Labour and the End(s) of Art in Archibald Lampman's “The Land of Pallas”

Abstract

This article is intended as a sequel to “Robots and ‘The End of Work' in Archibald Lampman's ‘The City of the End of Things,'” published in the University of Toronto Quarterly 85.2 (Spring 2016). It builds directly on ideas first presented there. In the earlier article, I argued that Lampman's “The City of the End of Things” has been regularly misread as a poem about exploited labour when, in fact, it is rather more concerned with the elimination of work through automation and the rationalization of the industrial process. Here, I turn to the question of the poet's work, and the status of the poem as a work, which inevitably arises whenever a poet makes the work of others the subject of his writing. While an anxiety about the status of creative labour is merely latent in “The City of the End of Things,” it manifests fully in “The Land of Pallas,” which Lampman wrote as a companion piece to the better-known poem. In the following article, I argue that “The Land of Pallas” can be read as an attempt to salvage an idea of the poet as external to the realm of work that the treatment of labour in “The City of the End of Things” had put in jeopardy.