Archibald Lampman
Encyclopedia
Archibald Lampman, was a Canadian poet
. "He has been described as 'the Canadian Keats
;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that he is "generally considered the finest of Canada
's late 19th-century poets in English
."
Lampman is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets
, a group which also includes Charles G.D. Roberts
, Bliss Carman
, and Duncan Campbell Scott
.
, Ontario
, a village near Chatham
, the son of Archibald Lampman, an Anglican clergyman. "The Morpeth that Lampman knew was a small town set in the rolling farm country of what is now western Ontario, not far from the shores of Lake Erie. The little red church just east of the town, on the Talbot Road, was his father’s charge."
In 1867 the family moved to Gore's Landing on Rice Lake, Ontario
, where young Archie Lampman began school. In 1868 he contracted rheumatic fever
, which left him lame for some years and with a permanently weakened heart.
Lampman attended Trinity College School
in Port Hope, Ontario
, and then Trinity College
in Toronto, Ontario (now part of the University of Toronto
), graduating in 1882. In 1883, after a frustrating attempt to teach high school in Orangeville, Ontario
, he took an appointment as a low-paid clerk in the Post Office Department in Ottawa, a position he held for the rest of his life.
Lampman "was slight of form and of middle height. He was quiet and undemonstrative in manner, but had a fascinating personality. Sincerity and high ideals characterized his life and work."
On Sep. 3, 1887, Lampman married 20-year-old Maude Emma Playter. "They had a daughter, Natalie Charlotte, born in 1892. Arnold Gesner, born May 1894, was the first boy, but he died in August. A third child, Archibald Otto, was born in 1898."
In Ottawa, Lampman became a close friend of Indian Affairs
bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott; Scott introduced him to camping, and he introduced Scott to writing poetry. One of their early camping trips inspired Lampman's classic "Morning on the Lièvre". Lampman also met and befriended poet William Wilfred Campbell
.
Lampman, Campbell, and Scott together wrote a literary column, "At the Mermaid Inn," for the Toronto Globe from February 1892 until July 1893. (The name was a reference to the Elizabethan-era
Mermaid Tavern
.) As Lampman wrote to a friend: "Campbell is deplorably poor.... Partly in order to help his pockets a little Mr. Scott and I decided to see if we could get the Toronto “Globe” to give us space for a couple of columns of paragraphs & short articles, at whatever pay we could get for them. They agreed to it; and Campbell, Scott and I have been carrying on the thing for several weeks now."
"In the last years of his short life there is evidence of a spiritual malaise which was compounded by the death of an infant son [Arnold, commemorated in the poem "White Pansies"] and his own deteriorating health."
Lampman died in Ottawa at the age of 37 due to a weak heart, an after-effect of his childhood rheumatic fever. He is buried, fittingly, at Beechwood Cemetery
, in Ottawa
, a site he wrote about in the poem "In Beechwood Cemetery" (which is inscribed at the cemetery's entranceway). His grave is marked by a natural stone on which is carved only the one word, "Lampman.". A plaque on the site carries a few lines from his poem "In November":
Lampman sent Roberts a fan letter, which "initiated a correspondence between the two young men, but they probably did not meet until after Roberts moved to Toronto in late September 1883 to become the editor of Goldwin Smith
’s The Week."
Inspired, Lampman also began writing poetry, and soon after began publishing it: first "in the pages of his college magazine, Rouge et Noir;" then "graduating to the more presitigious pages of The Week" – (his sonnet
"A Monition," later retitled "The Coming of Winter," appeared in its first issue ) – and finally, by the late 1880s "winning an audience in the major magazines of the day, such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's
, and Scribner's."
