rather, the opposite, because of the virtue and delicacy of his poems. In the long and fascinating interview that Dan Jacobson conducted with Hamilton shortly before his death (Between the Lines, 2002), it is striking how often he uses a phantom or gangland first-person plural; itâs always âwe werenât supposed to be telling people about fadsâ or âso we thought yes.â And yet I canât help thinking that the co-opted parties, left to themselves, would have stuck, more truthfully, to the third-person singular: âIan thisâ or âIan that.â Hence the persistent take-offs (flattery) and the unparalleled loyalty to his memory and example. He ran his magazines, the one from 1962 to 1970, the other from 1974 to 1979, without really making any discoveries or launching any notable careers. Perhaps they could even be described as gloriously exclusionary enterprises, ideally diminishing to a single angel (who?) on a pin. Most of the major reputations of the 1960sâLarkin, Gunn, Hughes, Plathâwere already firmly defined, and the editorial âweâ was fairly agnostic on their successors; âI never had any time for Geoffrey Hill and still donâtâ; entertained more or less crippling reservations about Lowell and Heaney and Berryman (âI was never a great Berryman fanâ); never saw the point of the Black Mountain school (âthat neo-Poundian stuffâ); and fought an unremitting war against the poppy, crowd-pleasing Mersey Poets (âYou can imagine what [Matthew] Arnold would have said if he had read Roger McGoughâ). At the same time, it seems to me that the poets who passed through his magazines, like Douglas Dunn, David Harsent, Hugo Williams, Craig Raine, did some of their best work then, in an endeavor to please Ian. The fiction writers, too, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Jim Crace, Martin Amis, Edna OâBrien, Kazuo Ishiguro surely bore some trace of having been through his editorial cura . It strikes me that Ian was perhaps the last poet routinely read by novelists (at least, if there have been others since, I am not aware of them). It was the last time there was any sort of citadel or center in English letters, even though it may have ended, in brilliantly English fashion, with the writers being called upon to pay the printersâ bills. (Doesnât it all sound like something from Cavafy?) Or is that just a story?
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Ian Hamilton published his book of poems called The Visit in 1970. It contained thirty-three poems, all of them short (more on this matter of brevity later). In 1988, the year he turned fifty, he had bulked this up to a production called Fifty Poems . Ten years later, that was replaced by Sixty Poems , always with the original thirty-three leading off. Alan Jenkinsâpoet and reviewer, a friend and successor of Ian Hamiltonâs at the TLS âhas managed to turn up two more poems and another seventeen unpublished or uncollected pieces. Grand total: seventy-nine. You think prime number, or else of the perceived shame and difficulty of writing at such a slow rate. Ian, of course, was aware of the problem: Fifty Poems came with a moody though unapologetic preface (âFifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might thinkâ included, with much other valuable material, in Alan Jenkinsâs edition). And when he read aloud to launch it, the difficulty was still more acute, as he threatened to gallop through the entire book in half an hour or so, because not only were the poems short, but they didnât elicit from Ian very much in the way of commentary or explanation. These problems, though real and un-get-round-ableâis there any substitute for quantity in poetry!?âare ancillary, because in the end Hamiltonâs slender oeuvre is worth others ten times as bulky. As the manâs life was a perhaps involuntary education in the
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Ian Hamilton published his book of poems called The Visit in 1970. It contained thirty-three poems, all of them short (more on this matter of brevity later). In 1988, the year he turned fifty, he had bulked this up to a production called Fifty Poems . Ten years later, that was replaced by Sixty Poems , always with the original thirty-three leading off. Alan Jenkinsâpoet and reviewer, a friend and successor of Ian Hamiltonâs at the TLS âhas managed to turn up two more poems and another seventeen unpublished or uncollected pieces. Grand total: seventy-nine. You think prime number, or else of the perceived shame and difficulty of writing at such a slow rate. Ian, of course, was aware of the problem: Fifty Poems came with a moody though unapologetic preface (âFifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might thinkâ included, with much other valuable material, in Alan Jenkinsâs edition). And when he read aloud to launch it, the difficulty was still more acute, as he threatened to gallop through the entire book in half an hour or so, because not only were the poems short, but they didnât elicit from Ian very much in the way of commentary or explanation. These problems, though real and un-get-round-ableâis there any substitute for quantity in poetry!?âare ancillary, because in the end Hamiltonâs slender oeuvre is worth others ten times as bulky. As the manâs life was a perhaps involuntary education in the
Similar Books
