[In the following review of A Poetry Chronicle, Fenton asserts that, while Hamilton's criticism may be severe, it offers a fresh perspective on the received literary masters.]

One often hears Ian Hamilton's poetry criticism referred to as ‘severe’ or ‘stern’, and among certain circles there is a vague suspicion that Hamilton, at heart, really doesn't much like poetry at all. This is typical of our times—the opposite of severe being in this case ‘indulgent’: it sometimes seems that poets are engaged in a sort of Dig for Victory campaign in which every little bit helps and its unfair or unpatriotic (or anti-American) to raise a voice of even modest doubt. Considerable and modest talents, to adapt Auden's phrase, are ruining their fine tenor voices with effects that bring down the house. In these circumstances writers and readers alike need reviewers who are not prepared to suffer fools gladly. Thus if Ian Hamilton is severe, it should make him the friend and not the enemy of poetry.

But is he severe? On the basis of the poetry he himself prints in the Review, which is often risibly mawkish, one would be inclined to say no. The fact is, though Hamilton himself would probably deny this, there is a kind of Review school, which clusters around his talent, producing works of extraordinary brevity, characteristically on a cryptic I/thou axis, and tending always towards a cloying romanticism or, worse, a gossamer-thin aestheticism. One notices that writers who have worked with him tend at least for a short period to produce imitations of the Hamilton style. The trouble is that he knows how it works well, and they mostly don't.

As a reviewer and critic Hamilton is at his best when swimming against the tide, taking some agreed truth about some poet or movement and then testing it against his own, almost invariably sensitive, reading of the relevant works. There are several examples of this approach at its best in A Poetry Chronicle, in which he has gathered together his writings from the past decade. In an extended essay, ‘The Forties’, he sets out the received opinion about the poetry of the time—‘the decade dominated by the punch-drunk Apocalypse, the foaming horsemen, and … by a wartime hysteria which could only have produced such rubbish’. Then, by examining the work of, say, Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas, he begins to build up an entirely different sort of picture—not a complete canvas and not an uncritical encomium. But by the end he convinces one that in remembering the Forties we have been simply remembering the wrong people.

His essay on The Waste Land is less of a bibliographical work; in fact it takes the opposite tack, arguing that so much that has been written about Eliot's poem is predicated on the assumption that all the inclusions and allusions are relevant to the main purpose of the work (because the author has said so). Hamilton argues that ‘we are given too much judgment and too little evidence’, that the poem does lack a genuine emotional centre. I agree with his criticisms of the poem, but even if I did not I would feel that he was doing the poem a service, by making a fresh reading possible after the textual pundits have done their, often questionable, work.

There are casualties among his criticism as well as beneficiaries. Fifteen years' work by Robert Creeley lies stacked like trash. Ted Hughes's Crow goes limping off the edge of the page, more tattered and bedraggled, if that were possible, than when it made its noisome landing. In a rather moving volte-face Hamilton turns against Lowell's Notebook—moving because we are also provided with previous admiring reviews. The degeneration of Lowell's gift, or of his use of it, is well argued, and he hits the nail firmly on the head in the final paragraph when he points out:

The temptation to shrug off such things and to point instead to … the work's size, range, assimilative energy and so on … would be a mistake, for it seems to have been in pursuit, in easy expectation, of such applause that this fine poet has allowed himself to let things slip—as life slips, and with it life's applause.

That last line is one of the few purplish passages in the book—justifiably, since the judgment on Notebook seems applicable to many other large poems of recent years, Crow is an example of the over-eager pursuit of applause, Dream Songs may be, perhaps—dare one say it—The Waste Land was. The value of Ian Hamilton's criticism has been that he has always refused to be conned by extravagant gestures, and rhetorical sleight of hand.