In Archibald Lampman: Canadian Poet of Nature, Carl Y. Connor deduces from a comparison of Lampman’s early poetry with "the fluent prose of his essays and letters" of the same period that "Lampman the prose writer somewhat preceded Lampman the poet in the volume and character of his earliest work" (51). Connor is referring specifically to Lampman’s writing of the early eighteen eighties when, as a classical scholar and then recent graduate of Trinity College, Toronto, he wrote copious letters to his friends¹ and published several essays and poems in the College magazine, Rouge et Noir.² Nevertheless, Connor’s general point is a valid one: before he published his first volume of poetry, Among the Millet, and Other Poems, in 1888, the bulk of Lampman’s writing consisted of essays, letters, and—a genre only briefly considered by Connor— "prose fairy tale[s]" (78).³ By as early as 1883, when he was beginning to publish his work outside the pages of Rouge et Noir, Lampman was becoming better known for his poetry than his prose,⁴ but for the next twelve years at least he continued to write essays for oral delivery or publication and twice served as a reviewer for The Week (Toronto). During this period he also collaborated with his fellow members of the Ottawa group of the Confederation poets, William Wilfred Campbell and Duncan Campbell Scott, on At the Mermaid Inn, a column that appeared weekly in the Globe (Toronto) from February 1892 to July 1893. When he died at the age of thirty-seven in 1899, Lampman left behind enough work in prose to fill a substantial volume and to sustain Connor’s claim that he was "a thinker on many diverse topics, a discriminating literary critic, and a writer…[of] taste and...style" (122, and see 147).

The Essays

Lampman’s essays, most of which were clearly intended for oral delivery, tend to fall into two parts: a general and sometimes very conceptual preamble that ranges widely over or around the topic at hand; and the body of the essay, which, in the case of literary topics, relies heavily on quotations to advance and illustrate its arguments. Since they are conceptual in nature, the preambles to such essays as "The Modern School of Poetry in England" and "Poetic Interpretation" have attracted a great deal of scholarly interest and comment; indeed, Lampman’s account in the opening paragraphs of his "Two Canadian Poets[:] a Lecture" of the inspirational effect of his first encounter with Roberts’s Orion, and Other Poems in the spring of 1881 may well be the most quoted and best-known passage in his prose work, if only because Malcolm Ross cites and discusses it at length in the Introduction to his important anthology of Poets of the Confederation. In Archibald Lampman, L.R. Early not only summarizes the same passage but also quotes and discusses aspects of the preambles of both "The Modern School of Poetry in England" and "Poetic Interpretation" (see 23, 26, 46). Similarly close attention is paid to the preamble to "Happiness" in the Introduction to the Canadian Poetry Press edition of Lampman’s The Story of an Affinity (see xxi, xxiii).

The corollary of this emphasis on the preambles to Lampman’s essays is that many scholars have glossed over the ensuing details of his arguments and some editors have felt little compunction in removing lengthy quotations and other materials from the body of the essays. In Archibald Lampman: Selected Prose, for example, Davies omits the lengthy (but not the brief) indented quotations from "The Modern School of Poetry in England" and "Poetic Interpretation," and in editing "Two Canadian Poets" and "The Character and Poetry of Keats" for the University of Toronto Quarterly, Brown "suppressed some of the longer quotations" in the former (406) and, in the latter, reduced the essay to somewhat more than half its original length by omitting "passages quoted from the poems or the letters...[and] accounts of material happenings in Keats’ life, based on Houghton and other early biographers" (356). "Nothing that has been omitted [from ‘The Character and Poetry of Keats’] could significantly alter the bearing of the appreciations and estimates of individual poems of which, apart from the introduction, these extracts principally consist," Brown assures his readers; "[a] few words of comment, set down in passing, on various poems which did not arrest Lampman’s attention are the only references to poems that have not been reproduced" (356). While understandable on the grounds of space and printing costs, these editing practises have given readers of the Selected Prose and the University of Toronto Quarterly a distorted sense of the content and form of Lampman’s literary essays, in effect, distilling approximations of the modern academic article from the looser medleys of discussion and illustration that he actually wrote.

The omission of lengthy quotations and other material obscures two other important aspects of Lampman’s essays: their rich resonances with his own poetry and their heavy reliance on the sorts of secondary sources towards which Brown tactfully gestures when he refers to "accounts of...Keats’ life, based on Houghton and other early biographers." Numerous examples in both categories, particularly the second, can be found in the Editorial Notes to the present edition, so only some representative instances need to be given here for the purposes of illustration.

Among "the many examples and illustrations drawn from the poetry of Keats and Wordsworth" that Davies "delete[s]" (2) from "Poetic Interpretation" are the well-known opening lines of "Resolution and Independence" in which Wordsworth describes the transition from a stormy night to a sunny morning:

    There was a roaring in the wind all night;
        The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
    But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
        The birds are singing in the distant woods;
        Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods;
    The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

    All things that love the sun are out of doors;
        The sky rejoices in the morning’s birth;
    The grass is bright with rain-drops; on the moors
        The hare is running races in her mirth.

Lampman argues that these lines "convey very perfectly the poetic impression of a blithe bright morning after a night loud with rain and storm" and he must have had them in mind when he gave his own impression of a similar transition in "After Rain," one of the most successful poems in Lyrics of Earth. There "three...days" and nights of "rain" and "wind" give way on the "the fourth day...at noon" to a warm world of shining "rillet[s]" and "Uplifted" spirits that draws "haymakers" and nature-lovers alike from their houses:

I watched the gray hawk wheel and drop,
Sole shadow on the shining world;
I saw the mountains clothed and curled,
With forest ruffling to the top;
I saw the river’s length unfurled,
    Pale silver down the fruited plain,
    Grown great and stately with the rain.

