Contemporary Literary Criticism | Hamilton, Ian - John Simon (review date January 1997)

John Simon (review date January 1997)

SOURCE: Simon, John. “Supreme Nonfiction.” New Criterion 15, no. 5 (January 1997): 63-8.

[In the following review, Simon praises Hamilton's Walking Possession as thought-provoking, witty, and entertaining.]

It is harder to review a collection of critical essays than other kinds of nonfiction. A little easier, to be sure, if you take issue with the critic; but what if you are full of admiring approbation? You end up reduced to quoting enthusiastically more and more passages, till the review becomes an anthology of quotations, a miniature commonplace book. I am not sure I can escape this predicament in reviewing Ian Hamilton's Walking Possession: Essays and Reviews, 1968-1993, a book I relished when I agreed with it, and respected when I didn't.

Hamilton, who is also a poet and a biographer, is probably best known for his Robert Lowell, an excellent critical biography,...

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