The award-winning poet published in 2019 a book of letters from their couple and friends, shedding new light on the tumultuous relationship between poet Robert Lowell and author Elizabeth Hardwicke. Saskia Hamilton died at her Manhattan home on June 7th. she was 56 years old.
Her brother John Hamilton said the cause was cancer.
Professor Hamilton joined Barnard College’s English Department in 2002 and was appointed Vice Chancellor in 2018. in commemorative post On Professor Barnard’s website, president and dean Linda A. Bell said her poetry “lives in the minutiae of everyday life.”
“They are asking us to look at ‘that Arcadian time we create together,'” Professor Bell wrote, quoting a passage from Professor Hamilton’s poem. “this time” (2017). “By charting the small moments of everyday life, it draws our attention to the beauty of the everyday world.”
Professor Hamilton’s first book of poetry, As for Dream, was published in 2001. Much of its poetry was about loss, but like In the Hospital, it was enigmatic and fragmented.
Can you pass me the light bulb?
He said he had to plant it, but he couldn’t reach it.
An attendant came in and adjusted the dials.
Still she didn’t get up from her chair.
his last words were
you are really lazy.
“Hamilton’s restraint in all these poems does more than lure the reader into something resembling the flow of her ‘dreams,'” writes Leslie Ullman in a Poetry magazine review of the titles of several poems. I wrote it while quoting the words used in “But it also has a challenging vibe, as if she wants more from a person.”
Three more collections followed, including 2014’s Corridor.
“Hamilton writes short, smart, sometimes enigmatic poems that seem to be carved from driftwood or old bone,” David Orr told The New York Times, listing the book as the 10 best poetry books of 2014. I wrote that I chose it for one of the books.
Professor Hamilton, who won the 2021 Art and Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was particularly acclaimed for shedding light on the works and lives of other authors. Mr Lowell. In 2005 she published The Letters of Robert Lowell, in which, as Charles McGrath wrote in a Times book review, “What we hear is Lowell, a formidable public figure. It is the voice of a human named Lowell.”
Three years later, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited with Thomas Travisano, was published. The book covered her 30-year correspondence between two Pulitzer Prize-winning poets.
Her most talked-about book was The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwicke, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, which used letters to explore controversial elements of Lowell’s career. . In 1970, he took up a teaching post at Oxford, England, leaving behind Mrs. Hardwicke, his then-wife, and a daughter.
There he began dating the British-Irish writer Caroline Blackwood, and the marriage dissolved. Mr. Lowell wrote the poems for his second Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poems, The Dolphin, based on letters Ms. Hardwick wrote to him during this period. The appropriation was widely condemned, including by Lowell’s friend Bishop and poet Adrian Rich.
Hardwick, who died in 2007, thought her letter had been destroyed, but was found in the Lowell Archives at Harvard University. Professor Hamilton wrote in his preface that this correspondence represents “a debate about the limits of art, that is, in what occasions the work of art is placed, and in what occasion the work of art is placed.” It is written that it does. What moral and artistic license do artists have in using their lives as material? “
In a 2020 Vanity Fair interview, Professor Hamilton, who knew Ms Hardwick, said she sensed her presence while writing the letter.
“I feel like she’s staring back at you,” she said. “I heard her letter. She knows you will be there one day. It’s of a completely different nature, it’s knowing that your neighbor is looking out the window.”
Professor Hamilton was born in Washington on May 5, 1967. Her father John was a writer and editor. Her mother, Elise Viarda, is an artist and therapist.
As a senior at Kenyon College in Gambia, Ohio, Professor Hamilton participated in the first convening for young poets at Indiana University, funded by philanthropist Ruth Lilly. She took home her top prize of $15,000 at the event, which she used to fund graduate school at New York University. She completed her master’s degree there and completed her doctorate. at Boston University.
She taught at Kenyon before joining the Barnard faculty. In addition to her younger brother John and her mother, she is left with her son Lucien Hamilton, and three other siblings, Claudia, Emma and James Hamilton.
Professor Hamilton’s poetry often dealt with difficult subjects. “She used her beautiful words to ease her grief and loss,” Professor Bell said in a post on Bernard’s site.
Professor Hamilton’s first collection was specifically concerned with these themes. In a 2001 interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican, she spoke of her experience writing her poems.
“When people begin to meditate deeply on loss, they try to imagine what the experience of dying might be like,” she says. “Is it dramatic, or is it very quiet, like you’re going from one dream to another?”