Through miles of shadow and soft heat,
Where field and fallow, fence and tree,
Were all one world of greenery,
I heard the robin ringing sweet,
The sparrow piping silverly,
    The thrushes at the forest’s hem;
    And as I went I sang with them.
(Poems 144-45)

Among the many differences between the stanzas of Wordsworth and Lampman is a faintly sinister, not to say post-Darwinian, detail—the predatory "gray hawk"—that Lampman may have remembered from one of the "descriptive couplets" of Roberts’s "In the Afternoon" that he quotes with approval in "Two Canadian Poets": "Again the droning bees hum by; / Still-winged, the grey hawk wheels on high."⁵ Presumably believing that the "longer quotation" of which this is a part does not "slow unduly...or...obscure" "the movement of [Lampman’s] thought" (406), Brown allowed it to remain in his edition of the essay, a reprieve denied to numerous other passages, including Roberts’s sonnet "The Sower" and Lampman’s observation that it is "apparently a transcript in verse of François Millet’s famous picture of the same title." Only when all the quotations in all the essays are intact can the complexities of Lampman’s poetic preferences and practices become readily apparent.

As Brown appears to have recognized, Lampman’s use of many of his secondary sources, not least the Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats by Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) and Keats, an influential biographical and critical study by Sidney Colvin, was far from complex. In a manner reminiscent of the workings of the Coleridgean fancy (and, indeed, of Coleridge himself in some of the less creative portions of the Biographia Literaria), Lampman all-too-frequently constructs his essays from materials ready-made by other biographers and critics, contributing little more to the project than fresh mortar and a new site. Thus— to give just two more examples—Lampman’s characterization of Shelley and his poetry in "The Revolt of Islam" draws heavily on John Addington Symonds’ Shelley, and his presentation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in "The Modern School of Poetry in England" as a man for whom "every material thing was but the expression of something inward and spiritual" merely reworks Walter Pater’s observation that for Rossetti, as for his great Italian namesake, "the spiritual and the material are fused and blent. ... Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous also or material" (5:212-13). Such borrowings and adaptations are perhaps to be expected in essays intended primarily as lectures, a form that permits the unattributed use of secondary sources and allows for the impromptu interjection of attributions. (It is quite easy to imagine that when he delivered "The Modern School of Poetry in England" to the Ottawa Literary and Scientific Society in March 1885 Lampman prefaced his discussion of Rossetti with a remark like "Of course, what I am about to say owes much to an essay by Walter Pater.")⁶ But Lampman’s heavy reliance on secondary sources is more difficult to understand or excuse in the literary essays intended for publication. As informal as nineteenth-century criticism could be in regard to secondary sources, it customarily contains more acknowledgements of its debts then the literary essays that Lampman published or wrote for publication. The startlingly derivative nature of "The Character and Poetry of Keats" may partly explain its failure to find a publisher during Lampman’s lifetime as well as Brown’s decision to present it in severely edited form. Unfortunately, Mothersill’s observation that it is "impossible...to tell" whether Brown’s deletions "consist...of Lampman’s own writing or material quoted by him" (4) applies to large portions of the essay as a whole unless it is read, as the Editorial Notes in the present text attempt to make possible, with a comprehensive awareness of "Houghton, and other early biographers."

When Lampman turns to Canadian poets and non-literary subjects, the absence of secondary sources and the pressure of direct experience results in essays that are considerably more engaging and admirable than his more derivative studies of English Romantic and Victorian poets. The discussions of Roberts and Cameron in "Two Canadian Poets" are fresh and intelligent, and "Friendship," "College Days Among Ourselves," and "Fishing in Rice Lake" are enlivened by personal feeling and experience. Even "German Patriotic Poetry" and "Gambetta," though heavily reliant in different ways on other texts, are shot through with an obvious relish for patriotism and war that prevents them from being merely the university essays that they probably were. (As Connor observes, "Lampman’s imagination was fired" during his years at Trinity College by certain aspects of militarism" [51].) But without doubt Lampman’s finest essay on any subject is "Happiness," the last piece of prose that he published during his lifetime and the first to be reprinted after his death. Not only is "Happiness" a well-crafted essay that makes creative use of sources as diverse as the classical topos of "The Choice of Hercules" and Matthew Arnold’s Preface to his Last Essays on Church and Religion, but it also treats of a subject—the habits of thought and work that lead to enduring art and lasting happiness—that had engaged Lampman in a deeply personal way for many years. In several of the essays in Rouge et Noir, happiness is a byproduct of friendship. In "The Character and Poetry of Keats" the "pith and kernel of the meaning" of Endymion lies in the lines that locate happiness in ‘"that which becks / Our ready minds to fellowship divine, / A fellowship with essence"’ that permits a glimpse of ‘"The clear religion of heaven!"’ And in "Happiness" itself the elusive goal lies in the resolute pursuit of "a free and characteristic activity" that permits a "consciousness of adequate self-expression...within the limitations imposed by the social structure." Very often in tandem with friendship, happiness is a theme that runs through several of Lampman’s essays and, very clearly, constitutes a major strand of his thinking about creative and social issues.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a letter of May 26, 1886 to May McKeggie in which he describes his own ways of dealing with depression:

I very often feel totally forlorn and impotent in the presence of what I have planned for myself to do. But I find that it is useless to be always examining myself and endeavouring to calculate one’s own strength and resources. The best way is to go actively to work on the first thing in the way of one’s art that lies in the road—to forget if possible that one is trying to be great and just endeavour to do what one has in hand as naturally and truthfully as one can. Life has some boons either visibly or invisibly for everyone, and all work that is faithful and comes from a full heart is of value. …I think a great deal of the good work that has been done in the world has been the outcome simply of a spirit of blind cheerful activity such as I describe. The great souls never knew half the time where they were going or what was to be the net result of it all—but they toiled carelessly and divinely on. Let us emulate them.

