The influence of Hunt’s poetry upon Keats and Shelley, in its general romantic tendencies, particularly in respect to diction and metre, deserves equal consideration with the influence of his politics upon Shelley and Byron. Juvenilia, a volume of Hunt’s poems collected by his father and issued by subscription in 1801 contains original work and translations which show wide reading for a boy of seventeen and some fluency in versification. Otherwise the writer’s own opinion in 1850 is correct: “My work was a heap of imitations, all but absolutely worthless.... I wrote ‘odes’ because Collins and Gray had written them, ‘pastorals’ because Pope had written them, ‘blank verse’ because Akenside and Thomson had written blank verse, and a ‘Palace of Pleasure’ because Spenser had written a ‘Bower of Bliss.’”[48] Hunt’s chief defect in taste, that of introducing in the midst of highly poetical conceptions, disagreeable physical conditions or symptoms, is as conspicuous in this volume[49] as in his more mature work.
The Feast of the Poets, 1814,[50] is a light satire in the manner of Sir John Suckling’s Session of the Poets. It spares few poets since the days of Milton and Dryden, and it includes in its revilings most of Hunt’s contemporaries. Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, comes in for the worst castigation. It is not remarkable that the satire antagonized people on every side in the literary world as The Examiner had done in the political. Hunt believed that “its offences, both of commission and of omission, gave rise to some of the most inveterate enmities” of his life.[51] It is important in the history to be discussed in a later chapter of the literary feud which resulted in the creation of the so-called Cockney School. Later revisions included some poets who had been intentionally ignored at first in both poems and notes, or who, like Shelley and Keats, naturally would not have been included in the 1814 edition; and it softened down the harsh criticism of those who were unfortunate enough to have been included, except Gifford, whom Hunt could never forgive. The irony is fresh and there are occasional spicy flashes of wit. The narrative is clear and the characterization vivid. Byron pronounced it “the best Session we have.”[52]
The Descent of Liberty,[53] 1815, is a masque celebrating the triumph of Liberty, in the person of the Allies, over the Enchanter, Napoleon. There is little plot or human interest; the natural, the supernatural, and the mythical are confusedly interwoven. The pictorial effect, however, is one of great richness and color, and some of the songs and passages have fine lyrical feeling and melody. It is interesting in this connection to note a vague general resemblance between the Descent of Liberty and Shelley’s Queen Mab (1812-13) in the worship of Liberty, in the hope and promise of her ultimate triumph, and in the wild imagination which Hunt probably never again equalled. It is not likely, however, that Hunt knew Shelley’s poem at the time he was writing his own.
The Story of Rimini, produced in 1816 and dedicated to Lord Byron, is the most important of Hunt’s works in a consideration of his relations with the enemies of the Cockney School[54] and with Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Byron criticised it severely. Shelley thought it carried uncommon and irresistible interest with it, but he agreed with Byron in thinking that the style had fettered Hunt’s genius.[55] Keats wrote a sonnet[56] on Rimini in 1817, and in his own works shows unmistakably the influence of Hunt’s poem in diction and versification.
The story is founded, of course, on the Francesca episode in the fifth canto of the Inferno of Dante. It was a dangerous thing for Hunt to undertake an elaboration of the marvelous episode of Dante. Had he been a man of greater genius it would have been a risk; as it was, he produced a diffuse and sentimental narrative which bears little resemblance to the singular perfection of the original. On the other hand, the Story of Rimini does possess indubitable merits: directness of narrative, minute observation, sensuous richness of pictorial description, and occasional delicate felicity of language.[57] Byron wrote of the third canto which he saw in manuscript:
“You have excelled yourself—if not all your contemporaries—in the canto which I have just finished. I think it above the former books; but that is as it should be; it rises with the subject, the conception seems to me perfect, and the execution perhaps as nearly so as verse will admit. There is more originality than I recollect to have seen elsewhere within the same compass, and frequent and great happiness of expression.” The faults he said were “occasional quaintnesses and obscurity, and a kind of harsh and yet colloquial compounding of epithets, as if to avoid saying common things in a common way.”[58]
October 30, 1815, in reply to these objections Hunt sent forth this defense: “we accomodate ourselves to certain habitual, sophisticated phrases of written language, and thus take away from real feeling of any sort the only language it ever actually uses, which is the spoken language.” At the same time he made a few alterations at Byron’s suggestion.[59] And again the latter wrote: “You have two excellent points in that poem—originality and Italianism.”[60] After the Story of Rimini appeared he wrote to Moore: “Leigh Hunt’s poem is a devilish good one—quaint, here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test.”[61] In 1818 Byron’s opinion had changed somewhat:
“When I saw Rimini in Ms., I told him I deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was, that his style was a system, or upon system, or some other such cant; and when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless; so I said no more to him, and very little to anyone else. He believed his trash of vulgar phrases tortured into compound barbarisms to be old English[62] ... Hunt, who had powers to make the Story of Rimini as perfect as a fable of Dryden, has thought fit to sacrifice his genius to some unintelligible notion of Wordsworth, which I defy him to explain.[63]... A friend of mine calls ‘Rimini’ Nimini Pimini; and ‘Foliage’ Follyage. Perhaps he had a tumble in ‘climbing trees in the Hesperides’! But Rimini has a great deal of merit. There never were so many fine things spoiled as in ‘Rimini.’”[64]
Hunt had a distinct theory of language based on a few crude principles. As his practical application of them had its effect upon Keats, a somewhat full consideration of them is desirable here. The first and most conspicuous one, promoted by what Hunt called “an idiomatic spirit in verse,”[65] was a preference for colloquial words.[66] He mistook for grace and fluency of diction, a turn of phrase that was without poetic connection and often in very poor taste. In dialogue, particularly, the effect is undignified. This professed doctrine was a fuller development[67] of the statement in the Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798: in Hunt’s opinion, Wordsworth failed to consider duly meter in its essential relations to poetry, and while Hunt himself desired a “return to nature and a natural style” he thought that Wordsworth had substituted puerility for simplicity and affectation for nature. Hunt’s acknowledged model for the poem was Dryden,[68] but Hunt’s colloquial phrasing, peculiar diction, elision,[69] and loose expansion approach much more closely to Chamberlayne’s Pharronida (1689) than to anything in Dryden.[70] The following extract is one of many that might be cited as suggestive of Hunt’s Story of Rimini:
“To his cold clammy lips
Joining her balmy twins, she from them sips
So much of death’s oppressing dews, that, by
That touch revived, his soul, though winged to fly
Her ruined seat, takes time to breathe
These sad notes forth: “farewell, my dear, beneath
My fainting spirits sink.”[71]