Paying homage to Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets", this work offers an account of 20th-century English language poetry, viewed through the lives and works of some of its principal exponents. There are towering figures such as Larkin, Eliot, and Auden, as well as more minor talents, for example Stevie Smith. The text also includes writers who illustrate interesting aspects of poetry, with Allen Ginsberg a prime example. The text includes a substantial essay on each subject, combining biography with critical judgement, along with representative poems. The introduction discusses the place of poetry in the 20th century.

Against Oblivion

Ian Hamilton

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Visit

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Faber&Faber

Robert Lowell: A Biography

Faber and Faber

This collection adds ten more poems to "Fifty Poems" published in the 1980s. These poems combine an almost conversational directness of address with metrical refinement. Their subject matter may be intimate, even private, yet they aim to engage the reader with candour and at a deep level.

Sixty Poems

Faber Paperbacks

Ian Hamilton Collected Poems

History & Criticism

Alan Jenkins

<p>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Poems contains all of the poetry that Ian Hamilton chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems; it also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus.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 distinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry.</p>

The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English

The idea for Ian Hamilton's unorthodox new book was sparked by a rereading of Samuel Johnson's classic "Lives of the English Poets". Johnson included appraisals of 52 poets, but of these only a tiny handful - four or five, perhaps - are still remembered. What, then, of the 20th century? How many English-language poets of that epoch will we be admiring 200 years from now? How many will resist oblivion? Hamilton takes 45 dead 20th-century poets and offers a personal - and sometimes highly critical - response to each of them. And in the process he constructs a portrayal of what the living of a 20th-century "poetic life" has actually involved. Underpinning Hamilton's narrative are two main propositions. Firstly, that the 20th century was almost from the beginning dominated by four key figures - Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Hardy -and that subsequent poets have, in one way or another, had to "take on" these overshadowing exemplars. For these four, Hamilton insists, oblivion presents no threat. Secondly, that, faced with a secular, mass-educated and largely philistine "audience", the poet's appetite for durability, for lastingness, has been intensified - in some cases, constructively; in others, with disastrous results. Larkin, Lowell, Berryman, MacNiece: will we continue to remember them? Ginsberg, Spender, Tate: real talents, or mere poetry-world careerists? And, in the end, how many do we need? Examples of each candidate's verse accompany Hamilton's prose text, so that "Against Oblivion" can be taken as an informal introduction to 20th-century poetry, or as a basis for critical dispute, or as a useful and provocative anthology: three books in one.

Against oblivion: Some lives of the twentieth-century poets

Viking Adult

<p>Pursuing the elusive writer in documents and interviews with friends and acquaintances, the author has pieced together an extended study of Salinger, tracing his life from Park Avenue childhood to his encounters with literary fame</p>

In Search of J.D. Salinger

Arts & Literature

Octopus Publishing Group: Minerva

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Books by Ian Hamilton