AGAINST OBLIVION: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets.

First edition, first printing. A copy previously belonging to Philip Larkin's long-term friend and lover, Maeve Brennan which then passed on to James Booth, former Professor of English at the University of Hull, and Larkin's editor and biographer, with his name in pencil to the half title. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Light toning to the page block owing to the poor quality paper stock. In the dustwrapper, fine except for a short scratch to the rear panel. Loosely laid in to this copy is a cutting of Sean O'Brien's Guardian review of the volume, a photocopy of another review by David Wheatley from The Sunday Tribune, and a pale blue ticket (stamped 11 May 2002) for The Donald Roy Theatre at the Gulbenkian Centre, University of Hull, for an unnamed production by the university's Department of Drama.

With a gift inscription in blue ink to the title page, "For Maeve, / with thanks for putting me up / (and putting up with me)!), / Love, Ben". We don't know who Ben is, but the recipient is Maeve Brennan (1929-2003, and not to be confused with the short story writer of the same name). Brennan, among the handful of women closely associated with Philip Larkin, was the closest thing to a 'muse' figure. They met in 1955 when Larkin left his job in Belfast to take up a job at the University of Hull Library where Brennan had been working since 1953. It wasn't until 1960, when Larkin helped Maeve prepare for a Library association exam, that the two became close. Their romance lasted eighteen years, the friendship lasting until the poet died in 1985. In her obituary of Brennan (Guardian, 19 June 2003) Jean Hartley writes of their relationship that "It was loving, playful, romantic, social and companionable. She was the one he felt he could marry, if only...". Hamilton's quirky late book, which includes a chapter on Larkin, published posthumously, was designed as a latter-day version of Samuel Johnson's great 'Lives of the English Poets'. Johnson had included fifty-two poets, only a handful of which are now remembered. Hamilton wrote these short essays on forty-five twentieth-century poets with the idea of such posthumous oblivion in mind. He leaves out Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Hardy, poets for whom "oblivion presents no threat" and whose voice voices can be heard through many of the poets who are included in the book. Chosen examples of each poet's work accompany Hamilton's text, the volume at once an informal introduction to and an anthology of twentieth-century poetry by one of the finest poetry critics of the century (and a fine poet in his own right).