In its rejection of obsessive subjectivity, its advocacy of "blind cheerful activity," its deference to "great souls" who have "toiled carelessly and divinely on" and, above all, in its tone of moral earnestness this passage bears the unmistakable imprint of Thomas Carlyle. As Lampman himself intimates through frequent recourse to The French Revolution, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, and other works in "Friendship," "Gambetta," and elsewhere, Carlyle preceded Arnold as a major force in moulding his thought to the contours of high Victorianism. It was within a Carlylean energy field that his beliefs about happiness and creativity took shape, that he came to understand the ethical and humanitarian duty of the artist to assist "[h]uman nature" in its "divine progress" towards "what is pure and noble and beautiful" ("The Poetry of Byron"), and that he developed a preference for Cameron over Roberts, Keats over Shelley, and almost any writer over Byron, the poet whose morbid egotism Carlyle regarded as a hinderance to the happiness that becomes possible when the "Precept Know thyself...[is] translated into...Know what thou canst work at" (1:132,153). That Lampman published his most Carlylean essay— "Friendship"— in the very month of Carlyle’s death—February 1881— may be taken as a tribute to the thinker who exercised a formative influence on his thought in the early ’eighties.

To judge by the fact that references to Arnoldian critical and social concepts such as poetry as a "criticism of life" do not begin to appear in Lampman’s essays until the mid-to-late ’eighties (see "The Modern School of Poetry in England," "Style," and "Poetic Interpretation"), he came to Arnold’s prose later than is usually thought, and perhaps with the encouragement of Roberts. Lampman’s correspondence with Roberts in the months following his epiphanic reading of Orion, and Other Poems in May 1881 has not survived, but a letter from Roberts of September 23, 1882 indicates that Lampman has mentioned Arnold’s poetry and offers suggestions for further reading. "I shall only refer to him you speak of [as] second to no living English writer," Roberts enthuses before encouraging Lampman to read Arnold’s "prose works, especially Essays in Criticism": "if you are not already familiar with them, you will find them the richest of intellectual fruits. That on ‘Heine’; on ‘Translating Homer’; ‘Maurice de Guérin,’ with others, are quite incomparable. Above all he is so tolerant, so lucid and unprejudiced, so broad in his grasp, and so exquisite in his expression" (Collected Letters 30). Lampman may already have been familiar with Arnold’s prose, if only in the General Introduction and the Introduction to Keats in T.H. Ward’s The English Poets: Selections, but, if he was not, then perhaps Roberts’s advice took him to the first series of Essays on Criticism and, specifically, to the definition of the "grand style" in "On Translating Homer" and the discussion of the "interpretative power" of poetry in "Maurice de Guérin" that lie in the background of "Style" and "Poetic Interpretation." In any event, Lampman was in the audience that heard Arnold deliver his paper on "Numbers; or, the Majority and the Remnant" in Ottawa in February 1884 and, as Michael Gnarowski suggests, probably "tried to model his own activities on those of the great English man of letters" (27). But, while Lampman drew on Arnold conceptually and devotes essays to some of the same poets (Shelley, Byron, and Keats), he did not share Arnold’s admiration for Byron or his distrust of democracy, and in the essay on socialism that he began in the mid-nineties he answers Culture and Anarchy with a plea for communistic "brotherhood" rather than liberal hierarchy. It is a pity that Lampman did not write the "elaborate article on Matthew Arnold" that, with Thomson’s encouragement, he was contemplating in May 1892, for such an article might have revealed a complex attitude to the man whom he regarded as "the greatest poet of his generation" (At the Mermaid Inn 98), particularly if it had—as, unfortunately, seems unlikely—reflected his friend’s advice to be "spontaneous, and indifferent to what other writers have said on th[e]...matter" (Annotated Correspondence 41, 43).

Less formative or broad in his influence on Lampman’s essays than either Carlyle or Arnold was John Campbell Shairp, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1877 to his death in 1885. A vigorous proponent of the "thesis that man’s spiritual nature must be postulated in any adequate philosophy of life" (Bayne 1282), Shairp insisted on the moral as well as the spiritual functions of the best poetry and judged poets from Shakespeare to Tennyson accordingly. His analysis of "Aesthetic literature" in "Dante Gabriel Rossetti" probably helped to colour Lampman’s response to that poet in "The Modern School of Poetry in England" and his On Poetic Interpretation of Nature, a series of essays on Wordsworth and other poets, appears to lie in the background of "Poetic Interpretation." Even more influential in shaping Lampman’s conception of the desirable characteristics and effects of poetry was Aspects of Poetry, a collection of Shairp’s Oxford lectures that includes an essay on "Poetic Style in Modern English Poetry" that seems to have provided a point of departure for "Style" and to have contributed also to "Poetic Interpretation." Aspects of Poetry diminished in importance for Lampman when he turned his attention to Keats and "Happiness" in the early-to-mid-’nineties, but prior to that Shairp supplemented Carlyle and then Arnold in shaping the high Victorian moral-aesthetic that dictates the three central concerns of his literary essays—the relation of beauty to morality, the relation of poetry to spiritual progress, and the value of a poem—its likelihood to endure—as measured by its moral and spiritual content. At the heart of Lampman’s moral-aesthetic is the belief, synthesized from his Victorian models in the crucible of his Anglican upbringing and education,⁷ that for a poem to be considered "good" in every sense of the word it must be a beautiful creation that will not depress or demoralize its readers but, rather, cheer, inspire, and elevate them, and, in so doing, "add to their happiness,"⁸ contribute to the well-being of society, and assist human moral and spiritual progress. Little wonder that the bulk of the "Notes" that Lampman took from John Ruskin’s Lectures on Art are from "Lecture 3. The Relation of Art to Morals" (see the Appendix in the present edition).

Since Lampman’s primary concern was to direct his readers and listeners towards poems that are both aesthetically and morally "good," he pays close attention to matters of technique and craftsmanship but always subordinates them to social and ethical priorities that inevitably include— for how, his assumptions lead him to ask, can a "bad" poet create a "good" poem?—the character and conduct of the writer. Keats may have succumbed, occasionally, to the promptings of a sensuous nature, and his infatuation with Fanny Brawne was bad for his mental and physical health, but on the evidence of his friends, his letters, and his biographers he was a profoundly ethical and humanitarian man who would have made his famous "aphorism...complete" if he had "said that Beauty [is] Goodness as well as Truth...for that which is beautiful and true in th[e] lofty sense is also good" ("The Character and Poetry of Keats"). Byron, in contrast, may have written a few good poems in "moods of high and serious reflection," but in the aggregate his work will not endure because it is the product of a man given to selfishness and dissipation ("The Poetry of Byron"). By the same moral-aesthetic logic as applied to a poet’s choice of subject-matter, "The Blessed Damozel" is an admirable product of Rossetti’s ability to give material form to his "inward and spiritual" moods but "Jenny," his meditation on the realities and implications of prostitution, "is chiefly noteworthy as being a representative work of the whole [Pre-Raphaelite] school and of later literature generally, bare, realistic, and hopeless" ("The Modern School of Poetry in England"). Similarly, Roberts’s Greek poems in the manner of "Milton...Tennyson...Keats and...Arnold"—all good men and good poets—command admiration both morally and aesthetically, but two of his love poems, "Tout ou Rien" and "In Notre Dame" are thoroughly "disagreeable," the first because it is "a declaration...[of] boundless and pitiless egotism" and the second because it is "an expression of brawny passion" ("Two Canadian Poets"). It is as consistent with Lampman’s moral-aesthetic that in the preamble to "Style" he uses human conduct as an analogue for poetic style as it is that in the opening paragraph of "The Modern School of Poetry in England" he defines poetry neither as the "Interpretation of the Invisible" (Carlyle) nor as a "Criticism of Life"’ (Arnold) but as "‘The Transfiguration of Life"’ (Alfred Austin), a conception that he allies to Arnold’s definition of religion as "Morality touched with emotion."’ The truly good poets, in Lampman’s view, are those whose life and work show a determination to rise above life as it is and to point towards what it ought to be; they are those whose moral sense causes them to put their imaginative powers and technical skills at the service of the ideal rather than the real, their fellow human beings rather than themselves.

An aspect of Lampman’s high Victorian moral-aesthetic that may also bear the imprint of his classical training at school and university is his insistence that a characteristic of the work of the best or "most perfect" poets is the great "variety" ("Poetic Interpretation") or "elasticity" ("Two Canadian Poets") of its styles and subjects. Taking his cue in "Style" from any one (or more) of the Victorian critics who followed Coleridge (and, behind him, Samuel Johnson) in proclaiming Shakespeare a universal man for his ability to enter imaginatively into any subject, Lampman cites passages in Henry IV, Part 2 and Richard III as evidence of a "universal mind" that represents "the highest development of the common healthy human intelligence" and a "universal style" that reflects the absence of any "special bias of thought and feeling." Most closely resembling Shakespeare in universality of mind and style is the "chameleon poet" Keats, who comes closest to being the "perfect poet" that Milnes in fact called him (Life 94) because "[h]e was governed by no theory and by no usurping line of thought and feeling. He was beyond all other men disposed to surrender himself completely to the impression of everything with which his brain or his senses came into contact" ("Poetic Interpretation"). Below Shakespeare and Keats in their imaginative and stylistic versatility are, in descending order, Wordsworth, Arnold, Tennyson, Shelley, Coleridge...and so on past Rossetti to the utterly monotonous monomaniacs of the Pre-Raphaelite school—Swinburne, a poet who has "never meditated genially and sympathetically upon the homely things of life," and Morris, another "morbid[ly] unhealth[y] soul" whose poems display a "universal monotony and want of hearty life" that "has done nothing to help the cause of order and divine beauty and peace" ("The Modern School of Poetry in England"). As even these few examples show, "variety" and "monotony" are the stylistic manifestations of a set of binary oppositions that Lampman applied to any poetic canon to determine whether, in the aggregate, its author was good (versatile: sympathetic: healthy: humanitarian) or bad (monotonous: subjective: morbid: socially destructive). Believing as he did that ‘[h]uman nature...[is] half human and half beast—but the human is the mightier part, and the whole is ever striving to be divine" ("The Modern School of Poetry in England"), Lampman recognized that no poet, not even Shakespeare, was entirely perfect, but he also held onto the hope—and herein lies the humanitarian and evolutionary thrust of his idealism—that human "striving" might one day in the far distant future create a perfect world and a perfect poet.

