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
"Leigh Hunt I showed my 1st book to--he allows it not much merit as a
whole; says it is unnatural and made ten objections to it in the mere
skimming over. He says the conversation is unnatural and too
high-flown for Brother and Sister--says it should be simple,
forgetting do ye mind that they are both overshadowed by a
supernatural Power, and of force could not speak like Francesca in
the _Rimini_. He must first prove that Caliban's poetry is unnatural.
This with me completely overturns his objections. The fact is he and
Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them
the affair officiously (sic); and from several hints I have had they
appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may
have made.--But who's afraid? Aye! Tom! Demme if I am."[152]
Leigh Hunt expressed himself thus in 1828: "_Endymion_, it must be allowed
was not a little calculated to perplex the critics. It was a wilderness of
sweets, but it was truly a wilderness; a domain of young, luxuriant,
uncompromising poetry."[153]
_La Belle Dame sans Merci_, which appeared first in _The Indicator_,[154]
was accompanied with an introduction by Hunt, who says that it was
suggested by Alain Chartier's poem of the same title and "that the union
of the imagination and the real is very striking throughout, particularly
in the dream. The wild gentleness of the rest of the thoughts and of the
music are alike old, and they are alike young." _The Indicator_ of August
2 and 9, 1820, contained a review of the volume of 1820. The part dealing
with philosophy in poetry is of more than passing interest:
"We wish that for the purpose of his story he had not appeared to
give in to the commonplace of supposing that Apollonius's sophistry
must always prevail, and that modern experiment has done a deadly
thing to poetry by discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air,
etc.; that is to say, that the knowledge of natural science and
physics, by showing us the nature of things, does away the
imaginations that once adorned them. This is a condescension to a
learned vulgarism, which so excellent a poet as Mr. Keats ought not
to have made. The world will always have fine poetry, so long as it
has events, passions, affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper
than this philosophy. There will be a poetry of the heart, as long as
there are tears and smiles: there will be a poetry of the
imagination, as long as the first causes of things remain a mystery.
A man who is no poet, may think he is none, as soon as he finds out
the first causes of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:--he
was none before."[155]