Eugene Lee-Hamilton

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Eugene Lee-Hamilton bigraphy, stories - English poet and translator

Eugene Lee-Hamilton : biography

6 January 1845 – 9 September 1907

Eugene Lee-Hamilton (6 January 1845 – 9 September 1907) was a late Victorian English poet.The Encyclopedia Americana (1919) 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.

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).
  • (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1903).
  • The Romance of the Fountain (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1905).
  • (London: Heinemann, 1908).

Notes

Life and works

Eugene Lee-Hamilton was born in London in January, 1845, and was educated mainly in France and Germany. In 1864 he was sent to the University of Oxford, and in 1869 entered the British diplomatic service. He was first attached to the Embassy at Paris. Owing to his early experiences of French life, and complete mastery of the French language, he was eminently fitted for this post. But when the Franco-German War broke out he was terribly overworked. 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.The Magazine of Poetry Volume 1 (1889) Charles Wells Moulton, Buffalo, New York

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 the never satisfactorily diagnosed illness that started in Portugal, and almost certainly had at least a psychological component. Linda Villari in the Albany Review (1908),"Doctors came and went to little effect, and by most of them his malady was soon pronounced to be a most perilous case of cerebro-spinal disease. By the following year (1874) all hope of recovery seemed gone; and thus, at the age of twenty-nine, this promising young diplomatist and budding poet had to renounce all his ambitions and try to resign himself to a lingering death. Accordingly, refusing all medical treatment, he would only accept his dear mother’s care and assistance. So by slow stages she brought him to her own home in Italy, henceforth his adopted country.At any rate the original diagnosis of his case had been far too pessimistic, for at long last, and dating, I think, from the time when the family left their Florence flat, and settled in the pleasant Villa Palmerino among vineyards and olive-groves a few miles away, certain signs of improvement began to appear in his general condition. But they were such faint signs as to be almost unheeded by the patient himself. Having long renounced every hope of recovery he could not realise that any change should be for the better. He had tried too many doctors in vain, so refused to consult any more.