Lampman published mainly nature poetry in the current late-Romantic
style. "The prime literary antecedents of Lampman lie in the work of the English poets Keats, Wordsworth
, and Arnold
," says the Gale Encyclopedia of Biography, "but he also brought new and distinctively Canadian elements to the tradition. Lampman, like others of his school, relied on the Canadian landscape to provide him with much of the imagery, stimulus, and philosophy which characterize his work.... Acutely observant in his method, Lampman created out of the minutiae of nature careful compositions of color, sound, and subtle movement. Evocatively rich, his poems are frequently sustained by a mood of revery and withdrawal, while their themes are those of beauty, wisdom, and reassurance, which the poet discovered in his contemplation of the changing seasons and the harmony of the countryside."
The Canadian Encyclopedia calls his poems "for the most part close-packed melancholy meditations on natural objects, emphasizing the calm of country life in contrast to the restlessness of city living. Limited in range, they are nonetheless remarkable for descriptive precision and emotional restraint. Although characterized by a skilful control of rhythm and sound, they tend to display a sameness of thought."
"Lampman wrote more than 300 poems in this last period of his life, although scarcely half of these were published prior to his death. For single poems or groups of poems he found outlets in the literary magazines of the day: in Canada, chiefly the Week; in the United States, Scribner’s Magazine, The Youth's Companion, the Independent, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Magazine. In 1888, with the help of a legacy left to his wife, he published Among the millet and other poems," his first book, at his own expense. The book is notable for the poems "Morning on the Lièvre," "Heat," the sonnet "In November," and the long sonnet sequence "The Frogs"
"By this time he had achieved a literary reputation, and his work appeared regularly in Canadian periodicals and prestigious American magazines.... In 1895 Lampman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
, and his second collection of poems, Lyrics of Earth, was brought out by a Boston publisher."
The book was not a success. "The sales of Lyrics of Earth were disappointing and the only critical notices were four brief though favourable reviews. In size, the volume is slighter than Among the Millet — twenty-nine poems in contrast to forty-eight — and in quality fails to surpass the earlier work." (Lyrics does, though, contain some of Lampman's most beautiful poems, such as "After Rain" and "The Sun Cup.")
"A third volume, Alcyone and other poems, in press at the time of his death" in 1899, showed Lampman starting to move in new directions, with the nature verses interspersed with philosophical poetry like "Voices of Earth" and "The Clearer Self" and poems of social criticism like "The City" and what may be his best-known poem, the dystopian vision of "The City at the End of Things." "As a corollary to his preoccupation with nature," notes the Gale Encyclopedia, "Lampman [had] developed a critical stance toward an emerging urban civilization and a social order against which he pitted his own idealism
. He was an outspoken socialist, a feminist, and a social critic
." Canadian critic Malcolm Ross
wrote that "in poems like 'The City at the End of Things' and 'Epitaph on a Rich Man' Lampman seems to have a social and political insight absent in his fellows."
However, Lampman died before Alcyone appeared, and it "was held back by Scott (12 specimen copies were printed posthumously in Ottawa in 1899) in favour of a comprehensive memorial volume planned for 1900." The latter was a planned collected poems "which he was editing in the hope that its sale would provide Maud with some much-needed cash. Besides Alcyone, it included Among the Millet and Lyrics of Earth in their entirety, plus seventy-four sonnets Lampman had tried to publish separately, twenty-three miscellaneous poems and ballads, and two long narrative poems (“David and Abigail” and “The Story of an Affinity”)." Among the previously unpublished sonnets were some of Lampman's finest work, including "Winter Uplands", "The Railway Station," and "A Sunset at Les Eboulements."
"Published by Morang & Company of Toronto in 1900," The Collected Poems of Archibald Lampman "was a substantial tome — 473 pages — and ran through several editions. Scott’s 'Memoir,' which prefaces the volume, would prove to be an invaluable source of information about the poet’s life and personality."
