Born in Morpeth, Upper Canada, Lampman spent most of his short adult life unhappily working as a clerk in the Post Office Department in Ottawa, for poetry was his true vocation. One of the "sixties group" which wrote Canada's first noteworthy English verse, his work shows the influence of English writers, particularly Keats and Arnold, and of American nineteenth-century literature. Author of many poems describing Ottawa's rural environs, he complemented his interest in Nature by commenting poetically on the dehumanizing effects of a mechanized capitalist society. He died at Ottawa.