Hunt was disappointed with Endymion and did not hesitate to say so. Keats writes to his brothers:
“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]
Much the same line of discussion is reported of the conversation at Haydon’s “immortal dinner,” December 28, 1817, when Keats and Lamb denounced Sir Isaac Newton and his demolition of the things of the imagination, Keats saying he “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.”[156] The pictorial features of the Eve of St. Agnes were particularly admired by Hunt, as one might be led to expect from the decorative detail of his own narrative poetry. The portrait of “Agnes” (sic for Madeline) is said to be “remarkable for its union of extreme richness and good taste” and “affords a striking specimen of the sudden and strong maturity of the author’s genius. When he wrote Endymion he could not have resisted doing too much. To the description before me, it would be a great injury either to add or to diminish. It falls at once gorgeously and delicately upon us, like the colours of the painted glass.” Of the description of the casement window, Hunt asks “Could all the pomp and graces of aristocracy with Titian’s and Raphael’s aid to boot, go beyond the rich religion of this picture, with its ‘twilight saints’ and its ‘scutcheons blushing with the blood of queens’?” Elsewhere he says that “Persian Kings would have filled a poet’s mouth with gold” for such poetry. Hunt calls Hyperion[157] “a fragment, a gigantic one, like a ruin in the desert, or the bones of the mastodon. It is truly of a piece with its subject, which is the downfall of the elder gods.” Later, in Imagination and Fancy, Hunt declared that Keats’s greatest poetry is to be found in Hyperion. His opinion of the whole is thus summed up:
“Mr. Keats’s versification sometimes reminds us of Milton in his blank verse, and sometimes of Chapman both in his blank verse and in his rhyme; but his faculties, essentially speaking, though partaking of the unearthly aspirations and abstract yearnings of both these poets, are altogether his own. They are ambitious, but less directly so. They are more social, and in the finer sense of the word, sensual, than either. They are more coloured by the modern philosophy of sympathy and natural justice. Endymion, with all its extraordinary powers, partook of the faults of youth, though the best ones; but the reader of Hyperion and these other stories would never guess that they were written at twenty.[158] The author’s versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and possessing in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can combine them. Mr. Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets.”[159]
The more important division of the literary relations of the two men is the direct influence of Hunt’s work upon that of Keats.
On Keats’s prose style Hunt’s influence was very slight and can be quickly dismissed. At one time Keats, affected perhaps by Hunt’s example, thought of becoming a theatrical critic. He did actually contribute four articles to The Champion. Keats’s favorite of Hunt’s essays, A Now, contains several passages composed by Keats. Mr. Forman considers that “the greater part of the paper is so much in the taste and humor of Keats” that he is justified in including it in his edition of Keats. He has also called attention to a passage in Keats’s letter to Haydon of April 10, 1818, which bears a striking likeness to Hunt’s occasional essay style: “The Hedges by this time are beginning to leaf—Cats are becoming more vociferous—Young Ladies who wear Watches are always looking at them. Women about forty-five think the Season very backward.”
The Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influences in spirit, diction and versification. There are epistles and sonnets in the manner of Hunt. I stood tiptoe upon a little hill opens the volume with a motto from the Story of Rimini. The Specimen of an Induction and Calidore so nearly approach Hunt’s work in manner, that they might easily be mistaken for it. Sleep and Poetry attacks French models as Hunt had previously done. The colloquial style of certain passages is significant of Hunt’s influence upon the poems. A few examples are: