The E.J. Pratt Publication Project was established in 1978 at the request of Mrs. Viola Pratt to prepare the poet's Collected Works in several volumes. The first General Editors were Professors Djwa and R.G. Moyles, with an editorial advisory board consisting of Professors Claude Bissell, Robert Brandeis, Northrop Frye, Douglas Lochhead, Jay Macpherson, and Malcolm Ross.
In 1993, as the result of the retirement of Professor Moyles, the senior textual editor, the Project was reorganized. It now consists of a General Editorial Board (Professors Djwa, W.J. Keith and Zailig Pollock); an Editorial Committee consisting of current and past editors of volumes in the series was established (Professor Djwa, Professor Susan Gingell, Lila Laakso, Professor D.G. Pitt and Professor Elizabeth Popham); and an Editorial Advisory Board (Professor Claude Bissell, Professor Robert Brandeis, Professor Peter Buitenhuis, Dr. Michael Darling, Professor Douglas Lochhead, Professor Jay Macpherson, Claire Pratt, Professor Malcolm Ross, Professor David Bentley, and Professor Brian Trehearne). Of the three general editors, Professor Pollock was chosen to administer the Pratt Project and to act as principal investigator.
So far the following volumes have appeared:
The following volumes are in various stages of development:
And, with the cooperation of the E.J. Pratt Library at Victoria College (Toronto) — literary executor for E.J. Pratt since the death of Claire Pratt in 1997 — and the University of Toronto Press, the E.J. Pratt Publication Project is supplementing print publication with publication to the World Wide Web:
The new print edition of the Complete Poems will contain one version of each text — the traditional "copy text" — with limited explanatory notes, and no textual notes; and the print edition of the Letters will contain a selection of Pratt correspondence, concentrating on letters that reveal information about Pratt's poetry, his relations with other poets and writers, and significant happenings in his life, again with limited explanatory notes. However, readers will have access, in the electronic editions, to a fully annotated edition of all completed versions of every poem (manuscript and published), linked to scanned images of every page of every poem, and to all of the over 1200 letters, which will be searchable by date, correspondent, subject/keyword and source. In the completed hypertext site, the Poems and Letters will be fully integrated into an electronic archive of Pratt's work in both HTML [Hypertext Markup Language] and TEI [Textual Encoding Initiative] formats, with an EAD [Encoded Archival Description]finding aid/descriptive bibliography of Pratt's poems and letters which will list the Pratt holdings in over 70 private and institutional collections.