Archibald Lampman: Canada's Modest Master

Archibald Lampman, Canada's greatest nature poet - its literary Tom Thomson - lived a short, quiet, and almost tidy life.

Lampman was born in 1861, in the small town of Morpeth, Upper Canada, to an Anglican minister and his wife. Archie, as he was known, had a happy childhood in various small Ontario towns, notably Cobourg. He was educated at Trinity College, Toronto, where, although a good student, he was distracted enough by his growing commitment to writing poetry that he was unable to pursue a professional career, as was generally expected of bright young men at the time. He made a brief, abortive attempt - lasting only three months - at being a high-school teacher in Orangeville. (He hated it: he wrote to a friend, "never descend to the abyss of pedagogy if there is another path open in any direction to thee in this life.") Within a few months of this failure, in 1883, he found work, through a friend's uncle, as a clerk at Canada Post in Ottawa.

The next 16 years of Lampman's existence, covering nearly half his life, were constrained both geographically and professionally. He rarely left Ottawa, travelling east a few times, to various parts of Quebec, to Boston twice and Nova Scotia once. He never saw the prairies. In his job, he won a single, nearly automatic promotion. He was married at the age of 25, and had three children, one of whom died in infancy. His one episode of personal drama was an affair with a Canada Post colleague, Katherine Waddell, which cost him some emotional angst. The pair eventually broke off the relationship.

Lampman chafed at the parochialism of Ottawa society. The city wasn't much more than a town at that time, with only about 20,000 inhabitants, and there was little to speak of in the way of cultural stimulation or artistic society. He once wrote to a friend, "I am suffocated. If I had the genius of Milton, I could do nothing."

Through it all, though, he was writing poetry of strikingly high quality; the narrow bounds of his life were not a hindrance to his distinctive voice or clean, finely tempered style of writing. Early on after his move to Ottawa, his friend Duncan Campbell Scott (another of Canada's great poets, though one with a much more ambivalent legacy) taught him to paddle a canoe, and Lampman spent many days exploring the lakes, rivers, woodlands, and small towns of eastern Ontario and western Quebec. He wrote with a rare clarity of vision and emotion about the landscapes he walked and canoed through. These qualities are evident in many of the over 300 poems that were eventually published under his name, though they are perhaps most distinct in his sonnet, "In November":

The hills and leafless forests slowly yield

To the thick-driving snow. A little while

And night shall darken down. In shouting file

The woodmen's carts go by me homeward-wheeled,

Past the thin fading stubbles, half-concealed,

Now golden-grey, sowed softly through with snow,

Where the last ploughman follows still his row,

Turning black furrows through the whitening field.

Far off the village lamps begin to gleam,

Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way;

The hills grow wintery white, and bleak winds moan

About the naked uplands. I alone

Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor grey,

Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.

The precise language, the lyrical flow -- enhanced by alliterations such as "darken down," and "golden-grey" -- and the sense of pleasure drawn from solitude and the contemplation of the natural scenery -- are all characteristic of Lampman's work.

(Some of the early poems seem a little bit too crafted, with too many stilted turns of phrase and archaic expressions, learned from his English-style education in the classics and the English Romantics such as Shelley and Keats. These tics obscure the natural, relaxed beauty of the images expressed: as, for example, when he writes, "Ah! I will set no more mine overtasked brain/To barren search and toil that beareth nought....") The simpler his language is, the more he approaches a Robert Frost-like solidity and directness of style.

Despite his carefully-honed skill in creating these short, nature-based poems, though, Lampman struggled greatly with his poetic ambitions. He had difficulty getting his first collection, Lyrics of earth, published -- it didn't appear until 1895, only four years before his death -- and he constantly wished to be able to demonstrate more versatility in his output. He had a strong social conscience -- he was a member of the Fabian Society -- and wanted to grapple with larger social issues. The few more ambitious works he attempted, however, were long-winded and heavy-handed failures. This over-reaching was, perhaps, an example of both his artistic heroism and his greatest tragedy (which is really the heroism and the tragedy of every not-entirely-great artist): never blessed with genius, he was always anxious to prove his artistic worth and secure his legacy as honestly as he could.

He once expressed his doubts about the value of what he was doing, and about his own talents: "poetry is to some men like the magnetic sea mountain in the Arabian Nights, that drew the very nails out of the ships to their distraction. This same delusion will doubtless ruin me, unfitting me for any solid profession, and yet in the end fulfilling none of the vapoury hopes I have founded upon it.”

Lampman's reputation was eventually established to a certain extent - among Canadian literature professors and students, at least - by the efforts of his fellow poet Duncan Campbell Scott, who posthumously edited and published a number of his works, and wrote a biography in 1900, the year after Lampman's death.

What Lampman represents, though - the poet of nature, the bard of the frontier - is often looked at with suspicion by a certain stream of Canadian literary criticism.

A high-school teacher of mine once who argued that we should remove all images of animals - the beaver, the caribou, the loon, and so on- - from our coinage. It was people who built our country, he said, not cute woodland creatures. Others of the same persuasion complain that the image of Canada -- established by artists such as Lampman, Susannah Moodie, even some of the more contemporary works of Margaret Atwood, Michael Crummey,  -- as a vast wild frontier of forest, prairie and tundra, peopled by pioneering farmers, miners, fishermen, and lumberjacks, is a cliche at best, and a dangerous romanticization at worst.

These critics argue that an increasing proportion of our diverse and urbanized population has little knowledge of, or interest in, our country's flora and fauna, and suffers little from this lack. In fact, they say, it is far more important to enhance our technological and industrial abilities, and to strengthen our commercial and cultural links with other countries and societies - centred in great metropolises like New York, Beijing, London, Mumbai - than to focus on the culture that grew out of our own desolate backyard.

I agree with all of these arguments, up to a point. It's true that a great deal of new Canadian art -- at least the art that gets paid attention to in the popular media -- is not focused on modern society as we live it, full of cable TV, coffee shops and office buildings, universities and suburban homes. (The author and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith refers to those works that ignore Canada's modern metropolitan reality as "angst on the farm" novels.)

However, there is also something to be said for encouraging Canadians to read what might be called our foundational literature. Canada's history and its current national character are, for better or for worse, strongly defined by its geography -- its fields of wheat and corn, its wilderness, its long distances, the stillnesses and the silences that intersperse our cities. These cities, while increasingly bustling and metropolitan, are still not much more than outposts, strung like Christmas lights along the edge of a vast expanse of farmland, forests, rivers, and mountains.

We shouldn't necessarily read Lampman out of a sense of duty -- as Samuel Johnson said, "A man should read as his fancy takes him, for what he reads as a chore will do him little good" -- but rather because reading him allows us better to understand who we are and where we have come from -- and, perhaps, to understand one another and get along a little better.

Lampman's poems are, above all, marked by a love of nature, painstakingly observed landscapes and details of natural phenomena, and a calm enjoyment of solitude and contemplation. These are things with which all Canadians can still identify, no matter how busy and bustling their lives may be.

"And I...standing idly there,

With muffled hands in the chill air,

Felt the warm glow about my feet,

And shuddering betwixt cold and heat,

Drew my thoughts closer, like a cloak,

While something in my blood awoke,

A nameless and unnatural cheer,

A pleasure secret and austere."

--

Sources: The Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings Through the First World War. Gerson, Carole, and Davies, Gwendolyn, editors. McLelland and Stewart Inc.: Toronto, 1994.

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