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.^[6] He was an editor of the literary periodical Fords and Bridges at Oxford and became good friends with Keith Douglas.^[6] As a pacifist he did farm work during the war and when Douglas was killed in Normandy, Hall was named as his literary executor.^[7] 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.^[8] 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.^[9]

• The Summer Dance and Other Poems (John Lehmann, London 1951)
• The Burning Hare (Chatto & Windus / Hogarth Press 1966 )
• A House of Voices (Phoenix Living Poet Series, Chatto & Windus/Hogarth, 1973)
• Selected and New Poems 1939–84 (Secker & Warburg, 1986)
• Long Shadows (Shoestring 2003, repr. Faber & Faber 2010)

• Selected Poems (Keith Douglas, J.C. Hall, Norman Nicholson) (1943)
• Mavericks: An Anthology, (Howard Sergeant and Dannie Abse (eds), Editions Poetry and Poverty, London, 1957)

• Noel-Tod, Jeremy; Hamilton, Ian (2013). The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199640256.

• Landscape with Figure: World War II poet Keith Douglas – Hall was recorded for a BBC radio program on Keith Douglas