Essays & Criticism
Written by Ian Hamilton
Poetry Chronicle: Essays and Reviews
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Book: (London:
Faber, 1973; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973)
From
the Preface:
'I have been writing regular
poetry reviews for just over ten years now, and this book
is a selection of what seem to me my least ephemeral pieces.
I have printed them more or less as they first appeared in
periodicals, limiting revision to the adjustment of sloppy
phrasings and resisting the temptation, stronger in some cases
than in others, to amplify and extend. My hope is that the
book, whatever is thought of its opinions, will serve some
kind of documentary purpose; that, at worst, it will offer
a reasonably detailed (though hardly all-inclusive) picture
of what has been happening in poetry during the last decade.'
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The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors
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Book: (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1976)
From
the Preface:
'Why "little magazines"?
No one has ever quite been sure where the term came from (though
The Little Review has been suggested as a probable
source) and it is not easy to define what credentials a magazine
requires in order to fit into the genre. There have been large
magazines with tiny circulations and there have been diminutive
sheets which have reached thousandsd of readers. But all "little
magazines" have been small in one or another of these
ways, and usually in both. They have had small resources,
small respect for the supposed mysteries of "how to run
a business", small appeal outside a very small minority
of readers.
'And yet most of them have
had arrestingly large-scale ambitions, a deep sense of the
unique importance of their task. They have usually felt that
they were making points, supporting gifts, promoting tendencies
which would otherwise have been fatally neglected. They have
seen themselves as nurturing literary growth at a level subtler
and more crucial than could ever be imagined by the commercial
or "established" press. And here perhaps one can
hazard a definition that will cover most of the whole field.
The little magazine is one which exists, indeed thrives, outside
the usual business structure of magazine production and distribution;
it is independent, amateur and idealistic -- it doesn't (or,
shall we say, feels that it shouldn't) need to print anything
it doesn't want to print.'
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Walking Possession: Essays
and Reviews 1968-1993
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Book: (London: Bloomsbury,
1994)
From
the Foreword:
'When the bailiffs come to
call, as call they often do down Grub Street way, your goods
and chattels are not immediately carried off to auction. For
fourteen days, you are given a chance to raise the money owed.
During this period, the duns take ‘walking possession’
of the things you own, or used to own. For two weeks, the
stuff is not yours but it is also not quite theirs. Reviewers
are sometimes thought of as the bailiffs of literature: they
take walking possession of their subjects; they talk as if
they own them, but they don’t. And that’s one
way of explaining the title of this book. Another is to confess
that many of the reviews reprinted here were written in less
than fourteen days and one or two of them were done on a typewriter
half-owned by the courts'.
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The Trouble with Money
and Other Essays
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Book: (London: Bloomsbury,
1998)
Author's
Note:
'The "new" pieces
collected here were written between 1994 and 1997 and to these
I have added a selection from Walking Possessions,
which was published in hardback by Bloomsbury in 1994'.
Contents:
1. Down Grub Street Way
The Trouble with Money,
3
Us and Them, 9
I Love Concordances, 16
Poor Cyril, 22
2. Lives and Letters
Edmund Wilson's Wounds,
31
Harold Ross of The New Yorker, 40
The Buried Life: Elizabeth Bishop's Letters, 49
The Sensitivities of Stephen Spender, 61
Auden's Juvenilia, 87
The First Life of Salman Rushdie, 95
Ford Madox Ford: Who Am I?, 139
Louis MacNeice: Anxious and Aloof, 145
Edward Upward: It's No Joke, 152
R. S. Thomas -- Frown by Frown, 159
3. 'These Are Damned
Times': Two Victorians
Tennyson: Two Lives, 169
Arnold's Letters, Finally, 180
4. Sports and Pastimes
On Being a Soccer Bore,
195
Tel's Tale, 203
All Our Yesterdays, 209
Cups and cups, 215
Three Managers, 221
Glenn and 'Glenda', 229
Just What Are Those Teeth For?, 237
Chunnel Crossing, 243
Anti-Star: A Profile of Julie Christie, 250
Taste, Tact and Racism, 266
5. From Walking Possession
A Biographer's Misgivings,
289
Philip Larkin: 1. The Collected Poems, 307
Philip Larkin: 2. The Selected Letters, 314
Philip Larkin: 3. The Biography, 321
Seamus Heaney's Anonymity, 330
Innocent Bystander -- The Forgetfulness of Damon Runyon,
338
Kingsley Amis's Self-Love, 345
The Comic Strip, 351
The Knocking Shop, 357
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