Through Hunt, Keats was introduced to a circle of literary men whose companionship was an important factor in his development, notably Haydon, Godwin, Hazlitt, Shelley, Vincent Novello, Horace Smith, Cornelius Webbe, Basil Montagu, the Olliers, Barry Cornwall, and later Wordsworth.
For about a year following the meeting of the two, Hunt undoubtedly exerted the strongest influence of any living man over the young poet. Severn said that Keats’s introduction to Hunt wrought a great change in him and “intoxicated him with an excess of enthusiasm which kept by him four or five years.”[102] Mr. Forman says that “Charles Cowden Clarke, as his early mentor, Leigh Hunt and Haydon as his most powerful encouragers at the important epoch of adolescence, must be credited with much of the active influence that took Keats out of the path to a medical practitioner’s life, and set his feet in the devious paths of literature.”[103] Keats’s interest in his profession had decreased as his knowledge and love of poetry grew. With the publication of his Poems in 1817, and his retirement in April of that year from London to the Isle of Wight “to be alone and improve” himself and to continue Endymion, his decision was finally made in favor of a literary life. Hunt’s aid at this time took the practical form of publishing Keats’s poems in The Examiner and of drawing the attention of the public to them by comments and reviews. Whether he ever paid Keats for any of his contributions to his periodicals is not known.[104] Through the influence of Hunt the Ollier brothers were induced to undertake the publication of Keats’s first volume of poems. It is dedicated to Leigh Hunt in the sonnet Glory and loveliness have passed away. The sestet refers directly to him:
“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.”[105]
Hunt replied in the sonnet To John Keats, quoted here in full because of its inacessibility:
“’Tis well you think me truly one of those,
Whose sense discerns the loveliness of things;
For surely as I feel the bird that sings
Behind the leaves, or dawn as it up grows,
Or the rich bee rejoicing as he goes,
Or the glad issue of emerging springs,
Or overhead the glide of a dove’s wings,
Or turf, or trees, or midst of all, repose.
And surely as I feel things lovelier still,
The human look, and the harmonious form
Containing woman, and the smile in ill,
And such a heart as Charles’s wise and warm,—
As surely as all this, I see ev’n now,
Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow.”[106]
In 1820, Hunt dedicated his translation of Tasso’s Aminta to Keats.
In spite of a eulogistic article by Hunt running in The Examiners of June 1, July 6 and 13, 1817, and other notices in some of the provincial papers, the Poems sold not very well at first, and later, not at all.[107] Praise from the editor of The Examiner, although offered with the kindest intentions in the world, was about the worst thing that could possibly have happened to Keats, for, politically and poetically, Leigh Hunt was most unpopular at this time;[108] and it was noised abroad that Keats too was a radical in politics and in religion, a disciple of the apostate in his attack on the established and accepted creed of poetry. As a matter of fact, Keats’s interest in politics decreased as his knowledge of poetry increased, although, “as a party-badge and sign of ultra-liberalism,” he, like Hunt, Byron and Shelley continued to wear the soft turn-down collars in contrast to the stiff collars and enormous cravats of the time.[109] In religion Keats vented his dislike of sect and creed on the Kirk of Scotland, as Hunt had on the Methodists. His “simply-sensuous Beauty-worship” Palgrave attributes to the “moral laxity” of Hunt.[110] Unless Palgrave, like Haydon, refers to Hunt’s unorthodoxy in matters of church and state, it is difficult to understand on what evidence he bases this statement; in the first place, a charge of moral laxity is not borne out by the recorded facts of Hunt’s life, but only by such untrustworthy tradition as still lingers in the public mind from the Cockney School articles of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly. Carlyle said that he was of “most exemplary private deportment.”[111] Byron, Shelley and Lamb testified to his virtuous life. In the second place, a close comparison of the works of the two now leads one to conclude that “simply-sensuous Beauty-worship” existed to a much higher degree in Keats than in Hunt, and that so strong an innate tendency would have developed without outward stimulus from any one. While both men sought the good and worshipped the beautiful, Keats, unlike Hunt, recognized somewhat “the burthen and the mystery” of human life.
Keats, during his stay in the Isle of Wight and a visit to Oxford with Bailey in the spring and summer of 1817, worked on Endymion, finishing it in the fall. The letters exchanged between him and Hunt during his absence were friendly, but a feeling of coolness began before his return. In a letter from Margate May 10, 1817, there is a curiously obscure reference to the Nymphs:
“How have you got on among them? How are the Nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance. Where are you now?—in Judea, Cappadocia, or the parts of Lybia about Cyrene? Stranger from ‘Heaven, Hues, and Prototypes’ I wager you have given several new turns to the old saying, ‘Now the maid was fair and pleasant to look on,’ as well as made a little variation in ‘Once upon a time.’ Perhaps, too, you have rather varied, ‘Here endeth the first lesson.’ Thus I hope you have made a horseshoe business of ‘unsuperfluous life,’ ‘faint bowers’ and fibrous roots.”[112]
A letter written by Haydon to Keats, dated May 11, 1817, warned Keats against Hunt, and, with others of its kind, was possibly the insidious beginning of the coolness which followed: “Beware, for God’s sake of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own neglect of character.”[113] A letter in reply from Keats, written the day after he wrote the passage about the Nymphs, accounts for its dissembling tone: