Leigh Hunt
born Oct. 19, 1784, Southgate, Middlesex,
Eng.
died Aug. 28, 1859, Putney, London
English essayist, critic, journalist, and
poet, who was an editor of influential journals
in an age when the periodical was at the height
of its power. He was also a friend and supporter
of the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John
Keats. Hunt’s poems, of which “Abou Ben Adhem”
and his rondeau “Jenny Kissed Me” (both first
published in 1838) are probably the best known,
reflect his knowledge of French and Italian
versification. His defense of Keats’s work in
the Examiner (June 1817) as “poetry for its own
sake” was an important anticipation of the views
of the Aesthetic movement.
Hunt, at his best, in some essays and his
Autobiography (1850; in part a rewriting of Lord
Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 1828), has
a distinctive charm. He excels in perceptive
judgments of his contemporaries, from Keats to
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. As a Radical journalist,
though not much interested in the details of
politics, he attacked oppression with
indignation.
The poems in Juvenilia (1801), his first
volume, show his love for Italian literature. He
looked to Italy for a “freer spirit of
versification” and translated a great deal of
Italian poetry, and in The Story of Rimini
(1816), published in the year of his meeting
with Keats, he reintroduced a freedom of
movement in English couplet verse lost in the
18th century. From him Keats derived his delight
in colour and imaginative sensual experience and
a first acquaintance with Italian poetry. Much
of Hunt’s best verse was published in Foliage
(1818) and Hero and Leander, and Bacchus and
Ariadne (1819).
In 1808 Leigh Hunt and his brother John had
launched the weekly Examiner, which advocated
abolition of the slave trade, Catholic
emancipation, and reform of Parliament and the
criminal law. For their attacks on the unpopular
prince regent, the brothers were imprisoned in
1813. Leigh Hunt, who continued to write The
Examiner in prison, was regarded as a martyr in
the cause of liberty. After his release (1815)
he moved to Hampstead, home of Keats, whom he
introduced in 1817 to Shelley, a friend since
1811. The Examiner supported the new Romantic
poets against attacks by Blackwood’s Magazine on
what it called “the Cockney school of poetry,”
supposedly led by Hunt.
In Hunt’s writings for the quarterly
Reflector (1810–11), politics was combined with
criticism of the theatre and of the fine arts,
of which he had considerable knowledge.
Imagination and Fancy (1844), his most sustained
critical work, draws interesting parallels
between painting and poetry. It was in the
weekly Indicator (1819–21) and The Companion
(1828), however, that Hunt published some of his
best essays. He continued to write for
periodicals until his death.
