Jenkins / Hamilton Ian Hamilton Collected Poems

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ISBN: 978-0-571-26261-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

A professional man of letters - critic, editor, biographer - though never a professional poet, Ian Hamilton (1938-2001) referred to his poems as 'miraculous lyrical arrivals', and he bided their time with exemplary patience and humility. His widely praised first collection, The Visit, published by Faber in 1970, was incorporated into Fifty Poems in 1988, itself expanded to Sixty Poems in 1998. In a preface to the former collection, he wrote: 'Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think. And in certain moods, I would agree.' Readers of Hamilton's condensed and immaculate oeuvre have felt otherwise: the poems of his youth and middle years (there was to be no opportunity for a late flowering) acquired talismanic significance for his contemporaries, and their combination of terseness and emotional intensity continues to set an example to younger poets. Edited by Alan Jenkins, this authoritative Collected Poems contains all of the poetry that Ian Hamilton chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems; it also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus. The result is an edition whose thoroughness and tact are themselves a moving tribute, restoring to view one of the most disinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry.

Alan Jenkins has published five collections of poetry, of which the most recent is A Shorter Life (2005); he was a poetry critic for The Observer and TheIndependent on Sunday from 1985-1990, and is deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jenkins, Alan

Hamilton, Ian

Leseproben

Introduction

‘So far as they can be said to be famous at all, Ian Hamilton’s poems are famous for being small in size and few in number’: thus Dan Jacobson began his subtle, admiring contribution to a Festschrift published for Hamilton’s sixtieth birthday. The latter’s also appeared at the same time, adding ten new poems, all short, to , published ten years earlier. Hamilton would have been seventy-one this year. In the three years between the publication of his last volume and his death at the age of sixty-three, he published two further poems. Given seven more years he might well have managed another collection: a .

He had ruefully acknowledged the unprolific nature of his poetic gift in the moving, matter-of-fact preface he wrote for in 1988:

Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think. And, in certain moods, I would agree. In certain moods, I used to crave expansiveness and bulk, and early on I had several shots at getting ‘more of the world’ into my verse: more narrative, more satire, more intelligence, and so on. Each time, however, I would end up knowing for certain that I could have tackled the material more cogently in prose. Why push and strain?

And so I decided to stop thinking like a poetry pro, to stop fretting about ‘range’ and ‘output’; decided, indeed, to keep the whole business of ‘my poetry’ quite separate from the rest of my so-called literary life: a life of book reviews, biographies, anthologies and magazines. I suppose I thought that I would wait for poetry to happen rather than force myself to go in search of it. After all, the poems I written arrived more or less out of the blue, prompted by circumstance rather than by any subject-seeking impulse on my part.*

The inspiration for those poems may have arrived ‘out of the blue’, but the poems themselves left little to chance. The circumstances that prompted them were ‘upsetting’ ones, as he later put it: his father’s death from cancer when Hamilton was thirteen, and his first wife’s mental illness. The stakes were as high as they could be. ‘Did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead?’ Hamilton later asked himself. ‘In some way, yes, I think I did.’

Hamilton’s first collection, , was published in 1970, though some of the poems in it date from 1961 or ’62, when he was in his early twenties. He had been writing poetry since a bout of scarlet fever in his teens led to the discovery of a ‘so-called heart problem’, and his removal from the football pitch. A sickly figure, ‘banished to the library during games’, he said, ‘I reached for my Keats. Keats was pre-eminent. You know, half in love with easeful death …’ All his life Hamilton maintained, only half-jokingly, that football was where the ‘real poetry’ was. He did not play, at least not competitively, but, he said, ‘You should see me .’ His team was Tottenham Hotspur: a lonely and often unrewarding passion, as he admitted, but one that would not let him go.

