Jeff Hamilton has taught a variety of courses over twenty years, from Twentieth Century Poetry and Advanced Poetry Writing to Writing One. He’s widely published as a poet, book critic, and scholar in American poetry studies.
Jeff Hamilton is a lecturer in English. Hamilton has taught a variety of courses at Washington University over twenty years, from Twentieth Century Poetry and Advanced Poetry Writing to Writing One. He’s widely published as a poet, book critic, and scholar in American poetry studies. His research interests are Robert Duncan, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and pastoral studies. He’s held appointments at The University of Iowa, Webster University, and Fontbonne University.
Teaching And Research Interests
Hamilton teaches upper level writing (particularly 311 Exposition and 312 Argumentation) in a way that rewards risk-taking in self-representation, and searches out the motives, or warrants, of intellectual inquiry. He enjoys classical rhetoric, and particularly encourages students to see the way that the kind of risk-taking most stylistically valued in writers who are widely admired occurs in seemingly negligible decisions of craft, the technical arts, or tropes, of exposition. A great believer in workshop, and in conferring, Hamilton welcomes providing students with close individual attention to their writing, and talking to them about how they can make the university work for them.
Hamilton’s poetry and criticism is available on line; an example of his scholarship can be found by going to the poet Robert Duncan’s Wikipedia page and scrolling down to the External Links. [C.f., http://jacketmagazine.com/26/dunc-hami.html] More recent work on Duncan can be found in an essay, “Robert Duncan’s Craft Exchanges: Doing Ground Work in the Pastoral,” forthcoming in Re-working the Ground: Essays on Robert Duncan’s Ground Work (St. Martins, 2111). Hamilton edited the 2001 re-printing of Laura Riding’s Though Gently, along with 12 essays by poets and scholars, an issue of the magazine he founded, Delmar 8. A current book project traces these two poets, as well as other writers, as exemplars of a Theocritean line in American Pastoral Studies