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John Keats
The page featuring John Keats in The Leigh Hunt Hair Book
The English Romantic poet John Keats was a close personal friend of Hunt’s, in addition to being a frequent contributor to Hunt’s periodical the Examiner. Keats apparently read the periodical as a student at Enfield School, and it was through the son of the school’s headmaster, his teacher Charles Cowden Clarke, that Keats eventually met Hunt (Roe 103). Hunt’s Examiner served as the venue for Keats’s first published poem, “To Solitude,” and the two met in person a few months later in the fall of 1816. By Hunt’s account, he and Keats “became intimate on the spot” (qtd. in Roe 270). Hunt facilitated Keats’s brief writing career in various ways, including Hunt’s roles as Keats’s friend, editor, and literary critic.
Hunt and Keats
Friendship and Influence: Socializing with the Hunt circle provided material for Keats’s poetry; furthermore, Keats and Hunt would engage in writing games of friendly competition by composing poems on the same subject. While Keats took immediately to Hunt, he was not so fond initially of Percy Bysshe Shelley, to whom Hunt had arranged an introduction. Put off by Hunt’s intimacy with Shelley, Keats drew closer to Benjamin Haydon, a painter and another friend within the Hunt Circle. Whether in earnest or motivated by his own jealousy, Haydon expressed worry “that Hunt’s florid ways would contaminate Keats’s style” (Holden 115). This concern echoes depictions from conservative periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review that portrayed Keats as a mere imitator of Hunt’s style and faulted the pair for presuming to strive for literary renown despite lacking knowledge of classical languages. While twentieth-century scholars such as Walter Jackson Bate and Aileen Ward took up such elitist assessments by assuming Hunt exerted a negative influence on Keats, such conclusions are no longer the dominant critical view of Hunt’s mentorship of his young friend (Tomko 287). Rather, starting with John Bayley’s 1962 reassessment, “the now discredited view that Keats wrote his finest poetry after escaping Hunt’s influence” has been roundly refuted (Holden 132).
Keats and Hunt's Periodicals
Hunt’s periodicals, the Examiner and the Indicator, served as publication venues for Keats’s poetry and also featured Hunt’s reviews of that poetry. In Hunt’s review in the Indicator for Keats’s poem “Lamia,” for instance, Hunt describes Keats as an “author [who] can pass to the most striking imaginations from the most delicate and airy fancy” (287). But Hunt’s praise is counterbalanced with constructive criticism: “When Mr Keats errs in his poetry, it is from the ill management of a good thing, –exuberance of ideas” (287). Later in the same piece, Hunt compares Keats favorably to both George Chapman and John Milton, concluding that “Mr Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets” (Hunt 305). In his earlier review of Keats’s first book of poetry in the Examiner, Hunt had positioned Keats as heir to the poetic revolution initiated by the Lake Poets, which had shifted poetic style from the artificial to the natural. While acknowledging Keats’s youthful inexperience, Hunt praises Keats for possessing a “sensitiveness of temperament” (122). Much later, after Keats’s death from tuberculosis, Hunt treats Keats in Imagination and Fancy as unrivaled among all English poets in crafting “the loveliest imagery and the most eloquent expressions” (109). Hunt’s literary criticism makes clear that he acknowledged the magnitude of Keats’s poetic talent.
For his part, Keats expresses a debt of gratitude to Hunt, exemplified in the dedication of his first book of poetry to Hunt. Keats’s dedicatory poem begins with a lament at the loss of “glory and loveliness” before shifting into a consolation:
“But there are left delights as high as these, /
And I shall ever bless my destiny, /
That in a time, when under pleasant trees /
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free /
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please /
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.”
Notes on Hunt's Dedication
While Keats ends on a note of self-deprecation, he also expresses the pleasure of pleasing Hunt, who was especially drawn to Keats’s short lyrics. After showing Keats his prized keepsake–a lock of Milton’s hair–Hunt suggested Keats pen a poem on the subject. The resulting poem, “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair” complements Hunt’s own poetry on the same topic. The occasion may have prompted Keats to share a lock of his own hair with Hunt as a token of their friendship.
When it became clear in 1820 that Keats had contracted tuberculosis, Hunt administered considerable care to his young friend. With full knowledge of the threat of contagion, Hunt took Keats into his home, where Hunt’s wife and children helped in the attempt to nurse Keats back to health. The effort proved futile as Keats’s condition worsened, but Hunt and Shelley did prevail upon Keats to travel to Italy in hopes that the warmer climate would spark a miraculous recovery. In a letter to Joseph Severn, a mutual friend who accompanied Keats on his journey to Italy to convalesce, Hunt continues to express care for Keats’s well-being, in addition to anticipatory grief at his likely passing. As it turns out, Keats had died before Hunt had penned this letter, but the news had not yet reached Hunt. The inclusion of Keats in Hunt’s hair book reflects both the bond of friendship between the men and Hunt’s high esteem for Keats’s poetry.