‘A so-called heart problem’; ‘my so-called literary life’. Hamilton was anything but a so-called poet, however. He was, rather, ‘a poet who was also a critic, an editor and a biographer, and it was his search, in all of these places, for “the real thing”, as he put it, which earned him much of his distinction’. So begins Hamilton’s entry in the , written by his friend of many years, Karl Miller, and the unhesitating way in which ‘poet’ is placed first among Hamilton’s vocations, though undoubtedly right, may surprise some. The brief entry for ‘Hamilton, Ian’ in the , which he edited, very properly restricts itself to listing some of his publications (including verse) without further comment. On his death, more than one obituarist regretted the loss of the best stylist of his generation. And by now there is probably another whole generation of readers who know Hamilton not as a lyric poet at all, but as the author of an outstanding Life of Robert Lowell (1982), or as the defendant in a lawsuit brought by J. D. Salinger, the subject of the biography he wrote next. (Salinger objected to some quoting from personal letters, freely available for inspection in university archives, and sought an injunction; Hamilton cut the offending quotes, re-wrote the book, and was mortified. The author of had been a hero of his adolescence, and ‘phoney’ remained one of his favourite terms of disapprobation.)

Others will have known him as a book reviewer and critic, whose hundreds of reviews, essays and articles take twenty-two small-print pages to list in his bibliography; or as the author of a book-length meditation on the artistry of the Spurs and England footballer Paul Gascoigne. Still others, no doubt fewer in number, will have read his stylish study of , his tour around the literary estates in , or his sometimes caustic thumbnail summaries of forty-five modern reputations in ; he also edited several anthologies and the mentioned above. Before or during all of this activity he was ‘Special Writer’, then Poetry and Fiction Editor on the (1965–72), and Editor of (1962–72) and (1974-79): a flinty-eyed scourge of poetasters and pretension, a witty, sardonic pillar of the Pillars (of Hercules, a pub in Soho), and, among women, a handsome, Bogartian figure with an intriguingly complicated private life.

When Hamilton’s appeared in 1998, some detected a poignant personal subtext in this account of the Victorian poet-sage’s gradual abandonment of poetry – or its abandonment of him – for the drudgery of school-inspecting and other good works. Certainly, Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ was a touchstone for Hamilton: a left-over Romantic poem, and one that spoke to his own sense of being a left-over romantic. He admitted to having been powerfully moved by this passage from Arnold’s notes:

It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits – and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.

And Hamilton’s own predicament does haunt several passages in his book, such as this: ‘What the age didn’t need were more poems of the kind that Arnold did have a real gift for, and had indeed already written: lyric poems of the self, that Arnold self which, as he came to believe, had or should have had better things to do than, well, write lyric poems.’

Hamilton may have had many things to do than write poems, but he would not have agreed that any of them were better things. ‘Miraculous lyrical arrivals’ he called the poems he did write, and, given his so-called literary life (or, as he put it in even less self-forgiving mood, a life spent calculating ‘all the crappy things I’d have to do if I didn’t do this crappy thing’), the miracle would seem to be that they arrived at all. At the very least, their rarity and brevity might seem unsurprising. But that would be to confuse the poet with the busy man of letters, or with the bohemian who took up his station in the saloon bar next door to offices, ready for the next round – and the next round of critical hostilities. Poetry, though it was ‘revelation’ rather than ‘something constructed’, was also a painstaking and profoundly moral business. Hamilton’s poems, among the most heartfelt of their time, are also among the most reticent: they are, in the best sense, modest. This reticence or modesty is central to understanding both the man and what he thought poetry could and should be. Blake Morrison, writing ten years ago, put it succinctly when he said that writers ‘move between two poles: self-expression at one extreme, self-effacement at the other. Though not as violently as Salinger or Matthew Arnold, Hamilton has himself struggled between these same poles.’

Hamilton was born in 1938, the second son of Robert Tough and Daisy ( McKay) Hamilton, who had left their native Scotland in 1936 and were living in King’s Lynn, where Hamilton senior worked as a civil engineer. In 1951 the family, now increased by a third son and a daughter, moved north to Darlington, Co. Durham, and Ian attended the grammar school there. After two years’ National Service, stationed in Germany with the RAF (Information Service), he went up to Keble College, Oxford, in 1958. At Oxford the young Hamilton, ‘tough, austere, unprivileged, unpretentious’, as his friend and fellow-undergraduate John Fuller has described him, quickly made his mark on the poetry scene, his ‘tight-lipped authority’ already fully formed. As a poet, though, he was still feeling his way, equally unimpressed by torrid 1940s neo-Romanticism, by Dylan Thomas’s bardic posturing and by the preening ironies – a kind of parade of diffidence – that were in the Movement-dominated 1950s.†...