The colloquial vocabulary, the familiar tone, and the expansion of thought into phrases and clauses where it would have gained by condensed expression, give to the Story of Rimini a prosaic and eccentric style. Yet Hunt declared he held in horror eccentricity and prosiness.[74]

In a discussion of the influence of Leigh Hunt upon the versification of his contemporaries and successors it is necessary to consider not only his theory but also the active part played by him as a conscious reviver of the older heroic couplet. In this reaction against the school of Pope, as also in the use of blank verse, he showed great independence in discarding approved models. The notes added to the Feast of the Poets in 1814, when it was republished from the Reflector of 1812, are important in this connection. They show a wide familiarity with modern poetry. He writes:

“The late Dr. Darwin, whose notion of poetical music, in common with that of Goldsmith and others, was of the school of Pope, though his taste was otherwise different, was perhaps the first, who by carrying it to the extreme pitch of sameness, and ringing it affectedly in one’s ears, gave the public at large a suspicion that there was something wrong in its nature. But of those who saw its deficiencies, part had the ambition without the taste or attention requisite for striking into a better path, and became eccentric in another extreme; while others, who saw the folly of both, were content to keep the beaten track and set a proper example to neither. By these appeals, however, the public ear has been excited to expect something better; and perhaps there was never a more favourable time than the present for an attempt to bring back the real harmonies of the English heroic, and to restore it to half the true principle of its music, variety. I am not here joining the cry of those, who affect to consider Pope as no poet at all. He is, I confess, in my judgment, at a good distance from Dryden, and at an immeasurable one from such men as Spenser and Milton; but if the author of the Rape of the Lock, of Eloisa to Abelard, and of the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady, is no poet, then are fancy and feeling no properties belonging to poetry. I am only considering his versification; and upon that point I do not hesitate to say, that I regard him, not only as no master of his art, but as a very indifferent practiser, and one whose reputation will grow less and less, in proportion as the lovers of poetry become intimate with his great predecessors, and with the principles of musical beauty in general.”[75]

The remarks on Pope close with the hope that the imitation of the best work of Dryden, Milton and Spenser “might lead the poets of the present age to that proper mixture of sweetness and strength—of modern finish and ancient variety—from which Pope and his rhyming facilities have so long withheld us.”[76] Hunt closes with an appeal for the return to Italian models, and says that Hayley, in his Triumphs of Temper was “the quickest of our late writers to point out the great superiority of the Italian school over the French.” He protests against the wide influence of Boileau.[77]

The Introduction to the Poetical Works of 1832 contains a concise and technical statement of Hunt’s theory of the heroic couplet. He argues that the triplet tends to condensation, three lines instead of four; that it carries onward the fervor of the poet’s feeling, delivering him from the ordinary laws of his verse, and that it expresses continuity. Of the bracket he says: “I confess I like the very bracket that marks out the triplet to the reader’s eye, and prepares him for the music of it. It has a look like the bridge of a lute.”[78] The use of the Alexandrine in the heroic couplet, he avers, gives variety and energy. Double rhymes are defended on historical grounds. For himself he claims credit as a restorer, not an innovator, and prophesies that the perfection of the heroic couplet is “to come about by a blending between the inharmonious freedom of our old poets in general ... and the regularity of Dryden himself.... If anyone could unite the vigor of Dryden with the ready and easy variety of pause in the works of the late Mr. Crabbe, and the lovely poetic consciousness in the Lamia of Keats ... he would be a perfect master of the rhyming couplet.” A study of the heroic couplet from Dryden to Shelley based on two hundred lines from each poet has yielded the results indicated in the table on the following page.

