Contemporary Literary Criticism | Hamilton, Ian - Richard Eder (review date 28 November 1982)

Richard Eder (review date 28 November 1982)

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Poetry Plus Pain in an Outsized and Wondrous Balance.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (28 November 1982): 2.

[In the following review of Robert Lowell, Eder praises Hamilton for his original research into primary sources and his fair, insightful portrayal of Lowell.]

“There's a strange fact about the poets of roughly our age, and one that doesn't exactly seem to have always been true. It's this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning.” Robert Lowell wrote this to Theodore Roethke, a month before Roethke died of a heart attack, and 14 years before Lowell died the same way.

It was a tormented, self-tormenting generation. Randall Jarrell walked into a speeding car; Delmore Schwartz was found dead in the hallway of a cheap Manhattan hotel, and John Berryman jumped to his...

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