Poetry - Literary Criticism, British & Irish Literary Biography, Literary Biography, English Literature

A Gift Imprisoned

Name: A Gift Imprisoned
Author: Ian Hamilton
ISBN: 9780465044214

by Ian Hamilton

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Overview

A Gift Imprisoned is a tale of the two lives of Matthew Arnold, who in his youth was an impassioned lyric poet, and in his maturity, his poetic ambitions long-since quelled, became Victorian England's best-known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary critic. Hamilton explores the reasons why Arnold abandoned an extremely promising poetic career, why he, as W. H. Auden wrote, "thrust his gift in prison until it died." These questions lead Ian Hamilton through beautifully reasoned considerations on the nature of creativity and its silencing.

About the Author, Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton is one of the foremost literary critics and biographers of our time. He is the author of the definitive biographies on Robert Lowell and that elusive master, J.D. Salinger. Among his other books are two collections of poetry, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (Editor); Keepers of the Flames: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography from Shakespeare to Plath; Writers in Hollywood; and most recently the collection Walking Possession. He has been the literary editor of the TLS and various other influential English publications. He has recently been appointed contributing editor for The New Yorker.

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Editorials

James Wood

The best account yet of Matthew Arnold's mysterious hesitations and painful triumphs. Hamilton is everything a biographer should be.
— The New Republic

Roger Kimball

Mr. Hamilton tells this story with a combination of tact, lightly worn mastery and carefully modulated pathos. There are no villains in this book, only damaged aspirations.
— Wall Street Journal

Booknews

Narrates the two decades after which Arnold turned his back on producing poetry and yoked his writing to the practical betterment of society, becoming Victorian England's best known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary. Finds that during the period however, he fought what he considered his inherited destiny. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Nicholas Jenkins

...Hamilton concentrates on Arnold's early adulthood, when he produced a number of the most mournful and innovative poems of the Victorian period....Hamilton's invaluable achievement in A Gift Imprisoned is to have shifted attention away from Arnold the prose diagnostician and back to the nameless poet, ''A,'' the indefinite article who found ways of making Victorian life not anciently ''poetical'' but anguishingly modern and poetic.
— The New York Times Book Review

New Republic

The provocative case of Matthew Arnold is raised again....

Christopher Carduff

He has written, with concision and insight and an attractive dry humor, an important revaluation of Arnold's poetry. It is also an investigation into the sources of Arnold's maddening ambivalence toward all the we find most valuable in his verse.
— The New Criterion