Dictionary of Literary Biography on (Robert) Ian Hamilton
Ian Hamilton defined his poems with clarity in the Bulletin of the Poetry Book Society (Summer 1974) when he characterized them as "dramatic lyrics .... the intense climatic moment of a drama," adding that the reader must supply "the prose part ... the background data." This description links his poetry to the early poems of Ezra Pound, whose famous dictum is worth recalling in relation to Hamilton's practice: "To me the short so-called dramatic lyric--at any rate the sort of thing I do--is the poetic part of a drama the rest of which (to me the prose part) is left to the reader's imagination.... I catch the character I happen to be interested in at the moment he interests me, usually a moment of song, self-analysis, or sudden understanding or revelation. And the rest of the play would bore me and presumably the reader."
The son of Robert Tough and Daisy McKay Hamilton, Robert Ian Hamilton was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk. He was educated at Darlington Grammar School and Keble College, Oxford, where in 1962 he earned a B.A. and founded the influential little magazine the Review (in 1974 after a two-year hiatus, it became the New Review and continued until 1979). In 1963 he married Gisela Dietzel; they have one son. Though limited in scope, this periodical was usually worth reading because it had a clear editorial policy and stood for the poetic standards that Hamilton believes in and from which his finest poems have been made. Like the early imagist poems of Ezra Pound, the poems of Hamilton and the best of the Review poets were stripped of all ornament; these were short, taut, "minimalist" poems which at best showed a compacted and controlled energy.
Hamilton's poetic output has been small, and he is better known as a critic; in fact A Poetry Chronicle (1963), which collects some of the essays and reviews he has written for the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement , and London Magazine, led Derek Stanford to call Hamilton "the best critic of modern verse we have had since G.S. Fraser." Hamilton has also written The Little Magazines (1976), which evaluates six influential periodicals--Little Review,Poetry,Partisan Review,Criterion,New Verse, and Horizon--and relates the experiences of their editors. His most recent book is a biography of Robert Lowell (1982), which has drawn considerable praise for honesty and sensitivity.
None of the poems in Hamilton's collection The Visit (1970) consists of more than twenty lines, but of the thirty-three poems it contains at least twelve should survive among that small body of memorable work produced in the 1960s--a lean time for English poetry.
The themes are personal--there is a particularly moving sequence concerned with the death of Hamilton's father, which transcends the merely personal. These are carved poems. The rhythms, exactly expressing "the true voice of feeling," are uncluttered with unnecessary words or images. The feelings caught in poems such as "Birthday Poem" are unique and irreducible. Also in The Visit is an intense sequence of love poems, partly concerned with the mental illness of the woman to whom they are addressed. The tone of these poems, as these lines from "Memorial" suggest, is of sadness expressed with a simplicity that is one of the hardest qualities to achieve in poetry but which is, ultimately, what makes the art worth practicing:
Four weathered gravestones tilt against the wall
Of your Victorian asylum,
Out of bounds, you kneel in the long grass
Deciphering obliterated names:
Old lunatics who died here.
The Visit would be stronger without some of the short occasional poems toward the end which have a certain limpness about them. But, in his finest poems, Hamilton has found the right words for subject matter which he has lived and suffered directly; it is this honesty that will make his poetry last.
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