Hamilton - Sligo Poets

The last time John Arthur Hamilton's poetry appeared in a Sligo newspaper was in the Sligo Times in 1912. The family appears to have left Sligo in 1914 and settled in his father's native Scotland.

He may have contributed poetry to newspapers in Scotland in the meantime but I have found no trace of it. He appears to have been aroused from his poetic slumber in 1915 by the continuing calls for more enlistment and by the perception that Ireland, and in particular the west, had not contributed a fair share.

His recruiting poem differs from most of that type by ignoring the usual reasons for enlisting, German brutality, defence of Belgium, defence of the homeland, and instead stresses the duty of the time expressed in abstract terms. Doing what's right is more important at this time than the pursuit of the coincidentally rhyming leisure and pleasure.

Hamilton's other poem doesn't seem to have anything to do with the war. It celebrates, in language which is stilted and full of stock "poetic" phrases, the return to home, England, after months roving free on the sea.

There is little evidence in these two poems of any improvement or development in Hamilton's writing since his days in Sligo and little to suggest that he had been writing much in the interim.

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