A Romantic LampmanL.R. Early, Archibald Lampman, Twayne World Authors Series: Canadian Literature, No. 770. Boston: Twayne; G.K. Hall, 1986. [xvi] + 175 pp. This is a major contribution to Lampman studies by the scholar-critic who, in the two or three years before the book's appearance, gave us such valuable items as "A Chronology of Lampman's Poems" (Canadian Poetry, 14 [Spring/Summer, 1984], pp. 75-87), "Twenty-Five Fugitive Poems by Archibald Lampman" (Canadian Poetry, 12 [Spring/Summer, 1983], pp. 46-70) and "Lampman's Love Poetry" (Essays on Canadian Writing, 27 [Winter, 1983-84], 116-149), this last being, like portions of Early's monograph on Lampman in the Canadian Writers and their Works Poetry Series volume two, incorporated into the present study. Having also written his Ph.D. thesis on Lampman, Early thus brings to his book a thorough and formidable background in the poet's life and work, as well as qualities that are everywhere evident in Archibald Lampman: a sympathetic biographical imagination, a discerning eye for patterns in the verbal universe, and a keen critical judgement. Archibald Lampman is also written with a refreshing lucidity and elegance; it is, quite simply, a pleasure to read, and will do more than anything currently available to acquaint a generation of undergraduates (Twayne's principal audience) with the work of Canada's finest nineteenth-century poet. The title of Early's more recent contribution to Canadian Poetry — "A Chronology of Lampman's Poems" — gives a clue to an important aspect of his book's approach: its examination of the poet's work, not in the three stages dictated by the three volumes that he published during his lifetime (Among the Millet [1888], Lyrics of Earth [1895; actually 1896] and Alcyone [1899]), but as a chronological sequence that places on view his development as a writer and thinker across the nearly three decades that preceded his death in 1899. Throughout Archibald Lampman, Early skilfully intertwines Lampman's creative career and his biography, repeatedly arguing connections between a given poem and a known event or surmised psychological condition. In the biographical chapter required in all Twayne books, the poet's life is divided into four phases: 1861-1882 (childhood, school, university), 1882-1886 (schoolteaching, marriage, Ottawa), 1887-1893 (his "coming of age as a poet" [p. 9]), and 1894-1899 (disillusionment, morbidity, a renewal of love). Of special interest in this biographical chapter is a precise redating of Lampman's involvement with Katherine Waddell, which, in Early's view, began neither in 1889 (Margaret Whitridge) nor in 1892 (Bruce Nesbitt), but in "September or October" 1893 and continued, as the other critics agree, until "around 1895-96, . . . [when the poet's] letters reveal a depth of anguish that can be explained only in part by his depression over the state of his writing" (pp. 18-19). "Certain poems that Lampman wrote at this time support this inference" (p. 19) observes Early in a statement that reveals his alignment with what Michael Baxandall in Patterns of Intention (1985) calls "inferential criticism": criticism (recently out of favour, and now perhaps poised to make a comeback) that firmly locates works of art in their biographical and historical contexts. Early is also quite traditional in the way that he conceives Lampman's personality. Carrying forward the views of Desmond Pacey and a "few other commentators of the 1950s and 1960s" ("Preface") who see Lampman as manifesting a "'duality of temperament'" (p. 166), as a poet of "contradictions" (p. 167) with a yawning "capacity for dualism" (p. 168), Early presents us with a writer of "fissured vision" (p. 29) who reveals his split personality in virtually all aspects of his life and work. Thus the Lampman who "cultivated two kinds of nature poetry" (p. 47) also harboured two views of nature (Arcadian and Darwinian), two conceptions of dream, two notions of the function of the poet. . . and, as it happens, also inhabited two distinctive Canadian landscapes: "the cultivated countryside and the wilderness beyond" (p. 6). Although Early's Lampman is nothing if not a late Romantic (more of which in a moment), he is also a Romantic seen through Modern eyes — a victim of the "dissociation of sensibility" which, in the view of T.S. Eliot and his critical heirs in Canada as much as in Britain, America and elsewhere, began in the Renaissance and reached mind-numbing proportions in the nineteenth century. "In general, Lampman's poetry was shaped more by mood than by system," argues Early, "And in this respect, as in so much else, he reflects his era" (p. 37). As a poet of "irreconcilable contradictions" ("Preface") and dissociated sensibilities, Lampman demands what Early seeks to provide: not an attempt "to demonstrate the consistency of his vision" ("Preface"), but a reading that isolates and discusses the various pockets in his oeuvre, from the public (social, political) poems to the private (love, crisis) ones, from poems in "Hesperian Moods" (pp. 49-56) to those carrying "Epiphanic Meanings" (pp. 56-85). In this last category are some of Lampman's "finest poems" — pieces such as "Heat" and "Among the Timothy" in which there occurs a "merg[ing]" of "moods" and "meanings" (in Eliot's terms, feeling and thought) that amounts to a temporary reassociation of sensibility. Although Early regards even the vision of Lampman's finest epiphanic poems as "too tenuous and too solitary to remain the basis of his work" (p. 62), he, like Pacey before him, provides some excellent, new-critical analysis of these (and other poems), working skilfully and convincingly with their patterns and ideas to demonstrate their force and coherence. He also provides many sparkling and memorable insights into individual words and lines (noting, for just two instances, the depiction of "Winter" as "a parodist, a mocker of moral presumption" in the "marvelously inventive" [p. 54] poem of that name and the "sacramental pun" on "host" in the final line of "A Niagara Landscape": "Saint Catharines, city of the host of flowers" [p. 51]); moreover, he works both tactfully and indepen dently with, and, when necessary, against, existing criticism to make his points, as for example in his comments on the conclusion of "The Frogs": "These lines probably are as endlessly debatable as the aphorism that ends the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' My own view is that Lampman, like many Romantics at crucial moments in their work, means what he says here, and that we err if we try to construe him in some sense more congenial to twentieth-century biases" (p. 66). Despite his emphasis on the "irreconcilable contradictions" and "diverse impulses" (p. 29) in and behind Lampman's work, Early does recognize a "provisional coherence" (p. 44) in The Story of an Affinity, the long, blank-verse poem written in the early 'nineties. To my mind, there is little doubt that The Story of an Affinity does indeed contain most of Lampman's major themes, including the orientations towards nature and society which, as Early admits in the initial stages of his study, are "complementary" "from the beginning" (p. 16) of the poet's creative career. But is not a "provisional coherence" also evident in Lampman's three published volumes (Among the Millet and Alcyone, as well as Lyrics of Earth, which, of course, was shaped by E.W. Thomson), especially when these volumes are viewed as coherent medleys and as exemplars of the kind of diversity valued by the "Poetic Interpretation" essay, where Lampman writes of his ideal poet as someone who would select from the best available poetic styles the one most suitable to the subject at hand? Does the "sheer variety of influences and attitudes in [Lampman's] poetry" then indicate "an uncertain and eclectic disposition" (p. 29) or is it, rather, the result of a consciously conceived and executed aesthetic? Is it possible that Early's emphasis on chronology rather than individual volumes contributes to his sense of the poet's lack of a unified and consistent vision? And, finally, is the aspiration to write in divers tones, to achieve only such unity as diversity will permit, any less admirable in its own way than the "drive towards ultimate synthesis" (p. 29) that Early finds in the great English Romantic poets and finds wanting in their Canadian heir? I raise these questions, not as a prelude to an argument for Lampman's coherence as a poet and thinker, but as an indication of the extent to which Archibald Lampman addresses, and, indeed, formulates, what may well be the largest issue in Lampmans criticism as it now exists: the issue of the unity and consistency of the poet's vision (or lack thereof) as an index of his stature and claim to attention. Such matters should be of wide interest in the present critical climate, where deconstruction and the question of canonicity (both of which are fruitful presences in Archibald Lampman) have done much to render problematical and fascinating our assumptions about which poets we study, why, and to what ends. In stressing Lampman's debts to Romanticism (an approach whose origins obviously lie in his 1977 Ph.D. thesis on "Lampman and Romantic Poetry") Early runs a twofold risk that he does not always entirely avoid: the risk of paying too little attention to the poet's late-Victorian context and the concomitant risk of reaching back into the relatively distant past for a source or analogue when a more proximate one would have served as well or better. The uncharacteristically feeble word "interesting" in the following quotation seems to me to betray the weakness of using eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century precedents to gloss a late Victorian poet:
One need hold no special brief for the Victorians to suggest that Tennyson (among others) provides more plausible and accessible precedents for the patterns discussed here than either Burke or Shelley. Another instance of the bypassing of Lampman's Victorian background in favour of his Romantic inheritance can be found in a later discussion of "In November" (the longer lyric rather than the sonnet) where, in astutely analysing one section of the poem as a critique of "reclusive" "Romantic" nature-worship, Early emphasizes its relation to Wordsworth (albeit with passing reference to Browning's Childe Harold) and ignores its evident formalistic and philosophical connections to Arnold's "Resignation," a central poem for the Victorian understanding of the relation between the poet and society which is also clearly present towards the end of Lampman's "Winter-Store." There are numerous occasions, however, when Early is utterly right in making the connections that he does between Lampman and the Romantics. Particularly rich and convincing in this regard is his analysis of "Winter Hues Recalled" as "unmistakably Wordsworthian" (p. 56) in its emphasis on a remembered epiphany, his analysis of "The Frogs" as a poem in the tradition of Keats's "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn" odes (pp. 63-65), and his general assertion (and note the resonance with the "Poetic Interpretation" essay) that Lampman's landscape poems "in blank verse and ballad form often introduce Wordsworthian concerns with memory and morality" while those "written in more intricate stanza forms — reminiscent of Keats's experiments in the great odes — sustain a more Hesperian atmosphere, but also discover some significance in nature re-presented" (p. 52). Early's application and adaptation of Geoffrey Hartman's distinction between the "Hesperian" art of Keats's "Ode to Autumn" (the poem that seized Lampman's imagination as nothing else ever did" [p. 25]) and an epiphanic "treatment of language more characteristic of Wordsworth" (p. 48) is both generally and specifically illuminating — a strategy whose effectiveness, like the drawing of other lines of connection between Lampman and the Romantics, inclines one to regret less that, in some instances, the Victorian background has been scanted in Archibald Lampman than that the limitations of the Twayne format did not allow Early to expand his discussion more in the direction of the Victorians. Within his overall concentration on Lampman and the Romantics, Early focuses primarily on the three Romantic poets who are most palpably present in the Canadian poet's work: Keats, Wordsworth and, to a lesser extent, Shelley, a poet whose "pessimism and despair," "ultimately bleak view of nature, visions of life as a fevered dream, and inclination to embrace death" (p. 26) met resistance in Lampman, partly because he recognized similar tendencies in himself. While Lampman's reasons for responding negatively to Shelley (as, more vehemently, to Byron) may have been temperamental, as Early argues, they may also have been an aspect of his Victorianism. After all, Shelley was regarded with deep suspicion by most Victorians who were not of the aesthetic-decadent continuity: when Charles Collins joined the Pre-Raphaelites, he trans formed an illustration of "The Sensitive Plant" into Convent Thoughts and Browning earlier (like Roberts later in "Aye") made Shelley acceptable by posthumously baptizing him. Similarly, Lampman's dislike of Byron (particularly the early Byron, and Early astutely notes a possible debt in "Winter-Store" to the more acceptable Byron of Don Juan [p. 83]) is as Victorian as Carlyle's famous injunction in Sartor Resartus to cast aside the author of Man fred and Childe Harold in favour of Goethe. Even Lampman's Keats and Wordsworth are the Victorian versions of these poets — the naturally magical rather than morbidly sensual Keats of Arnold's Study of Celtic Literature (1867) and the picturesque and domestic Wordsworth of the same author's hugely influential essay and Selection of 1879. But what about Blake? Several references to him are made in the course of Archibald Lampman, but his presence in Lampman's work (as in Crawford's and Carman's) remains elusive, partly, perhaps, because of the radical difference between the Blake we know — the post-Frye Blake of the prophetic works as well as the shorter works — and the only Blake known to the vast majority of Victorians — the lyric Blake of William Michael Rossetti's Poetical Works (1874). Although Early is tentative in his discussions on Lampman's debt to Blake (and misses what, to me, is a clear echo of"The Tyger" in "Alcyone": "With what passion and what pride,/And what hunger fierce and wide .. ." [p. 32]), he nevertheless makes notable gestures towards a study which he seems ideally qualified to undertake: a study of the curious, and largely unrecognized and unexamined presence of Blake in Lampman and other poets of the Confederation. In addition to placing on view Lampman's life, his chronological development, and his "Romantic Heritage" (to quote the subtitle of Early's second chapter), Archibald Lampman has fine things to say about the poet's politics, his response to the city and, as already intimated, his love poems. It also provides the best discussion available of the poetry of Lampman's last years — the "Lyrics of Crisis" (as Early calls them) of the "mid to late-1890s" (p. 127) and the "Last Poems," including a superb and ground-breaking analysis of "The Lake in the Forest," a final tour-de-force in which Early finds "a consciousness that can adapt its Old World language to its experience of the northern regions of the New World — the voice of a genuinely Canadian poet" (p. 138). In the "Conclusion" to the volume, an astute discussion of the position of"Lampman in the Twentieth Century" (pp. 147-152), Early offers some balanced insights into the forces that have worked to unsettle and consolidate the critical reputation of a poet whose "direct influence" on later writers has been limited but who is "none the less significant as a founder of one of the main streams in English Canadian poetry" — a poet who, with others, "naturalized" the "Romantic tradition . . . in Canada" and whose work thus deserves to be judged — as Early has judged it — "in terms of his chosen tradition" (p. 150). From that perspective, Lampman emerges as the "superior minor poet" that he knew himself to be, the author of a number of poems which come "uncommonly near to being very excellent" (p. 152). Early's list of those poems includes several, most notably, perhaps, "An Athenian Reverie," "Winter-Store," The Story of an Affinity, "A Vision of April" and, of course, "The Lake in the Forest," whose near excellence he himself has seminally demonstrated. One may disagree that Lampman's vision was as flawed as Early argues, or that he learned as much from the Romantics and as little from the Victorians as Archibald Lampman asserts, but there is no doubting the importance of this book or the sense of affectionate admiration for its subject that reaches an appropriate crescendo in its final lines: "If [Lampman's] work lacks the organic unity of a great poetic vision, perhaps in that very limitation it speaks to us. In his wishful thinking, capitulations to despair, recovered hopes, and unforeseen moments of piercing insight he continues to reflect our uneasy purchase on a world convulsed by change" (p. 152). The Index to Archibald Lampman provided by Twayne is a little spotty but not cripplingly so, and Early's Selected Bibliography, being crisply and helpfully annotated, provides easy access to the major primary and secondary sources. D.M.R. Bentley |