As a critic and editor, Ian Hamilton, who died on December 27th aged 63, was famously tough, unimpressionable, even brutal. But as a poet, he wrote with elegiac vulnerability of hands, hair, rose petals, lovers in darkened rooms.
In anyone else, this combination of hard and soft might have seemed contradictory. But with him it seemed perfectly natural. He was a Romantic, with high ambitions for a poetry of personal authenticity: Larkin, Keith Douglas and Robert Lowell were among those he especially admired. But most poetry, including his own, failed to pass muster, and he didn't hesitate to say so.
In 1988, gathering up the 50 short poems he had written since starting out (a decade later, there were still only 60), he remarked ruefully how so little of his life had got into the writing: "the raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love-affairs, the cash, the somehow getting-to-be-40, and so on - where does all that show itself?" Poets divide between the putters-in and the leavers-out, and Ian Hamilton was firmly the latter. But if the range was narrow, the voice was uniquely his - a voice (as he put it himself) "made musical by a kind of anguished incredulity, a refusal to believe that fathers die, that wives go mad, that love - however certain of itself - is not enough, not always".
Born in Norfolk and brought up in Darlington, Ian Hamilton went on to study English at Keble College, Oxford. It was in Oxford, at the age of 24, that he founded the Review, a poetry magazine that would become famous for its trenchancy.
Soon his influence was felt in London where he worked for the Times Literary Supplement as poetry and fiction editor (1965-'73), in the heyday of unsigned reviews: several of the more acidic notices were written by him. His first and only full collection of poems, The Visit, appeared in 1970. A Poetry Chronicle, a gathering of essays and reviews, followed shortly after.
To those in the know (and A. Alvarez and Clive James were among his admirers), he was now the "coming man" - equally talented as a poet and a critic. But when the Review folded after its tenth anniversary issue in 1972, it was unclear what he would do next.
The answer came two years later, in the shape of the New Review: a glossy literary monthly, backed by generous Arts Council funding, which as well as printing poems and reviews ran short stories, essays, interviews, photographs and a gossip column signed "Edward Pygge".
The New Review had its premises in Greek Street, in Soho, among strip clubs and massage parlours, and next door to a pub called the Pillars of Hercules which he treated as part of the office. By all accounts, he thrived in these louche surroundings, but his critical standards did not slacken. He stared people out, saw off bailiffs and debt collectors, and spoke from the side of his mouth, like a mafioso. Praise was unknown; the best hope was to avoid a withering putdown. As for paying contributors, he regarded it as a nasty habit.
That, at least, was his tough-guy reputation. In person he was shyer, gentler and more receptive than the legend suggests. The encouragement of young writers is clear from back issues of the magazine. Ian McEwan published several stories in the New Review. Sean O'Brien, Andrew Motion and Tom Paulin had early poems there. A memorable story called Annie, California Plates appeared, by an unknown called Jim Crace. Equally bold was a front cover featuring the artists David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj standing naked, at a time when it was unknown for a penis (let alone a pair of penises) to appear on the front of a mainstream cultural magazine.
Ian Hamilton was never much good with money, and keeping the New Review afloat took its toll. He did not complain, but by the end his hair was falling out from the stress - and he must have felt some relief when the Arts Council (whose literary advisory panel included several enemies of his) decided to cut off funding after 50 issues.
It was the last salaried job he had, and for the rest of his life he struggled to make a living. Reviews were one source of income, and for several years in the 1980s he presented the television programme Bookmark. But it was writing biography that chiefly kept him going.
No one could have anticipated how good a biographer he would make, but his first shot at it, his 1983 Life of Robert Lowell (who had been a friend), is a masterpiece. His next project, J.D. Salinger, was more problematic, since Salinger took legal steps to prevent publication: denied co-operation, access and the right to quote, Ian Hamilton (rather like Peter Ackroyd with his T.S. Eliot biography) brilliantly sidestepped the problems by making his frustrated "search" for Salinger part of the story, published in 1988.
The experience also fed into a later book, Keepers of the Flame (1992), which looks at the history of literary estates and at the efforts of over-zealous relations and widows to obstruct unofficial biographers.
To some, the appearance of his pair of books about Paul Gascoigne - Gazza Agonistes (1993) and Gazza Italia (1994) - must have come as a shock. But to those who knew of his passion for football, it was no more surprising than to find him bringing out yet another literary anthology - the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English (1994).
The story of Gascoigne - wonderful talents gone to waste - was one Ian Hamilton told again, albeit in a Victorian context, in his last biography, of Matthew Arnold (1998), whose real gift was for poetic self-expression, but who gave it up to become an educationalist and social reformer.
Many reviewers detected an autobiographical subtext here - had not Ian Hamilton, too, buried his lyric gifts all too soon? But it wasn't that he stopped writing poems, rather that he felt they could not - or should not - be forced. Certainly he never stopped taking poetry seriously. That seriousness, bordering on severity, is mentioned time and again by the friends (from Harold Pinter and Simon Gray to Dan Jacobson and Peter Porter) who contributed to a book of essays published on his 60th birthday.
The only oddity of that Festchrift is the absence of women among its contributors, for women were drawn to him no less than men were, and the New Review would not have appeared each month but for the female staff who looked after both the editing and the editor. Trouble with women was as much a part of his life as trouble with money, and both his marriages - first to Gisela Dietzel, with whom he had a son, then to the novelist Ahdaf Soueif, with whom he had two sons - ended in separation.
His is survived by partner, Patricia Wheatley, their son and daughter and three sons from his marriages.
(Robert) Ian Hamilton: born 1938; died, December 2001