In the Woold: Saskia Hamilton's Dutch Roots

Saskia Hamilton (1967–2023) was perhaps mostly known for her masterly edited letters of Robert Lowell, but she was first and foremost a poet in her own right. This essay traces how Hamilton both hid and revealed autobiographical details in her first three volumes, based on memories from the summers of her youth spent on a farm, the Woold, in the east of the Netherlands together with her Dutch grandparents, aunts, uncle, and cousins. It also discusses how the Dutch stories of her childhood poignantly merge with the realization of her untimely death in her last volume All Souls.