Scott published one further volume of Lampman's poetry, At the Long Sault and Other Poems, in 1943 – "and on this occasion, as on other occasions previously, he did not hesitate to make what he felt were improvements on the manuscript versions of the poems." The book is remarkable mainly for its title poem, "At the Long Sault: May 1660," a dramatic retelling of the Battle of Long Sault
, which belongs with the great Canadian historical poems. It was co-edited by E.K. Brown, who the same year published his own volume On Canadian Poetry: a book that was a major boost to Lampman's reputation. Brown considered Lampman and Scott the top Confederation Poets, well ahead of Roberts and Carman, and his view came to predominate over the next few decades.
Lampman never considered himself more than a minor poet, as he once confessed in a letter to a friend: "I am not a great poet and I never was. Greatness in poetry must proceed from greatness of character — from force, fearlessness, brightness. I have none of those qualities. I am, if anything, the very opposite, I am weak, I am a coward, I am a hypochondriac. I am a minor poet of a superior order, and that is all." However, others' opinion of his work has been higher than his own.
Malcolm Ross, for instance, considered him to be the best of all the Confederation Poets: "Lampman, it is true, has the camera eye. But Lampman is no mere photographer. With Scott (and more completely than Scott), he has, poetically, met the demands of his place and his time.... Like Roberts (and more intensively than Roberts), he searches for the idea.... Ideas are germinal for him, infecting the tissue of his thought.... Like the existentialist
of our day, Lampman is not so much 'in search of himself' as engaged strenuously in the creation of the self. Every idea is approached as potentially the substance of a 'clearer self.' Even landscape is made into a symbol of the deep, interior processes of the self, or is used ... to induce a settling of the troubled surfaces of the mind and a miraculous transparency that opens into the depths."
in 1895.
He was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in 1920.
A literary prize, the Archibald Lampman Award
, is awarded annually by Ottawa-area poetry magazine Arc in Lampman's honour.
Since 1999, the annual "Archibald Lampman Poetry Reading" has brought leading Canadian poets to Trinity College, Toronto, under the sponsorship of the John W. Graham Library and the Friends of the Library, Trinity College.
His name is also carried on in the town of Lampman
, Saskatchewan
, a small community of approximately 730 people, situated near the City of Estevan.
Canada Post issued a postage stamp in his honour on July 7, 1989. The stamp depicts Lampman's portrait on a backdrop of nature.
Canadian singer/songwriter Loreena McKennitt
adapted Lampman's poem "Snow" as a song, writing original music while keeping as the lyrics the poem verbatim. This adaptation appears on McKennitt's album To Drive the Cold Winter Away
(1987) and also in a different version on her EP, A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season (1995).
Canadian poetry
- Beginnings:The earliest works of poetry, mainly written by visitors, described the new territories in optimistic terms, mainly targeted at a European audience...
. "He has been described as 'the Canadian Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that he is "generally considered the finest of Canada
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...
's late 19th-century poets in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
."
Lampman is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets
Confederation Poets
"Confederation Poets" is the name given to a group of Canadian poets born in the decade of Canada's Confederation who rose to prominence in Canada in the late 1880s and 1890s. The term was coined by Canadian professor and literary critic Malcolm Ross, who applied it to four poets Charles G.D...
, a group which also includes Charles G.D. Roberts
Charles G.D. Roberts
Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts, was a Canadian poet and prose writer who is known as the Father of Canadian Poetry. He was "almost the first Canadian author to obtain worldwide reputation and influence; he was also a tireless promoter and encourager of Canadian literature......
, Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman
Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years....
, and Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott
Duncan Campbell Scott was a Canadian poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets....
.
Life
Archibald Lampman was born at MorpethMorpeth, Ontario
Morpeth is a community in Southern Ontario, Canada that is between Blenheim and St. Thomas on Highway 3 in the municipality of Chatham-Kent. It is located less than two hours away from Windsor.-History:...
, Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
, a village near Chatham
Chatham-Kent, Ontario
Chatham–Kent is a unitary authority in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Mostly rural, its centres of population are Blenheim, Chatham, Dresden, Ridgetown, Tilbury and Wallaceburg. Modern Chatham–Kent was created in 1998 by the merger of Kent County and its municipalities.- History :The former city of...
