| J. C. Hall | |
| Birth Name: | John Clive Hall |
| Birth Date: | 12 September 1920 |
| Birth Place: | Ealing, London |
| Death Place: | Tunbridge Wells, Kent |
| Occupation: | Poet |
| Language: | English |
| Nationality: | British |
| Alma Mater: | Oriel College, Oxford |
John Clive Hall (12 September 1920 – 14 October 2011) was an English poet and editor.
Hall's poetry was first published when he was aged seventeen in the anthology, The Best Poems of 1938.[1] He subsequently wrote and published a trickle of short poems over seven further decades. Not a modernist, he was included in Dannie Abse's 'reactionary anthology' Mavericks.[2] His work was admired by Philip Larkin who described it as, "just the sort of thing I should like to have done myself" and by W. H. Auden who wrote "in the poems of J. C. Hall we see a craftsmanship that yields to the reader constant pleasure and enjoyment. J. C. Hall should be better known."[3] A Trevor Tolley judged "his work has a carefulness that makes one ready to accept his small output as a mark of spiritual and poetic integrity".[4]
Born in Ealing, London and brought up in Tunbridge Wells,[5] Hall attended Leighton Park School and Oriel College, Oxford. He was an editor of the literary periodical Fords and Bridges at Oxford and became good friends with Keith Douglas. As a pacifist he did farm work during the war and when Douglas was killed in Normandy, Hall was named as his literary executor.[6] He worked at The London Magazine and at Stephen Spender's Encounter as an editor.[5] He edited the Collected Poems of Edwin Muir for Faber and Faber in 1952.[7] A group photographic portrait of Hall, with fellow poets Dannie Abse, David John Murray Wright, Anthony Cronin and John Smith is held by the National Portrait Gallery.[8]