Eugene Lee-Hamilton

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Eugene Lee-Hamilton

Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907) was a late Victorian English poet. His work includes some notable sonnets in the style of Petrarch. He endowed a literary prize administered by Oriel College in Oxford University, where he was a student. The prize is open to students of Oxford and of Cambridge University and continues to this day.

His technical quality and flair for story-telling have perhaps not received the attention they deserve. He spent much of his adult life suffering from an undiagnosed illness that almost certainly had at least a psychological component; he was nursed by his mother and sporadically by his half-sister, Violet Paget, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. Lee-Hamilton lived in Italy during his illness, and it was only after his mother died in 1896 and he recovered that he was able to travel again, eventually marrying the novelist Annie E. Holdsworth in 1898 and fathering a child, Persis Margaret, in 1903.

Lee-Hamilton is located firmly in the tradition of shorter Victorian verse; it is in the narrative and dramatic form that Lee-Hamilton’s strengths lie, most especially in the dramatic sonnet. The poet draws most especially upon the work of Robert Browning, but he further refines the art of the dramatic monologue. In contrast to his illness, there is a restless imagination to his sonnets. In particular Imaginary Sonnets (1888) draws upon a wide range of historical, mythic and imaginary figures; the programme of the sequence is that all of the sonnets are spoken by a particular person at a particular time. Philip Hobsbaum (in Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form) suggests that Lee-Hamilton’s Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894) is the only Victorian sonnet sequence that can compare to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lee-Hamilton’s story telling abilities are displayed in the gripping and suspenseful longer poems of collections such as the New Medusa (1882), narratives and dramatic monologues that explore the darker side of life.

Like Robert Browning, Lee-Hamilton’s works are concerned with the rougher edges of humanity; lust, jealousy, and fear dominate, rather than love. The shadowy edges between religion and atheism, sanity and madness, love and hate, are what seem to fascinate the poet. Certain motifs are used repeatedly in pursuit of depicting these states, submersion in water, being buried in the earth, being shackled, the conflict between body and mind, murderous female archetypes such as the gorgon, and male archetypes such as the madman or the murderous lover. Lee-Hamilton has an unfortunately greater tendency than Robert Browning towards the morbid and the grotesque. Too often, Lee-Hamilton shows us an image or plot that loses force because it lacks restraint.

His greatest works are his sonnets, and his greatest asset his technical ability. Lee-Hamilton condensed the dramatic monologue into a sonnet format, and used the short traditional format to add power to his poetry. The better sonnets are concise and restrained in their construction.

[edit] Works

Poems and Transcripts (London: William Blackwood, 1878).
Gods, Saints and Men (London: W Satchell & Co, 1880).
The New Medusa (London: Eliot Stock, 1882).
Apollo and Marsyas (London: Eliot Stock, 1884).
Imaginary Sonnets (London: Elliot Stock, 1888).
The Fountain of Youth (London: Eliot Stock, 1891).
Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (London: Eliot Stock, 1894).
(as translator), The Inferno of Dante (London: Grant Richards, 1898).
Forrest Notes (London: Grant Richards, 1899).
The Lord of the Dark Red Star (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1903). [1]
The Romance of the Fountain (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1905).
Mimma Bella (London: Heinemann, 1908). [2]

[edit] References

Dramatic Sonnets, Poems and Ballads: Selections from and Poems of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1903).
(MacDonald P. Jackson, ed.), Selected Poems of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907): A Victorian Craftsman Rediscovered (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).