Treasuring the past, savouring the present, and wanting to do right by the future, Archibald Lampman was a poet preoccupied with the workings of time. He was also a thinker with a mystical predisposition. His goal, however, was not to transcend time, but to find redemptive meaning within it. Archibald Lampman: Memory, Nature, Progress explores the ways in which Lampman pursued his goal in relation to the three faces of time. Memory - the past living in the present - fascinated Lampman. He relished the "alchemy" by which the dross of past experience could be left behind and the gold preserved. Nature holds attention so powerfully in the present that one's consciousness is fully engaged. Lampman could experience this stillness in virtually all conditions that his northern environment placed before him, and in his nature poems he celebrates the irony of this. Progress relates to the future of humankind. By forwarding the cause of social betterment, one is part of a movement larger than oneself, and this expansion, too, is redemptive. Archibald Lampman: Memory, Nature, Progress is the first book on this foundational figure in Canadian literature to appear in over twenty-five years and the first thematically focused study. It shows how Lampman's poems were shaped by his responses to his physical surroundings and to his social-intellectual milieu, as filtered through his stubbornly independent outlook.