Widely regarded by literary historians as the finest nineteenth-century poet writing in English Canada, Archibald Lampman himself recognized that he was "a minor poet of a superior order." His continuing popular reputation rests on his precise and accurate descriptions of the extremes of the Canadian environment, particularly through his sonnets. More recently he has come to be reevaluated for his abilities in expressing the relationships between those natural extremes and human moral dilemmas, and for his few stylistic experiments that mark him as the first significant Canadian poet in English with a twentieth-century sensibility. Through both his successes and failures his work embodies the distinction between colonial romanticism and a variety of closely focused poetic imagism that articulated the essence of Canadian poetry for at least a generation. His concern with linking language and environment remains as important for Canadian poetry as Ezra Pound's dicta are for the...