No doubt, Lampman’s preference for healthy "variety" in his poets was partly conditioned by Arnold’s association of monotony with morbidity in the Preface to his Poems (1853) and elsewhere (see Complete Prose Works 1:2-3), but it may also have origins in the classical principle of veriatas as practiced by Horace, Ovid, Statius and other Roman poets. Lampman probably knew the work of some or all of these poets directly and his discussions of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literature in "Style" suggest that he may also have known works such as Ben Jonson’s Under-wood and John Dryden’s Sylvae which embodied the idea, that, like a forest, a volume of poetry should contain poems in a variety of forms on a variety of subjects.⁹ And he would certainly have been aware, if only after 1886 as a result of Roberts’s In Divers Tones volume of that year, that in the first stanza of the first section of In Memoriam Tennyson expresses his admiration of "him [Goethe] who sings / To one clear harp in divers tones, / That men may rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things" (864).¹⁰ However he came by it, the ideal of "variety" was critically important to Lampman, not merely as a criterion for judging other poets, but as a principle for assembling his own volumes of poetry: Among, the Millet, and Other Poems is diverse in its styles and subjects, and Lyrics of Earth might have been similar if Lampman and Thomson, who helped to give it its final shape as a somewhat monotonous a cycle of nature lyrics (see Annotated Correspondence 144), had not recognized the difficulty of interesting a publisher in a collection of "miscellaneous poems" (qtd. in Greig Part 2:13).¹¹ It is a testament to Lampman’s continued commitment to the principle of variety and all that it implies about the poet’s mental make-up¹² and humanitarian functions, that in Alcyone, the volume that he left unpublished at his death, his visions of "the Issue of Things that Are" ("The City of the End of Things") and "the Country of the Ought to Be" ("The Land of Pallas")¹³ are surrounded by twelve "nature sonnets to make a variety" (Annotated Correspondence 166).¹⁴

The Reviews

Perhaps the most striking thing about Lampman’s reviews is that two— probably three—of them treat of books by authors whom he knew personally. "The Life and Times of Sir John A. Macdonald," which appeared in the June 30, 1883 number of the Canadian Illustrated News (Montreal), takes the reader through the Life and Times of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald by Joseph Edmund Collins, a mutual friend of Roberts and Lampman who was responsible for "establish[ing] a corresponding friendship" between the two poets and may have "provided the copy of Orion that so inspired Lampman" in May 1881 (Taylor 204-05). After Collins’s death in 1892, Lampman described him in At the Mermaid Inn as "almost the literary father of some of the young men who are now winning fame among us" (40). And, as its title indicates, "Mr. Thomson’s Old Man Savarin," published in the August 9, 1895 issue of The Week, is a review of Old Man Savarin and Other Stories by Edward William Thomson, a friend since March, 1890, when he wrote an editorial in the Globe suggesting to Macdonald that he should encourage Canadian talent by appointing Lampman to a less onerous and more remunerative position than the one he then occupied in the Post Office Department of the Civil Service. The fact that Lampman’s third review—his brief notice of C[harles] J. Parham’s Lyrical Translations from the Languages of Oc, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Provincial Dialects in The Week for December 8, 1887—treats of a work published privately in Ottawa suggests that Parham, too, was a friend or acquaintance. It is thus predictable that, to adopt the disclaimer with which "The Life and Times of Sir John A. Macdonald" begins, none of Lampman’s three reviews is "severe and critical," and all "aim to give...readers a general idea of a...work" judged to be "very able and delightful."

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the network of friendly reviewing in which Lampman played a minor part was in William Wilfred Campbell’s mind when, in the April 20, 1895 issue of Saturday Night (Toronto), he fired the first shot in what quickly became known as "The War Among the Poets," a cross-border skirmish that, if nothing else, dispelled any illusions that readers might have had about the cohesiveness of the Canadian literary community.¹⁵ "It seems to me that amid the incessant hailing and applauding of literary lights on both sides of the national boundary," wrote Campbell, "there is a great deal of insincerity and cheap humbug that is a hundred times more injurious to our literary development than dead silence on the whole subject. …In a very able editorial in one of its February issues, the New York Nation attacked this pernicious system under the title it has well earned, that of ‘the log-rollers.’ The Nation describes…‘log-rollers’ as a combination of unknown but extremely ambitions writers who band together for purposes of mutual admiration, and carry out their compact by booming one another in the…papers to which they have literary access" ("American Literary Conditions" 4-5). Of course, it would be an exaggeration to categorize Lampman’s three isolated reviews as "log-rolling" of the systematic sort decried by Campbell, but they are, nevertheless—and as Lampman, at least in the first instance, frankly admits—the products of a mutual admiration born of friendship.

In and of themselves, Lampman’s reviews are probably most interesting as indicators of his broad understanding of Canada’s history, landscape, and cultural conditions, his fondness for humour, and his patriotism. At various points the reviews resonate with the essays, as, for example, in the approving quotation of Collins’s view of Sir Alexander MacKenzie as a politician whose "[c]ast-iron theories always hedged him in and set bounds to his every impulse and plan" and in the general observation of Thomson’s "Canadian stories" that they "give some idea of the variety of scene which presents itself to the student of Canadian life." To what extent, it might be wondered, did Collins’s preference for pragmatic rather than theoretical politicians influence Lampman’s similar taste in poets? And could Lampman’s preference for "variety" have stemmed in part from a belief that this was an appropriate if not inevitable response to the "diversity of scenery" that he counted among the environmental factors working to mould the "Canadian character" and, eventually, to create a "Canadian race" and a "Canadian literature" ("Two Canadian Poets")? It is as much for the questions that they raise as for the insights that they provide into the thought and milieu of Canada’s finest nineteenth-century poet that Lampman’s essays and reviews will be of interest to students and scholars of Canadian literature.

The Present Edition

The texts in the present edition are based on those published during Lampman’s lifetime or, in the case of essays that were not so published, on the holograph manuscripts in the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario and in the Library of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. The specific copy text of each essay and review is described and, if necessary, discussed in the headnotes that precede the annotations in the Editorial Notes.

The editorial cornerstone of the present edition is the principle that in (re-)printing Lampman’s essays and reviews the text as originally published or written should be allowed to stand with as little alteration as possible. In accordance with the principle, Lampman’s characteristic (and often interestingly anachronistic) spellings of such words as "sourse," "leizure" "sieze" and "reallities" have been retained, as has his inconsistent use of "British" and "American" spellings. When grammar or sense has required the addition of a syllable, a word, or an item of punctuation, it has been set off in square brackets. When it has not been possible to provide corrections in square brackets without emending an error (of spelling, for example) the error is noted by "[sic]". Since Lampman’s frequent errors in reproducing the punctuation and wording of quoted materials are both telling and interesting, they have been allowed to stand except in the case of terminal punctuation and, very occasional, colons that are logically and grammatically necessary; when these have been added to quotations or—since Lampman was often careless or negligent in this respect also—to the sentences that introduce quotations, they have also been set off in square brackets. Only when an error of wording in a printed essay or review is blatantly a typographical error has it been emended (again, in square brackets). Details of the differences between Lampman’s quotations and their originals are given and sometimes discussed in the annotations.

