thumb|Archibald Lampman's headstone in [[Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa]]
thumb|Archibald Lampman's footstone in Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa
Archibald Lampman (17 November 1861 – 10 February 1899) was a Canadian poet. "He has been described as 'the Canadian Keats;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that he is "generally considered the finest of Canada's late 19th-century poets in English."
Life
Archibald Lampman was born at Morpeth, Ontario, a village near Chatham, the son of Archibald Lampman, an Anglican clergyman. "The Morpeth that Lampman knew was a small town set in the rolling farm country of what is now western Ontario, not far from the shores of Lake Erie. The little red church just east of the town, on the Talbot Road, was his father's charge." In 1868 he contracted rheumatic fever, which left him lame for some years and with a permanently weakened heart.
Lampman attended Cobourg Collegiate, followed by Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, While at university, he published early poems in Acta Victoriana, the literary journal of Victoria College. In 1883, after a frustrating attempt to teach high school in Orangeville, Ontario, he took an appointment as a low-paid clerk in the Post Office Department in Ottawa, a position he held for the rest of his life.
Lampman "was slight of form and of middle height. He was quiet and undemonstrative in manner, but had a fascinating personality. Sincerity and high ideals characterized his life and work."
On 3 September 1887, Lampman married 20-year-old Maude Emma Playter. "They had a daughter, Natalie Charlotte, born in 1892. Arnold Gesner, born May 1894, was the first boy, but he died in August. A third child, Archibald Otto, was born in 1898." He also became a close friend of Indian Affairs bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott; Scott introduced him to camping, and Lampman introduced Scott to writing poetry. One of their early camping trips inspired Lampman's classic Morning on the Lièvre which, in 1961, became the text for, and subject of, an award-winning National Film Board of Canada film of the same name.
Lampman, Campbell, and Scott together wrote a literary column, "At the Mermaid Inn," for the Toronto Globe from February 1892 until July 1893. (The name was a reference to the Elizabethan-era Mermaid Tavern.) As Lampman wrote to a friend: