Robert Gavin Hampson FEA FRSA (born 1948) is a British poet and academic. Hampson was born and raised in Liverpool, studied in London and Toronto and settled in London. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Royal Holloway. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria (2018-21) and Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies, University of London (2019-23). He is a member of the Poetics Research Centre and the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway. He is well known for his contributions to contemporary innovative poetry and the international study of Joseph Conrad.
Early life and education Robert Gavin Hampson was born in Liverpool in 1948. He won a Governors' Scholarship to attend Merchant Taylor's School, Crosby (1960-67).He subsequently studied English literature at King's College London between 1967 and 1970 and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete a master's degree at University of Toronto.Robert Hampson rhul.ac.uk With the award of a major State Studentship, he then returned to King's College, London, in 1971 where he completed a PhD on Joseph Conrad.
Poetry During the 1970s he co-edited the poetry magazine Alembic with two other graduates from King's College, Peter Barry (poet) and Ken Edwards, and was a key figure in the second generation of the British Poetry Revival. His poetry was published in Cid Corman's Origin, Alan Davies's 100 Posters, and in a range of other magazines during the 1970s. It was also included in the Arts Council's anthology, New Poetry 3 (1977). His work as one of the editors of Alembic has received attention in two books by Wolfgang Gortschacher - Little Magazine Profiles: The Little Magazines in Great Britain, 1939-1993 (University of Salzburg, 1993) and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (Poetry Salzburg, 2000)- and, more recently, in an interview (with Ken Edwards) by Sophie Seita in the magazine mimeo mimeo (2014). This has now been republished as 'transatlantic axis of alembic in Jacket2.jacket2.org/interviews/transatlantic-axis-alembic
His best-known work is probably his early long-poem, Seaport (Pushtika, 1995; Shearsman, 2008), composed during the 1970s, which has been written about by Peter Barry, Andrew Duncan, Amy Cutler, Neal Alexander and others. Barry's extended analysis of Seaport begins by noting its 'extensive use of "incorporated data" of various kinds', ranging from various literary sources (including works by Defoe, Melville, Hawthorne and Conrad) to 'historical accounts of the growth and development of the port, of the history of race relations in the city, newspaper accounts of local events and local guidebooks' (Contemporary British Poetry and the City, p.159). He concludes by describing this long poem as 'a large-scale vehicle of surprising flexibility which can accommodate the overtly political, the archival-historical and radically pared-down versions of poetry's more familiar affective modes' (Contemporary British Poetry and the City, p.162). Andrew Duncan similarly suggested that Seaport was 'a major work, where the recovery of pure facts without explanatory annotation allows the build up of a new understanding on the large scale' (The Council of Heresy, p. 29). Cutler argues that, in this work, Hampson 'shows the conflict between the different social typologies of space in the seaport'.Amy Cutler, 'Language Disembodied: The Coast and Forest in Modern British Poetry', Ph.D. Royal Holloway, University of London, 2017, p.166. Neal Alexander draws attention to the poem's demonstration of how 'multiple channels of traffic have shaped the port of Liverpool over time' - the cotton trade, the slave trade, Irish emigration.Neal Alexander, 'The Poetry of Ports' in Neal Alexander and David Cooper (eds), Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Postwar Poetry, Liverpool University Press, 2013, p.126. In the post 1939 section of the CUP English Literature in Context, John Brannigan describes Seaport as 'an important book for its extraordinary poetic account of the history and development of Liverpool'.John Brannigan, 'Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature, 1939-2015', in Paul Poplawski (ed.) English Literature in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2017, p.582. More recently, Phillip Jones has included discussion of Seaport in his 2018 Nottingham University PhD, 'Rewriting the Atlantic archipelago: Modern British poetry at the coast'.
Hampson's poetry has gone through various stages. The early work explored open-field poetics and what Peter Barry has called 'content-specific' poetics (in Seaport), but also treated text in How Nell Scored (1976) and 'on the trail' (1976). He subsequently explored self-conscious narrative and montage in his Godard-inspired film poems 'one plus one' (1980) and 'handy narratives' (1985); and a phrasal poetics (derived from Lyotard's 'The Differend' and his own critical engagement with the work of Adrian Clarke) in a human measure (1989) and unicorns: 7 studies in velocity (1989) - and subsequent volumes. This part of his career is represented in Assembled Fugitives (2001); some of the critical engagement with Clarke is evidenced in his essay 'Producing the Unknown' in New British poetries (1994); and Clarke, in turn, has discussed 'a human measure' and 'unicorns' in 'Robert Hampson and a Neo-Formalist Moment', his contribution to For Robert (2017), edited by Redell Olsen. More recent work by Hampson has been engaged in exploring the resources of the sonnet. His poetry has been translated into German, Italian and Rumanian. See, for example, Wolfgang Gortschacher & Ludwig Laher, So Also Ist Das: Eine Zweisprachige Anthologie Britischer Gegenswartslyrik (Haymon-Verlag, 2002), and the translation of the sequence 'Lou Mistrau' in the Italian journal Soglie (August 2014).