In editing Lampman’s holograph manuscripts for the present edition, the following procedures have been adopted: hyphens have been treated as dashes except between syllables and in compound words; ampersands and contractions have been expanded; and Lampman’s corrections have been accepted (and, where significant, noted in the annotations). When an essay has posed particular problems of transcription, these are discussed in the headnote in the Editorial Notes. In accordance with formal typographical practice, underlinings have been rendered as italics; surrounding quotation marks have been removed from indented quotations except when they note the beginning and end of a speech; and the titles of newspapers, periodicals, plays, books, and long poems published in book or pamphlet form have been italicized, while those of articles, short poems, and other sections of books have been enclosed in double quotations marks. In "The Character and Poetry of Keats" indented quotations that include interjections by Lampman have been run on to the preceding sentence.

To provide students and scholars with a sense of Lampman’s intellectual and stylistic shifts and development, an attempt has been made to arrange his essays and reviews in chronological order. This has yielded a skeletal sequence based on the certainties of publications, oral delivery, and dated manuscripts:

"The Revolt of Islam" December 1880
"Friendship" February 1881
"College Days among Ourselves [I]" February 1882
"German Patriotic Poetry" March 1882
"College Days among Ourselves [II]" March 1882
"Fishing in Rice Lake" August 1882
"College Days among Ourselves [III]" November 1882
"College Days among Ourselves [IV]" February 1883
"The Life and Times of Sir John A. Macdonald" June 1883
"Gambetta" July 1883
"The Modern School of Poetry in England" March 1886
"Lyrical Translations" December 1887
"Two Canadian Poets[:] a Lecture" February 1891
"The Character and Poetry of Keats" 1893
"Mr. Thomson’s Old Man Savarin" August 1895
"Happiness" July 1896

This leaves four essays in limbo: "Style," "Poetic Interpretation," "The Poetry of Byron," and the untitled draft on Socialism. Since the last of these appears in a notebook in the National Archives among poems dated from December 28, 1895 to March 4, 1896 and other materials of the mid-to-late nineties (see headnote), it has been placed between "Mr. Thomson’s Old Man Savarin" and "Happiness." "Style" is a little more difficult to position, but some internal evidence suggests that it was delivered orally after 1886 and probably between December 12, 1889 and October 6, 1892 (see headnote); it has therefore been placed between "Lyrical Translations" and "Two Canadian Poets[:] a Lecture." More difficult to place are "Poetic Interpretation" and "The Poetry of Byron." Was either of them the paper that Lampman read to "the assembled army of pedagogues—web-footed, English-mutilating, spoon-in-cup, knife-instead-of-fork-substituting, tobacco-chewing barbarians from every quarter of the country" (qtd. in Connor 61)—at a teachers’ convention between September 1882 and January 1883? Was either the "prose essay for the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ or some like publication" that Lampman was "meditating" in the spring of 1883 (qtd. in Connor 68)? The evidence for placing the two essays together and later is far from strong, but it is perhaps sufficient: both are written in pen on the same type of paper (see headnotes); the script of both resembles that of "The Character and Poetry of Keats"; "The Poetry of Byron" indicates a familiarity with Roden Noel’s 1890 Life of Byron (see headnote); and "Poetic Interpretation" approaches the various poets that it discusses with some of the assumptions of "Style" and "The Modern School of Poetry in England" but treats of Keats in a manner that anticipates but does not coincide with the long essay begun in October 1892 (see the headnote to "The Character and Poetry of Keats"). The fact that Arnold is a point of reference in both essays, providing the conceptual framework for "Poetic Interpretation" and the concluding quotation for "The Poetry of Byron," may indicate that they were written early in 1892 when, as observed earlier, Lampman was contemplating writing "articles in criticism for magazines" and "an elaborate article on Matthew Arnold" (Annotated Correspondence 40-41).¹⁶ "The Poetry of Byron" and "Poetic Interpretation" have thus been placed between "Two Canadian Poets[:] a Lecture" and "The Character and Poetry of Keats," but it should be borne in mind that this position, like that of "Style" and "[Socialism]," is tentative.

