Archibald Lampman (1861-1899)
1967: I first encountered some Lampman poems in a gr. 12 anthology of English classics. The poem below had a rustic charm to it like a Cornelius Krieghoff painting. It immediately struck me as a realistic portrait of Winnipeg and Canadian winters.
Many years later I went in search of more Lampman, finding the hefty 1900 edition of Archibald Lampman’s Poems edited by another Canadian poet-friend Duncan Campbell Scott. It has pretty much everything Lampman wrote before his early death; certainly his best works. Scott gobsmacked CanLit enthusiasts 43 years later by collecting some unpublished poems in At the Long Sault and Other New Poems by Archibald Lampman.
Among the Millet, the book pictured above, was Lampman’s first published work (1888) and when I went looking for this rare title, I located and acquired an even rarer signed copy dedicated to his Ottawa friend, walking companion, and painter Charles Moss!.
In retrospect, I would say Lampman was Canada’s top nature poet before Robert Service at the turn of the century, and Newfoundland’s E.J. Pratt beginning in the 1920s. His best poems remain “At the Long Sault”, “Heat”, “Morning on the Lievre (a popular classic olde NFB title–to view, Google “Morning on the Lievre”, found on YouTube), “The City of the End of Things”, “The Frogs”, “To a Millionaire”, “Midnight”, “Solitude”, “A Thunderstorm”, “Ambition”, “Winter Uplands”, “Winter Evening”, “Life and Nature”, and many of the nature sonnets.
The 5 poems recited in the above video:
