Archibald Lampman: Memory, Nature, Progress by Eric Ball (review)

Archibald Lampman: Memory, Nature, Progress is an appreciation of the eponymous poet’s work. Eric Ball approaches his study through the three subject headings in the monograph’s title. As a genre, appreciations rarely announce themselves by name, but they have conventions that make them easily recognizable. Foremost is the treatment of their subject matter implied in the word itself. For this author, writing a sustained study of Lampman’s work has clearly been a labour of love, and he lingers with pleasure on Lampman’s poems and discusses the influences on his art as an enthusiast of long standing.

Ball’s arguments may be divided into three categories to match the three titular headings. Under “Memory,” the author contends that Lamp-man regarded memory as essentially redemptive, the individual’s means of returning to earlier experiences in order to reflect upon them without interruption from the distractions and cares of the present, cares that prevent him or her from understanding the experience as it happens. Under “Nature,” the author affirms that Lampman found in the rural landscapes and rugged wilderness of central Canada a divine presence ever immanent, available to all who seriously seek it although frequently invisible to the fretful modern consciousness. Under “Progress,” Ball points to the many poems that have attracted critical attention over the years for the socialist content readers have found them to have, and he sees in them an anguished personal struggle with the inequities the poet observed in the industrialized capitalist society to which he belonged. That struggle ultimately leads to Lampman’s articulation of a “radical social vision” (205) that balanced physical and intellectual labours in an artisanal society in which men and women enjoy the fruits of their own toil.

Already grouped around the three titular subjects, discussions of individual poems often reproduce this tripartite organization. More than once, Ball suggests that Lampman found his highest poetic achievement when he managed to integrate some trinity of concepts into a single insight into human nature. The deadness of midwinter, the enduring earth, and the consolation that nature offers human beings in “Earth—the Stoic,” or the images of seasonal change, the speaker’s embrace of the immediate present, and a final, welcome encounter between the speaker and his natural environment in “The Lake in the Forest” represent to Ball the poet’s use of extremes (especially extremes in nature) to offer human beings unexpected solace in a world over which they have little control. When this distillation turns out what Ball regards as a unified imagery, he pronounces the poem a success, declaring certain poems Lampman’s “most successful” and “best” work on this ground. Several of these pronouncements punctuate the monograph. An effect of the close reading method Ball employs is repetition, not only because it leads the author regularly to make such statements but because, as the chapters move from “memory” to “nature” to “progress,” the process of assessment begins anew.

I enjoy close readings of individual poems, and I have enjoyed reading many parts of this monograph. The trouble is, I have no idea how I could refer to it in a critical discussion of Lampman’s work. Like all close analyses, the ones in this book bear the marks of an individual reader sensitive to the poet’s complex treatment of diverse subject matter. Yet it is also true that much of what is said about the poet’s oeuvre has been said before, as the author readily acknowledges with his references to a century of Lampman scholarship. Just as Ball savours Lampman’s work, he savours scholarly discussions of it. But there is a difference between appreciating a critical dialogue and advancing it. Take, for instance, Ball’s response to Brian Trehearne’s “Style and Mind in Lampman’s ‘Among the Timothy,’” which he has just summarized over the better part of three long paragraphs:

While it is intriguing to think that Lampman might have indeed constructed such a...