Other poems belonging to this period are Hero and Leander and Bacchus and Ariadne in 1819, and a translation of Tasso’s Aminta in 1820. The first two show Hunt’s faculty for poetical narrative and description, and, in common with Keats, a partiality for classical subjects. The three are in no way radically different from the poems already considered.
The Literary Pocket Book which Hunt edited in 1820, 1821 and 1822, the New Monthly Magazine to which he began contributing in 1821, and the Literary Examiner, which he established in 1823, complete the enumeration of his writings during the period of his association with Byron, Shelley and Keats. Beyond the contributions of Shelley and Keats to the first and the reviews of Byron’s poems in the third, they are unimportant here.
CHAPTER II
Keats’s meeting with Hunt—Growth of their friendship—Haydon’s intervention—Keats’s residence with Hunt—His departure for Italy—Hunt’s Criticism of Keats’s poetry—His influence on the Poems of 1817.
It was about the year 1815 that Keats showed to his former school friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, the following sonnet, the first indication the latter had that Keats had written poetry:
“What though, for showing truth to flatter’d state,
Kind Hunt was shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit been as free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.
Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?
Think you he nought but prison walls did see,
Till, so unwilling thou unturn’dst the key?
Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate!
In Spenser’s halls he stray’d, and bowers fair,
Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew
With daring Milton through the fields of air:
To regions of his own his genius true
Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair
When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew?”
This admiration, expressed before Keats had met Hunt, was due to the influence of the Clarke family and to Keats’s acquaintance with The Examiner, which he saw regularly during his school days at Enfield and which he continued to borrow from Clarke during his medical apprenticeship. Clarke later showed to Leigh Hunt two or three of Keats’s poems. Of the reception of one of them (How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of Time) Clarke said:
“I could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions—written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem.”[91]