Professor Saintsbury says: “There is no doubt that his [Hunt’s] versification in Rimini (which may be described as Chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture of Dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music of the followers of Spenser, especially Browne and Wither) had a very strong influence both on Keats and on Shelley, and that it drew from them music much better than itself. This fluent, musical, many-colored-verse was a capital medium for tale telling.”[79] Professor Herford marks it as the “starting point of that free or Chaucerian treatment of the heroic couplet and of the colloquial style, eschewing epigram and full of familiar turns, which Shelley in Julian and Maddalo, and Keats in Lamia, made classical.”[82] Mr. R. B. Johnson calls it “a protest against the polished couplet of Pope—a protest already expressed to some extent in the Lyrical Ballads, but through Hunt’s influence, guiding the pens of Keats, Shelley and some of his noblest successors.”[83] Mr. A. J. Kent says that “No one-sided sentiment of reaction against our so-called Augustan literature disqualified Leigh Hunt from becoming, as he afterwards became, the greatest master since the days of Dryden of the heroic couplet.”[84] Leigh Hunt’s greatest mistake in the handling of the couplet has been clearly pointed out by Mr. Colvin, who says that he “blended the grave and the colloquial cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in either.”[85] The late Dr. Garnett said that the ease and variety of Dryden was restored by Hunt to English literature.[86] Monkhouse pointed out that Keats and Shelley, more than Hunt, reaped the rewards of his revivification of the heroic couplet. The diffuseness of the diction of the Story of Rimini results in a movement weaker than Dryden’s and less buoyant than Chaucer’s. Yet the verse is distinguished by a fluency and grace and melody that at times are very pleasing. It had a notable influence on English verse—an influence begun by others but strongly reinforced by Hunt. Further treatment of the influence of Hunt’s diction and versification upon Keats and Shelley is reserved for chapters II and III of the present study.

Dryden,
Absalom & Achitophel,
1682.		Wm. Chamberlayne,
Pharronida,
1689.		Alexander Pope,
Dunciad,
1727.		Leigh Hunt,[80]
Story of Rimini,
1816.		John Keats,
I stood tiptoe,
1817.		Keats,
Sleep and Poetry,
1817.		Keats,
Endymion,
1818.		Keats,[81]
Lamia,
1820.		Shelley,
Julian & Maddalo,
1819.
Run-on Couplets461132347542045
Run-on Lines167112264148443552
Triplets300200054
Alexandrines3012003120

Hunt’s next poetical work after Rimini was Foliage, published in 1818. It is a collection of original poems under the title Greenwoods, and of translations under the title Evergreens.[87] In the preface Hunt announces the main features to be a love of sociability, of the country, and of the “fine imagination of the Greeks.”[88] The first predilection runs the gamut from “sociability” to “domestic interest” and is the most fundamental characteristic of the author and of his writing. In the preface to One Hundred Romances of Real Life he declares sociability to be “the greatest of all interests.” It rarely failed to crop out when he was writing even on the gravest and most impersonal of subjects. In his intercourse with strangers, this same “sociability,” added to a natural kindliness and sympathy, caused a familiarity of bearing that was often misunderstood. The Nymphs, the longest poem of the volume, is founded on Greek mythology and is interesting in connection with Keats’s poems on classical subjects. Shelley said that the Nymphs was “truly poetical, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word. If 600 miles were not between us, I should say what pity that glib was not omitted, and that the poem is not so faultless as it is beautiful.”[89] In general Shelley overestimated Hunt’s poetry, though he saw some of its affectations. Shorter pieces were epistles to Byron, Moore, Hazlitt and Lamb—a kind of verse in which Hunt excelled, for his attitude and style were peculiarly adapted to the familiar tone permissible in such writing. Among Hunt’s best poems may be counted the sonnets to Shelley, Keats, Haydon, Raphael, and Kosciusko; those entitled the Grasshopper and the Cricket, To the Nile, On a Lock of Milton’s Hair, and the series on Hampstead. The suburban charms of Hampstead were very dear to Hunt and he never tired of celebrating them in poetry and in prose. No amount of derision from the Quarterly or Blackwood’s stopped him. The general characteristics of Foliage are much the same as those of the Story of Rimini. There are poor lines and good ones, never sustained power, and no poetry of a very high order. The subjects themselves are often unpoetical. Hunt obtrudes himself too frequently in a breezy, offhand manner. Byron’s opinion of the book was scathing:

“Of all the ineffable Centaurs that were ever begotten by self-love upon a Nightmare, I think ‘this monstrous Sagittary’ the most prodigious. He (Leigh H.) is an honest charlatan, who has persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures, and talks Punch in pure simplicity of heart, taking himself (as poor Fitzgerald said of himself in the Morning Post) for Vates in both senses and nonsenses of the word. Did you [Moore] look at the translations of his own which he prefers to Pope and Cowper, and says so?—Did you read his skimble-skamble about Wordsworth being at the head of his own profession, in the eyes of those who followed it? I thought that poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession; but be it one, is that ... at the head of your profession in your eyes?”[90]