 Poetry: May 31, 2017 Issue [#8309] |
  Poetry
This week: The Canadian "Keats" Edited by: eyestar~*  
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 I am happy to be a guest editor and am back with a peek at yet another Canadian poet in honour of Canada's 150th birthday! 
 "I am not a great poet and I never was. Greatness in poetry must proceed from greatness of character — from force, fearlessness, brightness. I have none of those qualities. I am, if anything, the very opposite, I am weak, I am a coward, I am a hypochondriac. I am a minor poet of a superior order, and that is all."
Archibald Lampman in 1895.
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In honour of the 150th birthday of Canada's Confederation I have been reading Canadian poets and came across what Professor Malcom Ross called the Confederation poets: writers who became well known after Confederation in 1867. The group thrived from the 1890's to the 1920's and did not refer to themselves by that name. They strived for good literature created by Canadians and were influenced by Victorian style and Romanticism.
Archibald Lampman {1861-1899} was one of the Confederation poets that I recalled from school days! He was one of the best Canadian school of nature poets of 19th century and was known as the "Canadian Keats". He was born in Morpeth, Ontario near Chatham, Canada. I enjoyed nature themes and he has wonderful images that remind me of my nature wanderings as a child and even now.
In this one, the idea of "earth's secret soul" appealed to me and the word "impearled" is wonderful.
The ancients may have heard the music of the spheres and we are called to attend to earth herself. A lesson we could all be reminded of now. 
"Voices of the Earth
We have not heard the music of the spheres,
The song of star to star, but there are sounds
More deep than human joy and human tears,
That Nature uses in her common rounds;
The fall of streams, the cry of winds that strain
The oak, the roaring of the sea's surge, might
Of thunder breaking afar off, or rain
That falls by minutes in the summer night.
These are the voices of earth's secret soul,
Uttering the mystery from which she came.
To him who hears them grief beyond control,
Or joy inscrutable without a name,
Wakes in his heart thoughts bedded there, impearled,
Before the birth and making of the world."
When he was 19 he read Charles G.D. Roberts, known as the Father of Canadian poetry, another confederation poet of the time. It was this book " Orion and other poems" that inspired him to write. He was amazed with the idea that such lofty poetry could come from Canadian authors! He was most influenced by Keats' restraint and intense imagery and Arnold for high idealistic tone. An avid camper, and having grown up in rural places,not far from where I live, he was not a city boy.
A graduate of Trinity college in Toronto, he tried teaching high school but ended up with a Post office clerk position in Ottawa. He was married in 1887 to Maud Emma Playter and had 3 children, the first boy died at 3 months.
He wrote nature verses, philosophical toned works and poems of social criticism like "The City at the End of All Things". He was a socialist, feminist and social critic in his time, and wrote with Duncan Campbell Scott in a column At the Mermaid Inn for the Toronto Globe newspaper from 1892-93. He wrote 87 peices for $3.00 per copy. Ah the dream of getting paid for writing! He and his family would sometimes struggle with finances and he stuck with his low paying job.
 His best works concerned nature, a notion He himself came to realize. He did not think he was a great poet and wrote much to find his niche. He often felt troubled by what he said was a "morbid sensitivity" and felt poetry was both a cause of suffering and a therapy. I think it is like having avision of what you want to do, and you can't quite get it right--especially if looking a ideal models from others.  Others saw more in his 300 poems, many of which were not published in his lifetime.
He only lived til he was 37 due a weak heart, created by his bout with rheumatic fever as a child. There is a plaque on his gravesite in Beechwood Cemetary. It is interesting that he had written of the place in a poem.
Part of his sonnetNovember is quoted on the plaque.
"The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream."
In 1895 he was made a member of the Royal Society of Canada and designated a person of historical significance in 1920. In 1989 July 7 for Canada's birthday, his picture appeared on a nature stamp. More recently, Loreena Mckennit created a tune for his poem "Snow" using his exact words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txc2ugYPJJY
As an early poet, it is interesting that he is more renouned than others of his time. Reasons include the fact that people liked him as an honest person of integrity, wit and charm and from his own journals, he was honest with and about himself.
One of his best friends, Duncan Campbell Scott, who he himself introduced to poetry, was custodian and promoter who kept His record alive. For fifty years he carried the torch and was responsible for many republications of Lampman's work, the last one in 1943 before his own death.
Lastly, of course, his sonnet poetry is some of the best: he was known to write and revise many times to perfect the intensity and image of his work. The detail of his observation is exacting as a camera image and his poetry dreamlike. So of his peers, he rose to the top for his time and his name became familiar in our literary schooling.
I will end with this poem as it is about Niagara escarpement and falls. I went to university in St. Catharine's and so I am familiar with this beautiful place. Good times, Good memories. It is cool to think that many years before I was here, Lampman walked these lands in my province Ontario, in the years just after Canada was born.  
"Heavy with haze that merges and melts free
Into the measureless depth on either hand,
The full day rests upon the luminous land
In one long noon of golden reverie.
Now hath the harvest come and gone with glee.
The shaven fields stretch smooth and clean away,
Purple and green, and yellow, and soft gray,
Chequered with orchards. Farther still I see
Towns and dim villages, whose roof-tops fill
The distant mist, yet scarcely catch the view.
Thorold set sultry on its plateau'd hill,
And far to westward, where yon pointed towers
Rise faint and ruddy from the vaporous blue,
Saint Catharines, city of the host of flowers. "
quotes from:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Lampman
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=6209
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Oh yes, and some poems by Canadian authors I know here!
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"A Place to Hide [Harry Potter]"
Poetry Contests:
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 Let's dream together as we consider these questions:
As a poet, who would you say most influenced you or inspired you to write poetry?
 What poem would you like to put on a plaque or grave marker for yourself?
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