LEE-HAMILTON, Eugene (Jacob) 1845-1907

PERSONAL:

Born January 6, 1845 in London, England; died of a paralytic stroke September 7, 1907 in Bagni di Lucca, Italy; married Annie E. Holdsworth (a novelist), 1899; children: one daughter. Education: Attended Oxford University, 1864-69.

CAREER:

British Diplomatic Service, assistant to British ambassador in Paris, France 1869-73, secretary to legation in Lisbon, 1873; writer from 1873.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Poems and Transcripts, 1878.

Gods, Saints, and Men, 1880.

The New Medusa, and Other Poems, 1882.

Apollo and Marsyas, and Other Poems, 1884,

Imaginary Sonnets, 1888.

Sonnets of the Wingless Hours, 1894.

(With Annie Holdsworth Lee-Hamilton) Forest Notes, 1899.

Dramatic Sonnets, Poems, and Ballads: Selections from the Poems of Eugene Lee-Hamilton, 1903.

Mimma Bella; In Memory of a Little Life, 1908.

PLAY

The Fountain of Youth: A Fantastic Tragedy in Five Acts, 1891.

SIDELIGHTS:

Eugene Lee-Hamilton is best remembered for the evocative poetry he created during a prolonged illness. While Lee-Hamilton was paralyzed, barely able to communicate, and in desperate pain, he produced several volumes of poetry which articulated obliquely his agonized circumstances. A contributor to Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism explained, "The themes and central concerns of his best poetry [are] the penetrating exposure of psychological tragedy, the realistic horror of nightmares and hallucinations, pessimistic resignation to suffering, and the dramatic contrast between beautiful natural landscapes and grotesque situations for which they are backdrops." Lee-Hamilton's poetry was so surely linked to his experience, however, that it led critics to wonder about the connection between his malady and his imagination.

Lee-Hamilton was born on January 6, 1845, in London. His father died early on, so Lee-Hamilton was raised by his mother and stepfather in a family cobbled together from past marriages. Apparently, Lee-Hamilton detested his engineer stepfather, Mr. Paget, but for the most part he and the other children were tutored by their mother on extended visits to Germany and France. He won a place at Oxford University in 1864, but left without a degree in 1869 to accept a position in the British foreign service as assistant to the British ambassador to Paris. Lee-Hamilton served in that capacity throughout the Franco-Prussian war, but after developing health problems in 1873, he transferred to Lisbon. There, he was diagnosed with the tortuous cerebrospinal disease which forced him to remain caged in his body for twenty years.

During this period Lee-Hamilton stayed in Florence with his half sister, Violet Paget, who wrote fiction under the named Vernon Lee. The Twentieth-CenturyLiterary Criticism contributor described their life: "At their home Paget received many literary figures of the day, but only the most important—such as Oscar Wilde and Henry James—were allowed to meet with Lee-Hamilton, who found even brief conversation painful." Apparently, while Lee-Hamilton was suffering his agony in absolute stillness, he developed the habit of composing poetry to take his mind off of his pain. Ironically—though not surprisingly—his poetry often evokes the experience of paralysis and pain quite strikingly; in fact, it is this quality in his poetry that many critics have found intriguing.

Lee-Hamilton's first books of poetry did not make a big impression. A critic for the Atheneum regarded a review of the 1878 volume Poems and Transcripts with a shrug: "Lee-Hamilton's Poems and Transcripts are finished with thoroughly artistic care, and are indeed admirable in all respects. His employment of classic metres is singularly happy.… All that seems wanting … is a larger measure of lyrical faculty. His verses, admirable as they are in some respects, do not run easily."

Lee-Hamilton's poetry won increasingly warm reviews, in part because he began to discuss his pain more openly. Harvey T. Lyon, writing in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, explained: "His first book, Poems and Transcripts …, perhaps as unpromising a first book as any poet has ever brought out, was a collection of conventional verse, the product of the ordinary Oxonian. But by the appearance of his third book, The New Medusa he had emerged as a poet with a voice of his own, a voice that did not harmonize with his prose voice or personality." Lyon suggested the reason for this transformation: "Poetry gave substance and objectivity to unconscious motivations; it permitted him to impose the order of rhyme and meter on the nightmare world in which he found himself."

Indeed, much of Lee-Hamilton's later poetry speaks of his illness in increasingly bold ways. In "Introduction" from The New Medusa, for example, he writes: "The whole is prison work: the human shapes! Are such fantastic figures, one and all,! As with a rusty nail the captive scrapes! Upon his wall." Again, in Sonnets of the Wingless Hours he ponders: "And now my manhood goes where goes the song/Of captive birds, the cry of crippled things:/It goes where goes the day that unused dies." Critics agreed that these pained verses are among his best work. In a review of the poet's third volume, The New Medusa, George Saintsbury commented that "Lee-Hamilton has rendered the nightmarish atmosphere of the story excellently. His art is not quite perfect: there are lapses into the colloquial and bathetic here and there.… But this lack of application of the file is probably due in part to the author's physical trials." Other critics found Lee-Hamilton's work equally suggestive; in a review of Apollo and Marsyas, and Other Poems a critic for the Atheneum remarked, "The imagination at work in this poem is of so high an order that, had the execution been adequate, Mr. Lee-Hamilton's position among contemporary poets would have been clear and assured. The movement of the lines, however, lacks fluency.… Still, the poem has a merit which is in our day rare, the merit of business-like conciseness." Generally, critics found the poet's work intriguing because of the strange mood he evoked; that is, critics seemed to find his work intriguing because they found his pain intriguing.

Lee-Hamilton suffered-and created-in this way for twenty years. In 1894, however, with the success of Sonnets of the Wingless Hours and with the death of his detested stepfather Paget, Lee-Hamilton's illness gradually receded. As a contributor to the Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism explained: "This coincidental timing has led some commentators to presume that his illness was psychosomatic." Critics have debated the nature of Lee-Hamilton's illness, but they agree that when his illness went away, so did his poetic gift. As Lyon put it, "Pain had made him a poet; his health recovered, his career as a poet seemed ended."

Lee-Hamilton married Scottish novelist Annie E. Holdsworth in 1899, and they had a daughter in 1902. After the child's death in 1904, Lee-Hamilton began a new volume of poems, Mimma Bella; In Memory of a Little Life, but he died of a paralytic stroke before its completion. The uncommon nature of Lee-Hamilton's productivity, however, continued to invite speculation about the links between his poetry and his agony.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement Macmillan (London, England), 1912.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Volume 22, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

PERIODICALS

Colby Libra Quarterly III, February, 1954.

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, first quarter, 1957, Harvey T. Lyon, "A Publishing History of the Writings of Eugene Lee-Hamilton," pp. 141-159.*