In 2012, his collection Reworked Disasters (knivesforksandspoons press) was long-listed for the Forward Prize. In his comprehensive study of the sonnet in English, The Sonnet (Oxford University Press, 2019), Stephen Regan discusses Reworked Disasters in relation to sonnets by Ken Edwards and Tony Lopez as examples of the contemporary avant-garde sonnet. He describes Hampson's 'serious political focus on global warfare, imperialism, and torture' in this 'linguistically discontinuous' fourteen-sonnet sequence. (The Sonnet, p. 382).Hampson's more recent work includes 'love's damage', which was published in the Surrey Poetry Festival Magazine (21.05.11), edited by Amy De'Ath and Jonty Tiplady;[static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/436447/12796874 The Sonnet] 'sonnets 4 sophie' first published in Veer Vier (September 2013),[epc.buffalo.edu/library/Veer-56-1014.pdf Veer] EPC resources while an explanation of colours was reviewed by Edmund Hardy and Melissa Flores-Borquez in Intercapillary SpaceIntercapillary Space . blogspot.co.uk and out of sight (crater, 2012) and Liverpool (hugs &) kisses, his 2014 collaboration with Robert Sheppard, are reviewed on the 'other room' website.http://otherroom.org/tag/roberthampson In their review of out of sight, the Institute of Electronic Crinolines referred to 'The artificial highs of Robert Hampson's noir on overload' and described the text as evoking 'a knowingly flimsy fantasy of what resistance to all forms of identification might be like'.[instituteofelectroniccrinolines.org Institute of Electronic Crinolines] More recently, he has contributed to Robert Sheppard's European Union of Imaginary Author's project through a collaboration with Sheppard. This collaboration is included in Robert Sheppard (ed.) Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (Shearsman, 2017).
His sequence 'Volupte: 22 Constructions for Ewald Matare' is included in the Spring 2021 issue of Long Poem Magazine, and the volume Covodes 1-19 was published in December 2021 by Artery editions.[mercurius.one/home/robert-hampson Poetry of Life by Robert Hampson] mercurius.one Some of the Covodes have been published in Molly Bloom[mollybloom23.weebly.com/robert-hampson.html Robert Hampson] mollybloom23.weebly.com and junction box,glasfrynproject.org.uk and a recording of a performance of some of the Covodes (with accompaniment by cellist Jo Levi) at the 2021 Surrey Poetry Festival is available at vimeo.com/556947245. A full recording of Covodes 1-19 and Levy's 'Suite for Solo Cello' is available at www.arteryeditions.bandcamp.com.In a review of recent poetry, Billy Mills (poet) has commented on Covodes: 'Hampson folds his multiple concerns into a single nexus with the multiple challenges that confront this ambition for equity that should underpin our society ... Against which we see the prevailing influence of money and power'. A selection from Covodes 1-19 (translated into Italian by Marzia Dati) was published in Soglie, XXII, 1-2 (April–August 2020), and an interview with Robert Hampson about Covodes 1-19 by Belinda Giannessi was published in the Tears in the Fence blog (http://tearsinthefence.com/blog). A selection from the second sequence of covodes, transmissions, has been published online by datableed. The critical response to this sequence concludes: 'At the heart of this second set of covodes is therefore a question of what constitutes a ‘public’. In its etymological origins, the Latin publicus could signify both ‘of the people’ or ‘of the state’ and ‘done for the state.’ Especially at time of crisis, political discourse likes to evoke a mythical ‘will of the people’ as a rhetorical device that serves to bolster and extend the reach of the ruling class. Hampson’s poems – which critique ‘reflected britishness’ as a ‘myth’ – is keenly attentive to such linguistic manipulations. What is stake in ‘variants of concern’ is therefore a detourning of what a ‘public voice’ can and should be: these poems are in search of a voice that might wrench the word ‘public’ away from the mouths of politicians so that it could be recovered something other than a wound or a social untruth.' https://www.datableed.co.uk/dossier/datableed-reads-robert-hampsons-covodes
In the 2024 'unfinishing' podcast, 'Publishing an unfinished poem (twice)', Hampson discusses (with Emily Anderson) finishing, unfinished, the unfinished and the finished unfinished in relation to his critical and creative practices: https://open.spotify.com/show/1ez2Ji4YEwBSm7uzpZ5nzC
Scholarship Poetry criticism and creative writing Hampson taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 1973, and was Professor of Modern Literature there from 2000. From 2016 to 2019, he was Distinguished Teaching and Research Fellow in the Department of English at Royal Holloway. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria (2018-21) and Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies, University of London (2019-23). He is currently Professor Emeritus at Royal Holloway, University of London.