, the son of Archibald Lampman, an Anglican clergyman. "The Morpeth that Lampman knew was a small town set in the rolling farm country of what is now western Ontario, not far from the shores of Lake Erie. The little red church just east of the town, on the Talbot Road, was his father’s charge."
In 1867 the family moved to Gore's Landing on Rice Lake, Ontario
Rice Lake, Ontario
Rice Lake is an unincorporated place and railway point in geographic Rice Township in Unorganized Kenora District in northwestern Ontario, Canada, east of the border with the province of Manitoba.Rice Lake railway station is in the community...
, where young Archie Lampman began school. In 1868 he contracted rheumatic fever
Rheumatic fever
Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory disease that occurs following a Streptococcus pyogenes infection, such as strep throat or scarlet fever. Believed to be caused by antibody cross-reactivity that can involve the heart, joints, skin, and brain, the illness typically develops two to three weeks after...
, which left him lame for some years and with a permanently weakened heart.
Lampman attended Trinity College School
Trinity College School
Trinity College School is a coeducational, independent boarding/day school located in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada. TCS was founded on May 1, 1865, more than 2 years prior to Canadian Confederation. It includes a Senior School for grades 9 to 12 and a Junior School for grades 5 to 8.Among its...
in Port Hope, Ontario
Port Hope, Ontario
Port Hope is a municipality in Southern Ontario, Canada, about east of Toronto and about west of Kingston. It is located at the mouth of the Ganaraska River on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in the west end of Northumberland County...
, and then Trinity College
University of Trinity College
The University of Trinity College, informally referred to as Trin, is a college of the University of Toronto, founded in 1851 by Bishop John Strachan. Trinity was intended by Strachan as a college of strong Anglican alignment, after the University of Toronto severed its ties with the Church of...
in Toronto, Ontario (now part of the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
), graduating in 1882. In 1883, after a frustrating attempt to teach high school in Orangeville, Ontario
Orangeville, Ontario
Orangeville is a town in south-central Ontario, Canada, and the seat of Dufferin County.-History:Before European settlers, Orangeville was thought to be a native hunting ground...
, he took an appointment as a low-paid clerk in the Post Office Department in Ottawa, a position he held for the rest of his life.
Lampman "was slight of form and of middle height. He was quiet and undemonstrative in manner, but had a fascinating personality. Sincerity and high ideals characterized his life and work."
On Sep. 3, 1887, Lampman married 20-year-old Maude Emma Playter. "They had a daughter, Natalie Charlotte, born in 1892. Arnold Gesner, born May 1894, was the first boy, but he died in August. A third child, Archibald Otto, was born in 1898."
In Ottawa, Lampman became a close friend of Indian Affairs
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada
The Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development is the department of the government of Canada with responsibility for policies relating to Aboriginal peoples...
bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott; Scott introduced him to camping, and he introduced Scott to writing poetry. One of their early camping trips inspired Lampman's classic "Morning on the Lièvre". Lampman also met and befriended poet William Wilfred Campbell
William Wilfred Campbell
William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian poet. He is often classed as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included fellow Canadians Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott; he was a colleague of Lampman and Scott...
.
Lampman, Campbell, and Scott together wrote a literary column, "At the Mermaid Inn," for the Toronto Globe from February 1892 until July 1893. (The name was a reference to the Elizabethan-era
Elizabethan era
The Elizabethan era was the epoch in English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign . Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history...
Mermaid Tavern
Mermaid Tavern
The Mermaid Tavern was a tavern on Cheapside in London during the Elizabethan era, located east of St. Paul's Cathedral on the corner of Friday Street and Bread Street. It was the site of the so-called Friday Street Club...
