HALL, J(ohn) C(live)

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Nationality: British. Born: London, 12 September 1920. Education: Leighton Park, Reading, Berkshire; Oriel College, Oxford. Family: Two children. Career: Formerly a book and magazine publisher; trustee of the Kevin Douglas estate. Address: 9 Warwick Road, Mount Sion, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN1 1YL, England.

Publications

Poetry

Selected Poems, with Keith Douglas and Norman Nicholson. London, Bale and Staples, 1943.

The Summer Dance and Other Poems. London, Lehmann, 1951.

The Burning Hare. London, Chatto and Windus-Hogarth Press, 1966.

A House of Voices. London, Chatto and Windus-Hogarth Press, 1973.

Selected and New Poems 1939–1984. London, Secker and Warburg, 1985.

Other

Edwin Muir. London, Longman, 1956.

Editor, Collected Poems of Edwin Muir 1921–1951. London, Faber, 1952; New York, Grove Press, 1957; revised edition, Faber, 1960; New York, Oxford University Press, 1965.

Editor, with Patric Dickinson and Erica Marx, New Poems 1955. London, Joseph, 1955.

Editor, with G.S. Fraser and John Waller, The Collected Poems of Keith Douglas, revised edition. London, Faber, 1966.

Editor, with G.S. Fraser and John Waller, Alamein to Zem Zem, by Keith Douglas. London, Faber, 1966; New York, Chilmark Press, 1967.

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J.C. Hall's early poems, collected in The Summer Dance, though reflective and carefully formed, lack any strongly individual quality. As he himself acknowledged, "All these long years I've pondered how to make /A poetry I could truly call my own." In the next volume, The Burning Hare, the influence of Edwin Muir is all-pervasive. "Before This Journeying Began" and "The Double Span" are dedicated to him, and "The Island" reads like a pastiche of Muir. Hall is a conservative poet, conscious of his debt to literary tradition, and "The Playground by the Church," with its allusions to Valéry, is typical of his meditative poetry, which questions and explores the world of ideas and of philosophical apprehensions.

A House of Voices relies less than the previous collections on myth and symbol, although Hall remains aware of their potency. The tone of the verse is more relaxed, and the poems are more firmly rooted in the world of everyday experience. In "The Double" Hall ends on a note of metaphysical speculation, but the first three stanzas are more humorous and colloquial than anything in his earlier work:

   I often wonder what he was really like,
   That identical boy—whether he knew of me
   Taking the rap, riding round on my bike
   Secretly proud of the devil I dared not be.

Hall's patient search for a poetry truly his own appears finally to have been successful.

—John Press