Alfred Starr Hamilton: Creative genius or cranky crackpot?

The rediscovery of letters to police from New Jersey poet Alfred Starr Hamilton has piqued new interest in his work—yet no one can seem to decide what to think of it. Though compared to literary giants, it’s unclear whether Hamilton, who died in 2005 at the age of 90, was a madman, a master poet, a creative con artist, or all of the above.

From the NYT:

In the early 1960s, Hamilton began sending off thousands of poems to Epoch, a literary magazine at Cornell University. Three books followed, along with a measure of acclaim for the unaffected splash of plain words, the blend of the commonplace and the surreal, and the artistic persona — a solitary man, not playing to academic fashion, churning out poetry on an old Underwood typewriter on Sphinx typing paper. It didn’t hurt that he was said to be proud he had been dishonorably discharged from the military, or that he had hitchhiked through 43 states. Viewed as a rebel before his time, he was arrested and fined $25 in 1961 for protesting an air-raid drill in Montclair.

“We are living in the Badlands. Dorothy’s ruby-slippers would get you across the Deadly Desert. So will these poems,” wrote Jonathan Williams , a poet and publisher, whose influential Jargon Society published “The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton” in 1970. Williams called him “an ‘original’ poet, tuned in like Blake or Dickinson.”