.) As Lampman wrote to a friend: "Campbell is deplorably poor.... Partly in order to help his pockets a little Mr. Scott and I decided to see if we could get the Toronto “Globe” to give us space for a couple of columns of paragraphs & short articles, at whatever pay we could get for them. They agreed to it; and Campbell, Scott and I have been carrying on the thing for several weeks now."
"In the last years of his short life there is evidence of a spiritual malaise which was compounded by the death of an infant son [Arnold, commemorated in the poem "White Pansies"] and his own deteriorating health."
Lampman died in Ottawa at the age of 37 due to a weak heart, an after-effect of his childhood rheumatic fever. He is buried, fittingly, at Beechwood Cemetery
Beechwood Cemetery
Beechwood Cemetery is the National Cemetery of Canada. Because it is located in Ottawa, Ontario, the nation's capital, it is the burial site for a number of statesmen as well as a large number of mayors of the city. A woodland cemetery founded in 1873, it is 160 acres and is the largest cemetery...
, in Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
, a site he wrote about in the poem "In Beechwood Cemetery" (which is inscribed at the cemetery's entranceway). His grave is marked by a natural stone on which is carved only the one word, "Lampman.". A plaque on the site carries a few lines from his poem "In November":
-
-
- The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
- About the naked uplands. I alone
- Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray
- Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.
-
Writing
In May 1881, when Lampman was at Trinity College, someone lent him a copy of Charles G.D. Roberts's recently published first book, Orion and Other Poems. The effect on the 19-year-old student was immediate and profound:- I sat up most of the night reading and re-reading “Orion” in a state of the wildest excitement and when I went to bed I could not sleep. It seemed to me a wonderful thing that such work could be done by a Canadian, by a young man, one of ourselves. It was like a voice from some new paradise of art, calling to us to be up and doing. A little after sunrise I got up and went out into the college grounds ... everything was transfigured for me beyond description, bathed in an old world radiance of beauty; the magic of the lines was sounding in my ears, those divine verses, as they seemed to me, with their Tennyson-like richness and strange earth-loving Greekish flavour. I have never forgotten that morning, and its influence has always remained with me.
Lampman sent Roberts a fan letter, which "initiated a correspondence between the two young men, but they probably did not meet until after Roberts moved to Toronto in late September 1883 to become the editor of Goldwin Smith
Goldwin Smith
Goldwin Smith was a British-Canadian historian and journalist.- Early years :He was born at Reading, Berkshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after a brilliant undergraduate career he was elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford...
’s The Week."
Inspired, Lampman also began writing poetry, and soon after began publishing it: first "in the pages of his college magazine, Rouge et Noir;" then "graduating to the more presitigious pages of The Week" – (his sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
"A Monition," later retitled "The Coming of Winter," appeared in its first issue ) – and finally, by the late 1880s "winning an audience in the major magazines of the day, such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
, and Scribner's."
Lampman published mainly nature poetry in the current late-Romantic
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
style. "The prime literary antecedents of Lampman lie in the work of the English poets Keats, Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
, and Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
," says the Gale Encyclopedia of Biography, "but he also brought new and distinctively Canadian elements to the tradition. Lampman, like others of his school, relied on the Canadian landscape to provide him with much of the imagery, stimulus, and philosophy which characterize his work.... Acutely observant in his method, Lampman created out of the minutiae of nature careful compositions of color, sound, and subtle movement. Evocatively rich, his poems are frequently sustained by a mood of revery and withdrawal, while their themes are those of beauty, wisdom, and reassurance, which the poet discovered in his contemplation of the changing seasons and the harmony of the countryside."
The Canadian Encyclopedia calls his poems "for the most part close-packed melancholy meditations on natural objects, emphasizing the calm of country life in contrast to the restlessness of city living. Limited in range, they are nonetheless remarkable for descriptive precision and emotional restraint. Although characterized by a skilful control of rhythm and sound, they tend to display a sameness of thought."
