Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats
John Stuart Mill · en
Hunt, like Byron and Shelley, had curious ideas about the relation of the
sexes, ideas which Hazlitt said, were "always coming out like a rash."[47]
This "crotchet" was taken over likewise from Godwin, who thought it
checked the progress of the mind for one individual to be obliged to live
for a long period in conformity to the desires of another and therefore
disapproved of the marriage relation. But, like Godwin and Shelley, Hunt
bowed to the conventions. His life was a singularly pure one.
The influence of Hunt's poetry upon Keats and Shelley, in its general
romantic tendencies, particularly in respect to diction and metre,
deserves equal consideration with the influence of his politics upon
Shelley and Byron. _Juvenilia_, a volume of Hunt's poems collected by his
father and issued by subscription in 1801 contains original work and
translations which show wide reading for a boy of seventeen and some
fluency in versification. Otherwise the writer's own opinion in 1850 is
correct: "My work was a heap of imitations, all but absolutely
worthless.... I wrote 'odes' because Collins and Gray had written them,
'pastorals' because Pope had written them, 'blank verse' because Akenside
and Thomson had written blank verse, and a 'Palace of Pleasure' because
Spenser had written a 'Bower of Bliss.'"[48] Hunt's chief defect in taste,
that of introducing in the midst of highly poetical conceptions,
disagreeable physical conditions or symptoms, is as conspicuous in this
volume[49] as in his more mature work.
The _Feast of the Poets_, 1814,[50] is a light satire in the manner of Sir
John Suckling's _Session of the Poets_. It spares few poets since the days
of Milton and Dryden, and it includes in its revilings most of Hunt's
contemporaries. Gifford, the editor of the _Quarterly Review_, comes in
for the worst castigation. It is not remarkable that the satire
antagonized people on every side in the literary world as _The Examiner_
had done in the political. Hunt believed that "its offences, both of
commission and of omission, gave rise to some of the most inveterate
enmities" of his life.[51] It is important in the history to be discussed
in a later chapter of the literary feud which resulted in the creation of
the so-called Cockney School. Later revisions included some poets who had
been intentionally ignored at first in both poems and notes, or who, like
Shelley and Keats, naturally would not have been included in the 1814
edition; and it softened down the harsh criticism of those who were
unfortunate enough to have been included, except Gifford, whom Hunt could
never forgive. The irony is fresh and there are occasional spicy flashes
of wit. The narrative is clear and the characterization vivid. Byron
pronounced it "the best Session we have."[52]