Ian Hamilton defined his poems with clarity in the Bulletin of the Poetry Book Society (Summer 1974) when he characterized them as "dramatic lyrics .... the intense climatic moment of a drama," adding that the reader must supply "the prose part ... the background data." This description links his poetry to the early poems of Ezra Pound, whose famous dictum is worth recalling in relation to Hamilton's practice: "To me the short so-called dramatic lyric--at any rate the sort of thing I do--is the poetic part of a drama the rest of which (to me the prose part) is left to the reader's imagination.... I catch the character I happen to be interested in at the moment he interests me, usually a moment of song, self-analysis, or sudden understanding or revelation. And the rest of the play would bore me and presumably the reader."

The son of Robert Tough and Daisy...