"Lampman wrote more than 300 poems in this last period of his life, although scarcely half of these were published prior to his death. For single poems or groups of poems he found outlets in the literary magazines of the day: in Canada, chiefly the Week; in the United States, Scribner’s Magazine, The Youth's Companion, the Independent, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Magazine. In 1888, with the help of a legacy left to his wife, he published Among the millet and other poems," his first book, at his own expense. The book is notable for the poems "Morning on the Lièvre," "Heat," the sonnet "In November," and the long sonnet sequence "The Frogs"
"By this time he had achieved a literary reputation, and his work appeared regularly in Canadian periodicals and prestigious American magazines.... In 1895 Lampman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada , may also operate under the more descriptive name RSC: The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada...
, and his second collection of poems, Lyrics of Earth, was brought out by a Boston publisher."
The book was not a success. "The sales of Lyrics of Earth were disappointing and the only critical notices were four brief though favourable reviews. In size, the volume is slighter than Among the Millet — twenty-nine poems in contrast to forty-eight — and in quality fails to surpass the earlier work." (Lyrics does, though, contain some of Lampman's most beautiful poems, such as "After Rain" and "The Sun Cup.")
"A third volume, Alcyone and other poems, in press at the time of his death" in 1899, showed Lampman starting to move in new directions, with the nature verses interspersed with philosophical poetry like "Voices of Earth" and "The Clearer Self" and poems of social criticism like "The City" and what may be his best-known poem, the dystopian vision of "The City at the End of Things." "As a corollary to his preoccupation with nature," notes the Gale Encyclopedia, "Lampman [had] developed a critical stance toward an emerging urban civilization and a social order against which he pitted his own idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
. He was an outspoken socialist, a feminist, and a social critic
Social criticism
The term social criticism locates the reasons for malicious conditions of the society in flawed social structures. People adhering to a social critics aim at practical solutions by specific measures, often consensual reform but sometimes also by powerful revolution.- European roots :Religious...
." Canadian critic Malcolm Ross
Malcolm Ross (literary critic)
Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, OC, FRSC, was a notable Canadian literary critic.-Education:Born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the son of Cora Elizabeth Hewitson and Charles Duff Ross, Ross attended Fredericton High School before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy from the...
wrote that "in poems like 'The City at the End of Things' and 'Epitaph on a Rich Man' Lampman seems to have a social and political insight absent in his fellows."
However, Lampman died before Alcyone appeared, and it "was held back by Scott (12 specimen copies were printed posthumously in Ottawa in 1899) in favour of a comprehensive memorial volume planned for 1900." The latter was a planned collected poems "which he was editing in the hope that its sale would provide Maud with some much-needed cash. Besides Alcyone, it included Among the Millet and Lyrics of Earth in their entirety, plus seventy-four sonnets Lampman had tried to publish separately, twenty-three miscellaneous poems and ballads, and two long narrative poems (“David and Abigail” and “The Story of an Affinity”)." Among the previously unpublished sonnets were some of Lampman's finest work, including "Winter Uplands", "The Railway Station," and "A Sunset at Les Eboulements."
"Published by Morang & Company of Toronto in 1900," The Collected Poems of Archibald Lampman "was a substantial tome — 473 pages — and ran through several editions. Scott’s 'Memoir,' which prefaces the volume, would prove to be an invaluable source of information about the poet’s life and personality."
Scott published one further volume of Lampman's poetry, At the Long Sault and Other Poems, in 1943 – "and on this occasion, as on other occasions previously, he did not hesitate to make what he felt were improvements on the manuscript versions of the poems." The book is remarkable mainly for its title poem, "At the Long Sault: May 1660," a dramatic retelling of the Battle of Long Sault
Battle of Long Sault
The Battle of Long Sault occurred over a five day period in early May of 1660 during the Beaver Wars. It was fought between French colonial militia, with their Huron and Algonquin allies, against the Iroquois Confederacy. The battle took place along the Ottawa River in Canada next to a series of...
