Free Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann

without, a little too coolly canny (“Vigil”):
    These ancient lamps, diminishing each day,
    Will never taste the dark worlds they whimper for.
    These wounds,
    Though we have nourished them for years,
    Will be the freshest of sweet tears
    Tomorrow. And the lost will not be found.
    The enzyme that converted pain to poetry went away or gave up. The thing is, there was something not just poetry-minded, but also simply and truly high-minded about Ian, which meant that he had a horror of exploiting those around him: Lowell, whose life he wrote, and of whom he will have seen a fair bit in London in the late ’60s and early ’70s, appalled him with his personal fusses and pitiless production. The cards he was left with—seventy-nine poems, not so many more than a deck—were paucity and brevity. I realize I am paraphrasing the sentence with which Alan Jenkins opens his introduction, quoting Dan Jacobson: “So far as they can be said to be famous at all, Ian Hamilton’s poems are famous for being small in size and few in number.” Accordingly, he wrote hundreds of reviews and essays, and eventually a subtle and simply written and enchanting group of prose books that discreetly revolved around the question that so preoccupied Hamilton of what writers did when they stopped, in any vital sense, writing. First, there was the autogyro Lowell. Then the opposite case, J. D. Salinger, the greatly loved author who “had elected to silence himself. He had freedom of speech but what he had ended up wanting more than anything else, it seemed, was the freedom to be silent.” There were books on writers in Hollywood (a sort of posthumous condition), and on writers’ estates (those really had put down their pens). There was Paul Gascoigne, the most gifted footballer of his generation (and a Tottenham player!), who burned out on silly drink and bad food and personal excesses, and Matthew Arnold, a Victorian slave to duty and social good. I don’t think Ian chose—though of course he didn’t actually choose, there wasn’t a choice—any worse than any of these. Last of all there was a book called Against Oblivion , a set of lives of twentieth-century poets, a pendant to Dr. Johnson, agnostic, cool, sometimes drily wounding. All that I think is nacre; the pearls are the poems.

 
    JAMES SCHUYLER
    Not first sight, often enough, but a second look—it is a mysterious thing with poetry that it finds its own moment. The poets that have meant most to me—Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler—all, as it were, were rudely kept waiting by me. I had their books, or I already knew some poems of theirs, but there was no spark of transference. Then it happened, and our tepid prehistory was, quite literally, forgotten—beyond a lingering embarrassment at my own callow unresponsiveness. It was as though they had always been with me, and I found it difficult, conversely, to remember our first encounter. It is a slight relief to me that James Schuyler, who writes about reading almost as much as he writes about seeing, confesses to a similar sluggishness of feeling (“Horse-Chestnut Trees and Roses”):
    Twenty-some years ago, I read Graham Stuart Thomas’s
    â€œColour in the Winter Garden.” I didn’t plant
    a winter garden, but the book led on to his
    rose books: “The Old Shrub Roses,” “Shrub Roses
    of Today,” and the one about climbers and ramblers.
    It is this dilatory or sidelong compliance I am talking about. There follows my own belated winter garden to the American poet James Marcus Schuyler, pronounced Sky-ler, (1923–1991).
    The first time I was aware of James Schuyler was in one of those shrill American “Best of” annuals. At the back of the book, the poets comment on their own poems, in every shade of vainglory and modesty, pretentiousness and aw, shucks! The only comment I can remember from a decade’s worth of these books is