Among the Millet and Other Poems

Among the Millet and Other Poems is the first published collection of poetry by Archibald Lampman, published in 1888. It was the book that established Lampman’s reputation as one of the leading Canadian poets of his generation and that placed him alongside Charles G D Roberts and the other figures of the Confederation Poets group.

Lampman had been writing poetry for several years before the publication of this first collection, with various pieces appearing in Canadian and American magazines. Among the Millet brought together a substantial selection of this earlier work and added several major new poems that Lampman had been preparing specifically for the collection. The book was received with substantial critical praise on both sides of the Canadian American border, with reviewers comparing Lampman favourably to the English Romantic nature poets and predicting a major literary career.

The collection is dominated by the kind of careful Canadian nature poetry that became Lampman’s signature mode. The title poem itself is one of the most enduring pieces in the volume, a long meditation set in a millet field on a summer afternoon that captures the slow rhythms of agricultural eastern Ontario in the late nineteenth century. Other poems in the collection treat various Canadian landscapes through the seasons, with particular attention to the long cold winters and the brief intense summers that gave Canadian nature poetry its distinctive character.

Alongside the nature poetry are several more meditative pieces on themes of memory, mortality, and the long human relationship with natural beauty. Some of the early sonnets in the collection became Lampman’s most famous shorter poems and have remained in Canadian poetry anthologies for more than a century. The book also includes a few political and social pieces that anticipate the more openly engaged work of Lampman’s later years.

The collection runs about two hundred pages and is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth century Canadian poetry. It pairs naturally with Lampman’s later collections Lyrics of Earth and Alcyone.