, which belongs with the great Canadian historical poems. It was co-edited by E.K. Brown, who the same year published his own volume On Canadian Poetry: a book that was a major boost to Lampman's reputation. Brown considered Lampman and Scott the top Confederation Poets, well ahead of Roberts and Carman, and his view came to predominate over the next few decades.
Lampman never considered himself more than a minor poet, as he once confessed in a letter to a friend: "I am not a great poet and I never was. Greatness in poetry must proceed from greatness of character — from force, fearlessness, brightness. I have none of those qualities. I am, if anything, the very opposite, I am weak, I am a coward, I am a hypochondriac. I am a minor poet of a superior order, and that is all." However, others' opinion of his work has been higher than his own.
Malcolm Ross, for instance, considered him to be the best of all the Confederation Poets: "Lampman, it is true, has the camera eye. But Lampman is no mere photographer. With Scott (and more completely than Scott), he has, poetically, met the demands of his place and his time.... Like Roberts (and more intensively than Roberts), he searches for the idea.... Ideas are germinal for him, infecting the tissue of his thought.... Like the existentialist
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
of our day, Lampman is not so much 'in search of himself' as engaged strenuously in the creation of the self. Every idea is approached as potentially the substance of a 'clearer self.' Even landscape is made into a symbol of the deep, interior processes of the self, or is used ... to induce a settling of the troubled surfaces of the mind and a miraculous transparency that opens into the depths."
Recognition
Lampman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of CanadaRoyal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada , may also operate under the more descriptive name RSC: The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada...
in 1895.
He was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in 1920.
A literary prize, the Archibald Lampman Award
Archibald Lampman Award
The Archibald Lampman Award is an annual Canadian literary award, created by Blaine Marchand, and presented by the literary magazine Arc, for the year's best work of poetry by a writer living in the National Capital Region.- History :...
, is awarded annually by Ottawa-area poetry magazine Arc in Lampman's honour.
Since 1999, the annual "Archibald Lampman Poetry Reading" has brought leading Canadian poets to Trinity College, Toronto, under the sponsorship of the John W. Graham Library and the Friends of the Library, Trinity College.
His name is also carried on in the town of Lampman
Lampman, Saskatchewan
Lampman is a small town of around 735 people, located in the south east part of Saskatchewan roughly 30 miles northeast of Estevan. It is served by the Lampman Airport....
, Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan is a prairie province in Canada, which has an area of . Saskatchewan is bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, and on the south by the U.S. states of Montana and North Dakota....
, a small community of approximately 730 people, situated near the City of Estevan.
Canada Post issued a postage stamp in his honour on July 7, 1989. The stamp depicts Lampman's portrait on a backdrop of nature.
Canadian singer/songwriter Loreena McKennitt
Loreena McKennitt
Loreena Isabel Irene McKennitt, CM, OM, is a Canadian singer, composer, harpist, accordionist and pianist who writes, records and performs world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern themes. McKennitt is known for her refined, clear soprano vocals...
adapted Lampman's poem "Snow" as a song, writing original music while keeping as the lyrics the poem verbatim. This adaptation appears on McKennitt's album To Drive the Cold Winter Away
To Drive the Cold Winter Away
To Drive the Cold Winter Away is Loreena McKennitt's second album, released in 1987. It pays homage to her childhood memories of music for the winter season, the most vivid of which “came from songs and carols recorded in churches or great halls, rich with their own unique ambience and...
(1987) and also in a different version on her EP, A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season (1995).
Poetry
- Among the Millett, and Other Poems. (Ottawa: J. Durie, 18881888 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:*William Wilfred Campbell, Snowflakes and sunbeams. St. Stephen, NB: St. Croix Courier Press. Published at author's expense....
). - Lyrics of Earth. (Boston: Copeland & Day, 18951895 in poetry* February 18 — John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, father of Oscar Wilde's lover, leaves a calling card at one of Wilde's London clubs, the Albermarle. On the back of it he writes "For Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite"...
