SOURCE: Scammell, William. “A Doubtful Head for Heights.” Spectator 280, no. 8850 (21 March 1998): 45.

In the following review, Scammell offers a mixed review of Hamilton's A Gift Imprisoned. Scammell comments that Hamilton succeeds in “bringing Arnold vividly to life,” but comments that the book is not an entirely thorough examination of the poet's life and work.

Who was the ‘much-pondered Marguerite’, subject of Arnold's early love poems? How did Matt cope with that mother and father of all headmasters, Dr Arnold of Rugby? What was his attitude to his own gifts? ‘Why did he abandon the poetic life and settle for three decades of drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools?’ Did he have ‘insufficient faith in his own talent’, or was it ‘the fear of being … second-rate?’

Thus Ian Hamilton, famous for having only ever published one book of poems (lyric and elegiac, like Arnold's), famous too as a critic...