Towards the Last Spike was written in 1952 by Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 poet E. J. Pratt

E. J. Pratt

Edwin John Dove Pratt, FRSC , 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...

. It is a long narrative poem in blank verse about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad line in Canada, that of the Canadian Pacific Railway

Canadian Pacific Railway

The Canadian Pacific Railway , formerly also known as CP Rail between 1968 and 1996, is a historic Canadian Class I railway founded in 1881 and now operated by Canadian Pacific Railway Limited, which began operations as legal owner in a corporate restructuring in 2001...

 (CPR), from 1871 through 1885.

The poem won Pratt the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for poetry in 1952

1952 Governor General's Awards

In Canada, the 1952 Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit were the sixteenth such awards. The awards in this period had no monetary prize and were just an honour for the authors.-Winners:*Fiction: David Walker, The Pillar....

.

It is written in a mock-epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 style, where characters engage in both verbal and physical struggle. The poem also has a political context, illuminated by the debates between Prime Minister John A. Macdonald

John A. Macdonald

Sir John Alexander Macdonald, GCB, KCMG, PC, PC , QC was the first Prime Minister of Canada. The dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, his political career spanned almost half a century...

 (for the railway) versus Edward Blake

Edward Blake

Dominick Edward Blake, PC, QC , known as Edward Blake, was the second Premier of Ontario, Canada, from 1871 to 1872 and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 1880 to 1887...

 (against). The physical tests throughout the poem are a battle between the forces of nature (the Canadian Shield

Canadian Shield

The Canadian Shield, also called the Laurentian Plateau, or Bouclier Canadien , is a vast geological shield covered by a thin layer of soil that forms the nucleus of the North American or Laurentia craton. It is an area mostly composed of igneous rock which relates to its long volcanic history...

 is personified as a prehistoric monster) versus the combined might of the construction team headed by William Van Horne

William Cornelius Van Horne

Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, KCMG was a pioneering Canadian railway executive.-Life and career:Born in 1843 in rural Illinois, he moved with his family to Joliet, Illinois when he was eight years old...

.

In his introduction to Pratt's 1968 Selected Poems, literary critic Peter Buitenhuis says of the piece:

In this poem man has the chance to learn from his mistakes and to employ his sinews and his technology to throw his thin lines of steel across muskeg

Muskeg

Muskeg is an acidic soil type common in Arctic and boreal areas, although it is found in other northern climates as well. Muskeg is approximately synonymous with bogland but muskeg is the standard term in Western Canada and Alaska, while 'bog' is common elsewhere. The term is of Cree origin, maskek...

 and mountain. Again Pratt is using a mosaic technique of organizing his diverse material; but because Towards the Last Spike contains a great deal of political material, it is looser in form than the other epics. The gigantic nature of his theme tends to make the poem too impersonal, even though forces like the North Shore Laurentian monster and Lady British Columbia

British Columbia

British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

 are personified.... Fortunately, the gigantism of these forces is almost matched by the human figures that Pratt has chosen as his heroes, William Van Horne and Sir John A. Macdonald. The two men are complementary in the poem: Macdonald, rhetorician and parliamentarian, supplies the dream of continental union; Van Horne, engineer and administrator, supplies the force and skill that makes the dream come true.

The poem ends with the famous driving home of the last spike at Craigellachie

Craigellachie, British Columbia

Craigellachie is a locality in British Columbia, located several kilometres to the west of the Eagle Pass summit between Sicamous and Revelstoke...

:

The stroke released the trigger for a burst

Of sound which stretched the gamut of the air.

The shouts of engineers and dynamiters,

Of locomotive-workers and explorers,

Flanking the rails, were but a tuning up

For a massed continental chorus.

When Towards the Last Spike appeared, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye

Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....

 wrote that

Pratt has shown an increasing interest in techniques of communication, an interest which may well go back to his early days as a student of psychology.... The theme of the epic act of communication in Canadian history, the linking of east and west by a great railway, was thus a logical one for Pratt to choose for his latest poem.... But while the choice of theme may have been easy, the theme itself is fantastically difficult. The poem is in the epic tradition, without any of the advantages of epic to sustain it. No narrative suspense is possible where the ground has all been surveyed; no heroic action can be isolated in so concentrated an act of social will.... The real hero of the poem is a society's will to take intelligible form; the real quest is for physical and spiritual communication within that society. I have a notion that the technical problems involved in Towards the Last Spike are going to be central problems in the poetry of the future. And I think that the ingenuity with which these problems have been met would make the poem a historical landmark even for readers who disliked it as a poem."

"There would be much more to say about the poem if I had the space," Frye added. "There is the contrast between the desperate, quixotic, east-west reach from sea to sea which is the vision of Macdonald ... and the practical, short-sighted vision of Blake, which sees the country realistically, as a divided series of northern extensions of the United States.... There is the portrait of Strathcona

Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal

Sir Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, GCMG, GCVO, PC, DL was a Scottish-born Canadian fur trader, financier, railroad baron and politician.-Early life:...

as a Canadian culture-hero, a combination of Paul Bunyan and Sam Slick.... Above all, Pratt is a poet unusually aware of the traditional connection between poetry and oratory." He concluded: "The faults of the poem are obvious and commonplace; its virtues are subtle and remarkable."

Frye later wrote that Pratt had "expressed in Towards the Last Spike the central comic theme ... of the Canadian imagination."

3 years after its publication, fellow Canadian poet, F.R. Scott, critiqued Pratt for overlooking the thousands of indentured Chinese labourers who actually built the railway in his poem "All the Spikes but the Last."