"[2] Lampman is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets, a group which also includes Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott.

"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.

[7] 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.

Partly in order to help his pockets a little Mr. Scott and I decided to see if we could get the Toronto "Globe" to give us space for a couple of columns of paragraphs & short articles, at whatever pay we could get for them.

[9]"In the last years of his short life there is evidence of a spiritual malaise which was compounded by the death of an infant son [Arnold, commemorated in the poem "White Pansies"] and his own deteriorating health.

[10] A plaque on the site carries a few lines from his poem "In November":[11] The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan About the naked uplands.

A little after sunrise I got up and went out into the college grounds ... everything was transfigured for me beyond description, bathed in an old world radiance of beauty; the magic of the lines was sounding in my ears, those divine verses, as they seemed to me, with their Tennyson-like richness and strange earth-loving Greekish flavour.

"[12] Inspired, Lampman also began writing poetry, and soon after began publishing it: first "in the pages of his college magazine, Rouge et Noir;" then "graduating to the more presitigious pages of The Week" – (his sonnet "A Monition," later retitled "The Coming of Winter," appeared in its first issue[12]) – and finally, by the late 1880s "winning an audience in the major magazines of the day, such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Scribner's.

"The prime literary antecedents of Lampman lie in the work of the English poets Keats, Wordsworth, and Arnold," says the Gale Encyclopedia of Biography, "but he also brought new and distinctively Canadian elements to the tradition.

Evocatively rich, his poems are frequently sustained by a mood of revery and withdrawal, while their themes are those of beauty, wisdom, and reassurance, which the poet discovered in his contemplation of the changing seasons and the harmony of the countryside.

"[13] The Canadian Encyclopedia calls his poems "for the most part close-packed melancholy meditations on natural objects, emphasizing the calm of country life in contrast to the restlessness of city living.

"As a corollary to his preoccupation with nature," notes the Gale Encyclopedia, "Lampman [had] developed a critical stance toward an emerging urban civilization and a social order against which he pitted his own idealism.

"[13] Canadian critic Malcolm Ross wrote that "in poems like 'The City at the End of Things' and 'Epitaph on a Rich Man' Lampman seems to have a social and political insight absent in his fellows.

"[3] However, Lampman died before Alcyone appeared, and it "was held back by Scott (12 specimen copies were printed posthumously in Ottawa in 1899) in favour of a comprehensive memorial volume planned for 1900.

"[12] Among the previously unpublished sonnets were some of Lampman's finest work, including "Winter Uplands", "The Railway Station," and "A Sunset at Les Eboulements."

Brown considered Lampman and Scott the top Confederation Poets, well ahead of Roberts and Carman, and his view came to predominate over the next few decades.

Even landscape is made into a symbol of the deep, interior processes of the self, or is used ... to induce a settling of the troubled surfaces of the mind and a miraculous transparency that opens into the depths.

Toronto choir the Upper Canada Choristers commissioned a setting of three of Lampman's poems ("The Bird and the Hour," "Snow" and "Voices of Earth") from Canadian composer Stephen Chatman.