He studied English literature at King's College London between 1967 and 1970 and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete a master's degree at University of Toronto.
[3] His best-known work is probably his early long-poem, Seaport (Pushtika, 1995; Shearsman, 2008), composed during the 1970s, which has been written about by Peter Barry, Andrew Duncan, Amy Cutler, Neal Alexander and others.
Barry's extended analysis of Seaport begins by noting its 'extensive use of "incorporated data" of various kinds', ranging from various literary sources (including works by Defoe, Melville, Hawthorne and Conrad) to 'historical accounts of the growth and development of the port, of the history of race relations in the city, newspaper accounts of local events and local guidebooks' (Contemporary British Poetry and the City, p.159).
Andrew Duncan similarly suggested that Seaport was 'a major work, where the recovery of pure facts without explanatory annotation allows the build up of a new understanding on the large scale' (The Council of Heresy, p. 29).
[5] In the post 1939 section of the CUP English Literature in Context, John Brannigan describes Seaport as 'an important book for its extraordinary poetic account of the history and development of Liverpool'.
[6] More recently, Phillip Jones has included discussion of Seaport in his 2018 Nottingham University PhD, 'Rewriting the Atlantic archipelago: Modern British poetry at the coast'.
See, for example, Wolfgang Gortschacher & Ludwig Laher, So Also Ist Das: Eine Zweisprachige Anthologie Britischer Gegenswartslyrik (Haymon-Verlag, 2002), and the translation of the sequence 'Lou Mistrau' in the Italian journal Soglie (August 2014).
(The Sonnet, p. 382).Hampson's more recent work includes 'love's damage', which was published in the Surrey Poetry Festival Magazine (21.05.11), edited by Amy De'Ath and Jonty Tiplady;[7] 'sonnets 4 sophie' first published in Veer Vier (September 2013),[8] while an explanation of colours was reviewed by Edmund Hardy and Melissa Flores-Borquez in Intercapillary Space[9] and out of sight (crater, 2012) and Liverpool (hugs &) kisses, his 2014 collaboration with Robert Sheppard, are reviewed on the 'other room' website.
[10] In their review of out of sight, the Institute of Electronic Crinolines referred to 'The artificial highs of Robert Hampson's noir on overload' and described the text as evoking 'a knowingly flimsy fantasy of what resistance to all forms of identification might be like'.
His sequence 'Volupte: 22 Constructions for Ewald Matare' is included in the Spring 2021 issue of Long Poem Magazine,[12] and the volume Covodes 1-19 was published in December 2021 by Artery editions.
[20] In their essay for The Year's Work in English Studies, K. O'Hanlon describes Clasp as 'essential reading for anyone interested in getting to grips with post-war poetry and the avant garde'.
Graduates of the creative writing programme whom he taught include the novelists Tahmima Anam, Adam O'Riordan, Anna Whitwham and Sarah Perry and the poets Robert Selby and Declan Ryan.
He recently co-edited pertinent actions (Osmosis Press, 2023) with Briony Hughes, an anthology of work by alumni of the Poetic Practice programme (with a Foreword by Marjorie Perloff).
[30] He has also made a significant contribution to innovative poetry in London as the organiser of events and conferences and as the convenor and curator of two important seminar series.
In the 1970s he organised a short reading series, Future Events, at The White Swan in Covent Garden with Ken Edwards and Mike Dobbie.
At the end of the 1970s, he and Erik Vonna-Michel organised three one-day 'Saturday Courses' at Lower Green Farm: Bob Cobbing, Allen Fisher and Eric Mottram were the subjects of the different days.
It was superseded by the Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar, which he runs with Amy Evans Bauer at the University of London Institute for English Studies.
[10] In 2017, on the occasion of his retirement from full-time teaching, Redell Olsen edited For Robert: An Anthology (RHUL Poetics Research Centre / The Institute of the Electric Crinolines).
He also edited various Conrad texts – Lord Jim (1986), Victory (1989), Heart of Darkness (1995) – for Penguin books, as well as Rudyard Kipling's Something of Myself (1987) and Soldiers Three/ In Black & White (1993) and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (2000).
[37] He co-edited (with Helen Chambers) Guy de Maupassant's Mademoiselle Perle and other stories (riverrun, 2020), a selection from the translations made by Elsie Martindale and Ada Galsworthy, which were first published in 1903 and 1904 respectively.
He was a member of the QAA Benchmarking Group for Creative Writing and is currently a member of the Practice Research Advisory Group;[40] the Out of Practice Collective based at the IES; the European Science Foundation Panel of Experts; the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission Advisory Committee; and the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Research Foundation, Flanders).. His first wife was the Bengali children's writer Sibani Raychaudhuri.