Lampman

Lampman

An outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets, Archibald Lampman was born on November 17, 1861 in Morpeth, Ontario, a village near Chatham. Lampman was repelled by the mechanization of urban life and escaped to the countryside whenever possible. After being influenced by the craftsmanship and perfection of form of Classical poetry and by the lyrical verse of such English poets as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, he wrote nature poems celebrating the beauties of Ottawa and its environs and the Gatineau countryside of Quebec. During his lifetime Lampman published two volumes of verse, Among the Millet and Other Poems (1888) and Lyrics of Earth (1893). After his death, Duncan Campbell Scott, his friend and literary executor, edited The Poems of Archibald Lampman (1900) and Lyrics of Earth: Poems and Ballads (1925). At the Long Sault, and Other New Poems was published in 1943. He died on February 10, 1899 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.