Notes to the Introduction

1. Connor partly bases this view on letters that appear to have survived only in his excerpts from them (see Connor 205). [back]
2. Taking its name from the College colours (with a gesture, very likely, towards Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir), Rouge et Noir was "published quarterly in the interests of Trinity College" from January 1880 to December 1885, after which it became the Trinity University Review. According to its opening number, it was to be a forum for "free and liberal discussion" (5), albeit within the Church of England traditions of the College (see also Trinity, 1852-1952 41-46). Since Lampman entered Trinity as a Foundation Scholar in the fall of 1879, he may well have been involved with the inception of Rouge et Noir and certainly wrote material for it in addition to the essays contained in the present edition (see the headnote and annotations to "College Days among Ourselves"). [back]
3. "Hans Fingerhut’s Frog Lesson" was published in 1885 in Man, a periodical run by Lampman’s father-in-law, Dr. Edward Playter, but "The Fairy Fountain" was not published until 1975 in Archibald Lampman: Selected Prose; it is probably the "fairy tale" that Lampman mentions having recently written in a letter of January 29, 1885 to May McKeggie. Since both "Hans Fingerhut’s Frog Lesson" and "The Fairy Fountain" are Kunstmärchen—allegories written in the manner of the German folk tale (Volksmärchen) by several German Romantic writers—they reflect Lampman’s interest in German literature and, indeed, his German background (see Connor 13-17). In a letter of December 28, 1885 to May McKeggie, Lampman states that he has recently been given "a copy of [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe’s short novels and Tales"—R.D. Boylan’s translation of Goethe’s Novels and Tales (1854, 1878), which includes J.A. Froude’s translation of Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). [back]
4. "Winter Evening" and "The Life and Times of Sir John A. Macdonald" were published, respectively, in the February and June 1883 issues of the Canadian Illustrated News (Montreal), and "Fishing in Rice Lake" in the August 10, 1882 issue of Forest and Stream. In the chapter on Canadian "Thought and Literature" that concludes the Life and Times of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald, J.E. Collins predicts a "brilliant…future" for Lampman as a poet on the basis of his "exquisite touch" and "some lines of the very highest merit" (496). [back]
5. A "grey hawk slow-wheeling" also appears in Roberts’s "Tantramar Revisited" (Collected Poems 79), which Lampman greatly admired and probably quoted at length to conclude "Style." [back]
6. Twice in the early ’nineties when he was entertaining the possibility of being offered a teaching position at Cornell University, Lampman complained vociferously to Thomson about his lack of books and reading: "I am so ignorant and so ill-read that I hardly know how I could support the position of an assistant Professor of anything. ...For a man who has so much natural talent as I, it is surprising how little I have read.—and now I exceedingly regret that I have not given more time to study," he moaned on October 4, 1891, and again on May 20, 1892: "[t]he trouble is that I am hampered in...[writing articles of criticism] by my lack of reading and poverty of information. I have ideas enough, but not enough knowledge of books to support them’ (Annotated Correspondence 20, 40-41). [back]
7. Lampman’s father, also Archibald Lampman, who "first instructed [his son] in the art of verse" (Poems 175), was an Anglican minister and Trinity College was an Anglican institution (see note 1, above). In a letter of November 1, 1897, Lampman states that it "depresses [him] to go to church" and offers a bleak analysis of the appeal of Christianity (Annotated Correspondence 194). [back]
8. This is one of Arnold’s requisites for poetry in the Preface to his Poems (1853), the other being that its "representation" of human feelings be "add[ed] to our knowledge" by being "particular, precise, and firm," and moreover, serves to "enspirit and rejoice the reader...[to] convey a charm, and infuse delight" (Complete Prose Works 1:2). [back]
9. For the classical origins of the aesthetic of variety and its importance for seventeenth-century poetry see the essays of Earl Miner, William S. Anderson, and Annabel Paterson in Neil Fraistat’s Poems in their Place. For some nineteenth-century Canadian manifestations of the aesthetic and their implications, see my "Trees and Forest." [back]
10. In an obituary column in At the Mermaid Inn on October 15, 1892, Lampman praises Tennyson for, among other things, his "perfection and variety of phrase and cadence" and describes In Memoriam as his "wisest and...loftiest" poem (172). [back]
11. See also my Introduction to Lyrics of Earth, 7-10. [back]
12. In his At the Mermaid Inn column for April 2, 1892, Lampman contrasts the "businessman," who "spends his whole life in the pursuit of a dream," with the "poet," who "attaches himself to no dream" and "endeavours to see life simply as it is, and to estimate everything at its true value in relation to the universal and the infinite" (44-45). [back]
13. In "the last proof sheets of…[Alcyone] corrected by Lampman" (Duncan Campbell Scott’s note) in the Lampman Papers in the National Archives of Canada the full titles of his dystopian and utopian poems are "The City of the End of things, or, The Issue of Things that Are" and "The Land of Pallas, or, the Country of the Ought to Be" (MG29 D59, vol. 3, 1176 and 1209). [back]
14. See also Lampman’s statement on October 30, 1895 in regard to the ‘"Century of Sonnets"’ that he had assembled in the late summer of the previous year and had since been trying to place with an American publisher: "I will take out ten of the descriptive sonnets and mixed [sic] the rest in with the general ones, so as to make up a variegated collection of 90. …I will call it ‘Sonnets of Life and Death"’ (Annotated Correspondence 158). [back]
15. Campbell was an aggressive and paranoic personality whose final columns in At the Mermaid Inn in June and July 1893 included denigrating remarks about "descriptive sonnet writers" and "landscape painting in words" (334, 341) that may have been aimed at his fellow Confederation poets, particularly Roberts and Lampman. On June 6, 1894, Lampman described Campbell to Thomson as a "curious bird," adding in confidence: "I have reason to believe that he regards me as an enemy, assisted by numerous emissaries, who are always lying in weight [sic] to injure his fame and literary reputation." On May 6, 1895, after the "War Among the Poets" had broken out, he went further: "Campbell has actually got it into his head…that I—I mind you—am engaged with Roberts and Carman in an underhand intrigue to destroy him and undermine his literary reputation. …He harbours infinite wrath and bitterness against me. Campbell is a monomaniac on the subject of his reputation. His state of mind in regard to such matters amounts absolutely to madness" (Annotated Correspondence 122, 139). Alexandra J. Hurst has made the documents generated by the controversy readily available in The War Among the Poets. [back]
16. "Poetic Interpretation" has been placed after "The Poetry of Byron" in the present edition because its distinctly critical view of Shelley accords with that expressed by Lampman in his At the Mermaid Inn column for March 5, 1892 (see the headnote to "The Revolt of Islam"). The moralistic tone as well as the positive assessment of Shelley in "The Poetry of Byron" align it with "The Modern School of Poetry in England" and "Style." [back]

Works Cited in the Introduction

Arnold, Matthew. Complete Prose Works. Ed. R.H. Super. 11 vols. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960-77

Bayne, Thomas Wilson. "John Campbell Shairp." Dictionary of National Biography. 17: 1281-83.

