Lampman wrote more than 300 poems in this last period of his life, although scarcely half of these were published prior to his death. For single poems or groups of poems he found outlets in the literary magazines of the day: in Canada, chiefly the Week; in the United States, Scribner’s Magazine, the Youth’s Companion, the Independent, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Magazine. In 1888, with the help of a legacy left to his wife, he published Among the millet and other poems. In 1895, after many delays and difficulties with a number of publishers, Copeland and Day of Boston published Lyrics of earth (it actually appeared the following spring). A third volume, Alcyone, and other poems, in press at the time of his death, was held back by Scott
“Placid” is another matter. Lampman’s spirit, from the end of his university days, had become increasingly troubled, beset by what he called a “morbid sensitivity.” Ironically, poetry was both a main source of his suffering and its therapy. Before he had left Toronto for Ottawa, he had written to a friend: “Good or ill – 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 was certainly not “ruined” by poetry, yet what he had said in his letter was to become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. By the end of the 1880s he was in full command of the type of short nature poem on which his reputation was ultimately to rest. Always, however, he had wanted to do something on a grander scale, poems with “more human life” in them, as he put it, and now, urged on by his friend Thomson, he laboured over a series of long dramatic narratives, some of them drafts from earlier days, based on ancient tales and biblical lore. They did not work; Lampman knew, as his critics were to know later, that there was not a spark of life in them. By 1893 he was thoroughly depressed. “There is one kind of work I can do,” he wrote Thomson, “nature work, as they call it and I had better confine myself to that.” The long delay in finding a publisher for Lyrics of earth increased his sense of failure. Meanwhile, his private life was disturbed by a “personal drama” only recently disclosed in its particulars: for some time he had been having an affair (if that is the word) with a fellow-worker at the Post Office, Katherine Waddell, whom he had met in 1889, and it was becoming clear that they must break the connection. In the face of all these trials one is inclined to say, as Scott said on occasion, “Poor Archie!” Critics were later to draw parallels between Lampman’s afflictions and the afflictions of Keats. But Lampman, though often hard up, was never poor; nor was he ever reviled by the critics. He had friends in reasonably high places, and he was well served by the incomparable loyalty of Scott and Thomson. Although he despised, and lampooned in his letters, the intellectual environment of Ottawa (“I am suffocated. If I had the genius of Milton, I could do nothing.”), it must be remembered that, besides Scott, the environment included John George Bourinot*, Campbell, William Dawson Le Sueur*, Ritchie, and like men of culture and learning, all of them known to the poet. Lampman’s Angst was nevertheless real enough to him. With talents to match his zeal, he is the first Canadian poet (Isabella Valancy Crawford* might have an equal claim) to whom nothing really matters but the world of the poetic imagination, and to the extent that this is so he reflects the problems that arose in the latter part of the 19th century when a hobby became an obsession. The effect on Lampman was to make him push the world, which he had always held at arm’s length, still farther away. His retreat was to nature and the poetry nature engendered. Mercifully, in the year before he died he was tranquil. He was working on one of the finest of his nature poems, “Winter uplands,” in his last days.
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