Archibald Lampman and Islamic Culture

Archibald Lampman and Islamic Culture D. M. R. Bentley (bio) Modern life is vast and complex, and the poet often finds that such primary feelings as belong to all ages and places may be dealt with more freely and with a sharper accentuation, when they are wrought upon a background of ruder and simpler custom” (Essays and Reviews 63). So wrote Archibald Lampman in “The Modern School of Poetry in England,” a largely negative lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites that he read at a meeting of the Ottawa Literary and Scientific Society in March 1885. Lampman’s remarks refer specifically to the “quaint and medieval” poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets (1881), but, as has been argued elsewhere (see Bentley “ ‘Men of the North’ ”), they apply equally well to his own use of medieval “backgrounds” in such poems as “The King’s Sabbath,” “Ingvi and Alf,” and “King Oswald’s Feast” to deal with “such primary feelings as belong to all ages and places,” specifically (and respectively) religious excess, sexual desire, and economic inequality. Lampman’s remarks are also applicable to the small group of his works that use Islamic culture as a “background”: an unfinished novel and a ballad (“A Spanish Taunt”) set near the beginning of the re-conquest of Spain and three poems—“Abu Midjan,” “Baki,” and “The Vase of Ibn Mokbil”—set in earlier phases of Islamic culture. Of course, the suggestion that Lampman’s perception of [End Page 55] the European Middle Ages as a period of “ruder and simpler custom” than late Victorian Canada applies also to his perceptions of Moorish Spain and medieval Mesopotamia may wrinkle the noses and narrow the eyes of many Islamicists and call forth cries of appropriation and Orientalism.1 Such cries are justified, but they will go unheeded here because the goal of this essay is not to belabour the obvious fact that Lampman was an heir and user of the Orientalist tradition but, rather, to examine the “feelings” and ideas that he “wrought upon a background” of Islamic culture and to ascertain, if possible, why and for what purposes he did so. Lampman was writing after centuries of increasing interest in Islamic culture in Britain, Europe, and North America had produced a wealth of information in almost every sphere of human activity. As a student at Trinity College in Toronto from 1879 to 1881 and thereafter as a civil servant in Ottawa, Lampman would have had more access than most Canadians of his day to the plethora of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works that draw upon or treat of the religion, history, geography, language, and literature of countries that were or had once been Islamic. Even a scanty survey of such works and the scholarship that they have since generated is impossible and unnecessary here, but some sense of Lampman’s response to works that he knew or was very likely to have known provides a useful context for his own writings, the specific sources of which will emerge in due course. While at university, his intense admiration for Thomas Carlyle would probably have taken him to “The Hero as Prophet. Mohammed. Islam” in Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), a lecture that may have been in his mind many years later when he wrote of “Mohammed” in his untitled essay on Socialism as a “man with a burning and inextinguishable idea” that led to the establishment of “law, religion, and order” in the countries conquered by his followers (Essays and Reviews 187–88). After leaving university, his near hero-worship of Matthew Arnold had certainly taken him to “Sohrab and Rustum: An Episode” (1853) (see Essays and Reviews 87 and 260), a poem aligned with the interest in Islamic warriors that is evident in his unfinished novel and in “Abu Midjan.” By the early 1890s, his disapproval of Byron’s work on account of the scandalous life of its author had probably not prevented [End Page 56] him from reading Turkish Tales (1813 to 1816), which he regarded as “verbiage,” “written no doubt because they were just the sort of thing which, in conjunction with the poet’s beauty...

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