Bentley, D.M.R. Introduction. Lyrics of Earth. By Archibald Lampman. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1978. 1-20.

——. Introduction. The Story of an Affinity. By Archibald Lampman. London: Canadian Poetry Press, 1986. xi-xxxi.

——. ‘"Trees and Forest’: Notes on Variety and Unity in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Writing." In Literary Genres/Les Genres Littéraires. E. I.S. MacLaren and C. Potvin. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, U of A, 1991. 19-30.

Brown, E.K. On Canadian Poetry. 1943. Rev. ed. 1944. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1973.

——. Prefatory Note. In "The Character and Poetry of Keats." By Archibald Lampman. Ed. E.K. Brown. University of Toronto Quarterly 15 (June, 1946): 356-57.

——. Prefatory Note. In "Two Canadian Poets: a Lecture by Archibald Lampman." Ed. E.K. Brown. University of Toronto Quarterly 13 (July, 1944): 406.

Campbell, William Wilfred. "American Literary Conditions." In The War Among the Poets: Issues of Plagiarism and Patronage among the Confederation Poets. Ed. Alexandra J. Hurst. London: Canadian Poetry Press, 1994. 4-9

——. At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892-93. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979.

Carlyle, Thomas. Works. Centenary Edition. 30 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. New York: AMS Press, 1969.

Collins, J.E. Life and times of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald, K.C.B., D.C.L., &c, Premier of the Dominion of Canada. Toronto: Rose, 1883.

Colvin, Sidney. Keats. 1887. English Men of Letters. London: Macmillan, 1913.

Connor, Carl Y. Archibald Lampman: Canadian Poet of Nature. Montreal: Louis Carrier, 1929.

Davies, Barrie. Introduction. In Archibald Lampman: Selected Prose. Ed. Barrie Davies. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1975. 1-9.

Early, L.R. Archibald Lampman. Twayne World Authors Series: Canadian Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Fraistat, Neil, ed. Poems in their Place: the Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986.

Gnarowski, Michael. Introduction. Selected Poetry. By Archibald Lampman. Ed. Michael Gnarowski. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1990. 1-36.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Novels and Tales. Trans. R.D. Boylan and J.A. Froude. 1854. London: George Bell and Sons, 1878.

Greig, Peter E. "A Check List of Lampman Manuscript Material in the Douglas Library Archives." Douglas Library Notes 15 (Winter, 1967): 8-16 (Part 1); 16 (Autumn 1967): 12-27 (Part 2).

Houghton, Lord. Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats. New York: George P. Putnam, 1848.

——. "Memoir" In Poetical Works. B. John Keats. Ed. Lord Houghton. Aldine Edition of the British Poets. London: George Bell, 1876. ix-xxxi

Hurst, Alexandra J., ed. The War Among the Poets: Issues of Plagiarism and Patronage among the Confederation Poets. London: Canadian Poetry Press, 1994.

Keats, John. Poetical Works. Ed. Lord Houghton. Aldine Edition of the British Poets. London: George Bell, 1876.

Lampman, Archibald. An Annotated Edition of the Correspondence Between Archibald Lampman and Edward William Thomson (1890-1898). Ed. Helen Lynn. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980.

——. Archibald Lampman: Selected Prose. Ed. Barrie Davies. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1975.

——. Archibald Lampman’s Letters to Edward William Thomson (1890-1898). Ed. Arthur S. Bourinot. Ottawa: Bourinot, 1956.

——. At the Mermaid Inn, Conducted by A. Lampman, W.W. Campbell, Duncan C. Scott. Ed. Arthur S. Bourinot, 1958.

——. At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892-93. Ed. Barrie Davies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979.

——. "The Character and Poetry of Keats." Ed. E.K. Brown. University of Toronto Quarterly 15 (June, 1946): 356-72

——. Happiness: a Preachment by Archibald Lampman and Carrying to You the Best Wishes of the Ryerson Press. Toronto: Ryerson, 1925.

——. Letters to May McKeggie. Microfilm copies. Trinity College Archives, Toronto.

——. Lyrics of Earth. 1895 [1896]. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1978.

——. Papers. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

——. Poems. Ed. Duncan Campbell Scott. Toronto: Morang, 1900.

——. "The Poetry of Byron." Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. Queen’s Quarterly 83 (Winter, 1976): 623-32

——. "Style." Ed. Sue Mothersill. Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 7 (Fall/Winter, 1980): 56-72.

——. "Two Canadian Poets: a Lecture by Archibald Lampman." Ed. E.K. Brown. University of Toronto Quarterly 13 (July, 1944): 406-23

Milnes, Richard Monckton. See Lord Houghton.

Mothersill, Sue. "Archibald Lampman’s Critical Prose: an Edition of Selected Essays." M.A. thesis. Carleton U, 1981.

Noel, Roden. Life of Lord Byron. Great Writers. London: Walter Scott, 1890.

Pater, Walter. [Works]. Library Edition. 10 vols. London: Macmillan, 1910.

Roberts, Charles G.D. Collected Letters. Ed. Laurel Boone. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1989.

Ross, Malcolm. Introduction. Poets of the Confederation. Ed. Malcolm Ross. New Canadian Library, 1. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1960.

Shairp, John Campbell. Aspects of Poetry, Being Lecture Delivered at Oxford. 1881. Freeport, N.Y: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.

——. On Poetic Interpretation of Nature. Boston: Houghton Mufflin, 1877.

Symonds, John Addington. Shelley. 1878. New Ed. English Men of Letters. London: Macmillan, 1887.

Taylor, M.Brook. "Joseph Edmund Collins." Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 12: 204-06.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Longman’s Annotated English Poets. London: Longmans, Green, 1969.