Lampman, Archibald

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Robert L. McDougall, “LAMPMAN, ARCHIBALD,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/lampman_archibald_12E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Poet and postal clerk; b. 17 Nov. 1861 in Morpeth, Upper Canada, first child and only son of Archibald Lampman and Susannah Charlotte Gesner; d. 10 Feb. 1899 in Ottawa.
    • Archibald Lampman is commonly identified with a group of early Canadian poets which included William Bliss Carman, Charles George Douglas Roberts, and Duncan Campbell Scott. They have been variously referred to as the “group of the sixties” or “poets of the Confederation.”
    • 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. Lampman was of loyalist stock on both sides of the family.
    • Lampman’s world-view was simple. Like many of his fellows he had lost his faith in Christian dogma and institutionalized religion. What is left is a burning idealism, a secular but lofty humanism which looks less to the glory of God than to the glory of man’s soul as it journeys towards peace and justice and freedom in a transcendent relation with nature, called in many poems the Earth Mother. Indeed, of all the strands of 19th-century thought that entered into Lampman’s make-up, transcendentalism was probably the most important. At the cutting edge of his mind, Lampman was acutely sensitive to social problems, and about these he wrote forcefully in an essay on socialism and in two visionary poems, “The city of the end of things” and “The land of Pallas.” But most of these concerns, as also the impedimenta of aphorisms and moral imperatives he inherited from a sententious age, were shed like debris from a comet when he entered his world of nature. Here the structure of attitudes and values becomes elementary and undogmatic as he moves from sensory exposure to mystical identification. He had picked up and nourished from his early reading of Shelley the idea of contemptus mundi, the rejection of the world. In many of the best Lampman poems the city is there, and it is evil, the haunt of materialism and greed and cruelty among men. But the city is characteristically at Lampman’s back. He faces nature, and nature, at first simply restorative to body and mind, becomes in the end sacramental, the means whereby the Soul (and the word is usually capitalized) “Feels upward to some height at last,” aching for union with “the Master Spirit of the world.” Thought there is, but it is of a certain transcendental order. In the concluding lines of the poem “Heat,” one of the best known of Lampman’s poems, the speaker says: “In the full furnace of the hour / My thoughts grow keen and clear.” What thoughts? We are not told. The short poem “The choice” begins with a rejection of the “conflict” and “pomp” of the world and ends with the lines: “I sit me in the windy grass and grow / As wise as age, as joyous as a child.” At the core of Lampman’s best, the thought is the poem.
  • Second Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4536
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/29497654/archibald-lampman