (p. 425)