Poet with a chilling turn of praise

When the poet and biographer and literary critic and editor Ian Hamilton died last December, he left us a long, two-part interview with Dan Jacobson in the London Review of Books, and the manuscript of this book, Against Oblivion, to hear him in and remember him by. Many readers won't have heard of him, and few will have read him, or read the best of him, but he was certainly one of the most respected and austerely benign literary figures of the past decades.

Hamilton's reputation was made early, in the Sixties and Seventies. That was when he wrote the 33 poems that went into his first trade book, The Visit (1970), edited his two influential literary magazines, The Review and The New Review, and established himself as the toughest poetry critic around.

When The New Review came to an end, he was forced to reinvent himself.

The terse poet and fastidious taste-maker became something quite like Dr Johnson's "harmless drudge". Hamilton Mk II was a writer of bulk prose, an author of no-nonsense literary journalism and a serial biographer (of Robert Lowell, of Salinger, of Matthew Arnold, of Hollywood writers). His themes were America, compromise, industriousness and silence. He compiled the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, the Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Essays, and now this book, which is a kind of Lives of the Poets for our time. These are make-books and make-work, but in the way Hamilton did them, they have unexpected dignity, character and bite.

"Most poets," Hamilton says in his introduction, "can't help believing they are poets, and believing, too, that being a poet really matters." At the same time, most poets know that no amount of belief will be the slightest use once they are dead, and time gets to sifting their (literary) remains.

Against Oblivion offers short accounts of the life and work of 45 20th century poets, none of them alive, and none of them certain to "survive"; Hamilton has deliberately left out the four - in his opinion - who are: Yeats, Eliot, Hardy and Auden. A photograph, and a poem or two apiece, and that's the end of the wager with posterity that surely every poet makes with himself. You can treat this book as a bundle of second-hand betting slips.

It would be to misunderstand Hamilton if you were to suppose there now followed 45 eulogies, 45 enthusiastic claims staked for accommodation in posterity's draughty halls. No, he doesn't talk up his runners and riders - if anything, the opposite. This is their true form, the real gen, straight from the horse's mouth, preferred ground, race tactics, training accidents, nobblings and all. Even praise - perhaps especially praise - tends to be delivered with the hand-brake on. Or would you like it to be said of you that your "tireless eye for oceanic detail and expanse" is one of your "most lasting strengths"? That's what Robinson Jeffers gets. It's the typical Hamilton tone - part slave-in-the-triumphal-chariot, part curmudgeonly grandfather, part amiable nihilist - and it's what makes him such an entertaining, if complicated, guide.

Of Rupert Brooke he says (in parentheses): "he died of a mosquito bite and saw no active service" - it seems even more wounding than if he'd said it the other way round. Louis MacNeice, gloriously, is "in the pub, but never really of the pub". And this, be it noted, is the praise. Chilling.

As a long-time participant-cum-onlooker, Hamilton is ideally placed to assess the vanity fair or the grisly comédie humaine of poetry.

The varieties of derailment are fascinating, the suicides (one in seven), the alcoholics (one in five), the head-cases (too many to count), the Americans (Roethke, Berryman) who explode with ambition and over-production, the Brits, more the imploding type, doing it with drink and misanthropy and inhibition (Larkin, Henry Reed), or foreign wars (five, if you count Rupert Brooke).