Eugene Lee-Hamilton

Eugene Lee-Hamilton (6 January 1845 – 9 September 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.

Life and works

Eugene Lee-Hamilton was born in London on 6 January 1845 and educated mainly in France and Germany. In 1864 he was sent to the University of Oxford. In 1869 he entered the British diplomatic service. He was first attached to the Embassy at Paris, where, due to his early experiences of French life, and mastery of the French language, he was eminently suitable. After the Franco-German War broke out he took part in the Alabama arbitration at Geneva. Subsequently he was appointed secretary in the British Legation at Lisbon. He had to renounce this second position in 1873, when, suddenly, he collapsed altogether, losing the use of his legs, and suffering agonies of pain. He expressed it in one of his sonnets,

"To keep through life the posture of the grave,

While others walk and run and dance and leap."

It was in order to while away the tedium arising out of this malady that he first took to composing verse. All of his poetry from this time was composed without his touching pen or paper, and subsequently dictated.

Early poems

Hamilton's first miscellaneous poems appeared in 1878, and attracted no notice whatever; and it was only with the publication of The New Medusa that his poetry began to receive attention. This volume was followed, in 1885, by one entitled Apollo and Marsyas, and his next publication, entitled Imaginary Sonnets, came out in the fall of 1888. As a writer of sonnets he is most remarkable.

He spent much of his adult life suffering from psychological ailments.

He was nursed by his mother and sporadically by his half-sister, Violet Paget, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. Lee-Hamilton lived with his mother and step-father in Florence, 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, but she died of meningitis in infancy. This led to him writing the poem, Mimma Bella; In Memory of a Little Life.

Analysis

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.

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).
• (with his wife) Forrest Notes (London: Grant Richards, 1899).
• The Lord of the Dark Red Star (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1903).
• The Romance of the Fountain (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1905).
• Mimma Bella (London: Heinemann, 1908).