Something small: the Collected Works of Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton's posthumous Collected Poems contains 62 poems, which take up one page each, except "Larkinesque" which extends 7 lines onto the following side. Many of them have fewer than 10 lines; some fewer than 30 words. Hamilton died comparatively young by modern standards, aged 63 in 2001, but that is still an extraordinarily small body of work, even if you include the additional 20 pages of juvenilia and unpublishedalia at the back.

Hamilton's poetry was all about modesty. Rather than "I" his favourite pronoun was "you"; he sought to express not so much his own thoughts as the experience of those he loved:

Tight in your hands,
Your Empire Exhibition shaving mug.
You keep it now
As a spittoon, its bloated doves,
Its 1938
Stained by the dropping of your blood.
(Birthday Poem)

He wrote of his approach: "It wouldn't be about me; rather, it would be about my inability, however intensely I felt, to do anything about the suffering" (quoted by Alan Jenkins). His father died, and his wife was institutionalised with mental illness. These were the subjects of his earlier adult verse.

He believed his poetry had a kind of magical power: "But did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead? In some way, yes, I think I did." (Preface to Fifty Poems.) This may seem surprising, but other down-to-earth figures like B S Johnson had equally mystical beliefs (Johnson followed Robert Graves's theory about the White Goddess). Without questioning the sincerity of Hamilton's claim, it was probably an idea that came to him only occasionally, like a Catholic who glimpses a cathedral spire in a faraway city, and decides on salvation. And there are many ways of bringing back the dead.

In the preface to his Fifty Poems, he tells how he "decided [...] 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." Hamilton was prolific, just not in poetry; only in prose.

Alan Jenkins quotes Hamilton's biography of Matthew Arnold: "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."

Arnold gave up his lyric poetry to pursue his other role, as an enormously influential educationalist. Hamilton wrote: "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."

The introduction to Fifty Poems describes a sense of failure, of embarrassment, of years wasted: "The raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love affairs, the cash, the somehow-getting-to-be-forty, and so on."

Did Hamilton in some sense give up on poetry, or did he simply find himself unable to write it, or was it a combination of the two? Did he believe in the unimportance of poetry, or at least of his own poetry, being a brilliant editor and critic of others? Was this a cover-up for his idleness and inebriation, or was he in some way a broken man?

In a 2007 interview with the Guardian the American novelist Thomas McGuane talked about the death of his sister from a heroin overdose more than 30 years before: "I think everyone, sooner or later in their lives, has something they never get over and in fact, I don't want to get over it."

McGuane added, "I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life and they don't live long, and the more you're around them, you kind of accept that."

McGuane's novels are very different from Hamilton's poetry; McGuane writes ironic tales of the failed dreams of the American west, comedies of manners, books that are never entirely serious even when celebrating the joys of nature, the wild, the ranch, horseriding, freedom, and escape from human society. Hamilton's poetry is utterly serious, even if sometimes blackly comic. But in both writers there is a sense that they do not wish to write epically; they would rather be small.