) (Wildside Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1434401304 - Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, Two poems. n.p., 1896.
- Alcyone. (Ottawa: Ogilvy, 18991899 in poetry— Opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
). - The Poems of Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott ed. (Toronto: Morang, 19001900 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* In February, Myōjō , a monthly literary magazine, begins publication in Japan. between February 1900 and November 1908...
) (General Books, 2009). ISBN 978-1150520181 - Lyrics of Earth: Sonnets and Ballads, Duncan Campbell Scott ed. (Toronto: Musson, 19251925 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot joins the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, leaves Lloyds bank....
). - At the Long Sault and Other New Poems, Duncan Campbell Scott and E.K. Brown ed.. (Toronto: Ryerson, 19431943 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* September 12 – Abraham Sutzkever, a Polish Jew writing poetry in Yiddish, escapes the Vilna Ghetto with his wife and hides in the forests. Sutzkever and fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke...
). - Selected Poems of Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott ed. (Toronto: Ryerson, 19471947 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Dorothy Parker divorces Alan Campbell for the first time....
). - Lampman’s Kate: Late Love Poems of Archibald Lampman, Margaret Coulby Whitridge ed. (Ottawa: Borealis, 19751975 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* With the 1974, fall of the dictatorship in Greece, poets, authors and intellectuals who had fled after the coup of 1967 returned, and this year many began publishing in that country.* Brick Books, a...
). - Lampman’s Sonnets: The Complete Sonnets of Archibald Lampman, Margaret Coulby Whitridge ed. (Ottawa: Borealis, 19761976 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Two poems written in 1965 by Mao Zedong just before the Cultural Revolution, including "Two Birds: A Dialogue", are published on January 1-Works published in English:Listed by nation where the work...
). ISBN 978-0919594500 - The Story of an Affinity, D.M.R. Bentley ed. (London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 19861986 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* New American Writing, an annual literary magazine concentrating on poetry, is founded in Chicago, Illinois....
). ISBN 978-0921243007 - Selected Poetry of Archibald Lampman, Michael Gnarowski ed. (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 19901990 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Allen Ginsberg crowned "Majelis King" in Prague on May Day...
). ISBN 978-0919662155
Prose
- Archibald Lampman's letters to Edward William Thomson (1890-1898). Arthur S. Bourinot ed. Ottawa: Arthur S. Bourinot, 1956.
- Selected Prose of Archibald Lampman, ed. Barrie Davies. (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1975).
- At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in the Globe 1892–3, ed. Barrie Davies (Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979). ISBN 0802022995
- An annotated edition of the correspondence between Archibald Lampman and Edward William Thomson, 1890-1898. (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980). ISBN 978-0919662773
- The Essays and Reviews of Archibald Lampman. D.M.R. Bentley ed. London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1996.
- The Fairy Tales of Archibald Lampman. D.M.R. Bentley ed. London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1999.
External links
- Selected Poetry of Archibald Lampman - Biography and 29 poems (At the Long Sault: May 1660, The City at the End of Things, Comfort of the Fields, Evening, The Frogs, The Growth of Love XI, Heat, In Beechwood Cemetery, In November (1), In November (2), A January Morning, Midnight,, Morning on the Lièvre, A Niagara Landscape, On Lake Temiscamingue, On the Companionship with Nature, Outlook, The Railway Station, Reality, Storm, A Sunset at Les Eboulements, Temagami, A Thunderstorm, To a Millionaire, To the Ottawa, Voices of Earth, We too shall Sleep, Winter Evening, Winter Uplands, Winter-Solitude)
- Archibald Lampman at Canadian Poetry.
- Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
- Website for the town of Lampman, Saskatchewan
- Archibald Lampman's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
- The Lampman Medallion in the Trinity College Chapel
- Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews, No. 45 (Fall/Winter 1999). [Lampman centennial edition].