Leigh Hunt

In July 1822 three youthful idealists met in the city of Pisa to plan a new literary endeavour. The result of their efforts, The "Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South", would run for only four issues and has generally been marginalised in the histories of literature and politics. Yet the authors have not: Leigh Hunt, editor of radical newspaper "The Examiner", was joined by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Hunt compared the circle to the three Roman potentates who carved up the empire between them; George Croly, writing in the Tory "Blackwood’s Magazine", made the same analogy to a very different purpose.
The aftermath of the meeting is perhaps better remembered than the journal itself: Shelley’s drowning on his departure from nearby Livorno. Despite a deteriorating personal relationship, Hunt and Byron persevered, more out of a mutual respect for Shelley than for one another. The first issue, in October 1822, was met with a level of withering criticism that, with hindsight, appears quite out of proportion to the influence of the journal itself. Yet the nature of those attacks reveals concerns surrounding the perceived connections between political reform, religious orthodoxy and personal morality.

This article unravels an apparent paradox: an imitation of John Pomfret’s 1699 poem of the same title, Leigh Hunt’s 1823 “The Choice” appears in a reformist journal but embodies a retirement poem, the retirement mode typically viewed as quietist or reactionary in its politics. Grasping Hunt’s goals in turning to the retirement mode requires recognizing the upsurge of lower-middle-class interest in such poetry after 1790, an increase reflecting a new concept of retirement among city-bound readers barred from the rural estates celebrated in such poems: retirement as the reading or writing of retirement poetry. Once retirement poetry internalized the ideal-real contrasts central to its urban, middle-class reception, such verse acquired a reformist function that attracted Hunt. Such poems highlighted the trammels of Cockney life and, through their foregrounding of the unreality of rural retirement, invited utopian speculation. The association of Hunt’s poem with Pomfret also amplified its reformist resonances: not only a favorite of middle-class professionals reading to escape daily cares, Pomfret’s ubiquity in canon-making anthologies, in an era when taste and politics were fused, represented a challenge to elite literary-political judgment. Reprinted in the Routledge Historical Resources: Romanticism module (forthcoming 2021).

George Eliot’s dialogue with Romanticism is an especially significant, albeit not unproblematic, aspect of her work. In examining the importance of memory in her writings, and her organic view of society, Newton (1981) defined Eliot a “Romantic humanist”, suggesting that she embraced the philosophical humanism of the early nineteenth century without its metaphysical views and aesthetic egotism. Eliot’s letters amply document her reading of English and European Romantic writers, and critics have especially traced the influence of William Wordsworth and George Gordon Byron in The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch (Dramin 1998; Wilkes 2013; Kei 2015). Her response to Percy Bysshe Shelley, instead, has only marginally been explored. Yet in Middlemarch she makes explicit reference to the poet twice. Mr. Brooke defines Ladislaw as “a kind of Shelley”, “a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley” (Eliot 2003, 359; 499). The article investigates Eliot’s dialogue with Shelley with a focus on the political and reformist aspect of her writings. To this end, I shall firstly focus on biographical evidence, discussing the role of G. H. Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt – co-editors of the radical paper The Leader in the 1850s – as possible mediators. Subsequently, I shall examine Shelley’s influence on Eliot with a focus on Ladislaw’s and Dorothea’s socialist and utopian views in Middlemarch.

Having lived for quite a few months next to Byron and Shelley, the Irish poet and translator John Taaffe was what Max Brod was to Kafka, a minor figure condemned to irrelevance by his standing next to a genius. His 1822 commentary on the first eight cantos of Dante’s Inferno is half-forgotten now. This paper briefly chronicles its birth and early success, based on poorly-known (Taaffe’s autobiography) or yet-unpublished documents (a letter by Leigh Hunt). Taaffe rises to the challenge thrown down by Ugo Foscolo to Dante scholars, i.r. finding a new historical and poetical method of commenting the Comedy ; in turn it is the 1822 commentary that led Foscolo to reflect on the level of validation of basic evidence in connection with the chronology of Dante’s life and works.

Le schede bio-bibliografiche della banca dati Dante in Inghilterra sulla piattaforma Dislocazioni Transnazionali nascono dal lavoro congiunto di un gruppo di ricerca che in occasione di un Progetto di Ricerca di Ateneo finanziato dal Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica dell'Università di Pisa (2015), ha indagato le influenze della produzione dantesca sugli scrittori romantici inglesi.
Nate come ausilio sintetico per orientarsi in un mondo fitto di dati, date e personaggi talvolta poco noti, le schede mettono in luce i rapporti che singoli autori ebbero con la Commedia, e in senso lato con la tradizione letteraria italiana.

Tra i saggisti romantici più celebri, Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) e William Hazlitt (1778- 1830) visitarono entrambi la Toscana negli anni Venti dell’Ottocento. Hunt, legato alla cerchia degli Shelley, si stabilì in Italia in maniera continuativa (1821-25), mentre Hazlitt prese piuttosto parte a quella cruciale pratica socio-culturale che va sotto il nome di Grand Tour, organizzando un viaggio a tappe tra la Francia e l’Italia (sett. 1824 – ott. 1825) in cui chiaramente non poteva mancare una cospicua sezione toscana.
Il confronto tra queste due esperienze è molto interessante non solo per la quantità di dettagli che da esse si possono apprendere, ma anche per riflettere su come l’Ottocento stesse modificando sensibilmente il paradigma settecentesco del viaggio.
Lo scopo del mio intervento è di confrontare, dove possibile, le due esperienze di viaggio, seguendo quanto i due scrittori decisero di mettere per iscritto, rispettivamente nelle Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1826) e nella Autobiography (1850). Si vorrà sottolineare quanto il resoconto di Hunt, figlio di un impulso memorialistico, differisca significativamente dall’esperienza registrata da Hazlitt, che scaturisce piuttosto da una pratica odeporica sin da principio intesa come collezione di illuminazioni interrelate. Nello specifico, laddove Hunt cercò di intessere un racconto che unisse alle impressioni del luogo anche la storia dei suoi famosi compagni di viaggio, Hazlitt fu più incline a registrare momenti di estatica partecipazione all’esperienza locale, in maniera analoga ai famosi “spots of time” che Wordsworth, aprendo la strada all’esperienza epifanica moderna, ebbe cura di collezionare nel suo poema autobiografico The Prelude.

This paper explores the themes of sickness and healing. Firstly, the relationship between protagonist and landscape in Keats’ ballad, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, is examined. For both Keats and Hunt landscape is associated with a beautiful woman whom the poet finds beguiling. In Keats’ poem, possibly drawing on his knowledge of Hampstead, this association leads to sickness, while for Hunt, on the other hand, Hampstead was a place of potential healing during his incarceration in Surrey Jail. Hunt’s actual address was the ‘Vale of Health’, a place of conviviality for Hunt and his circle. Secondly, Hunt’s 1814-15 sonnet sequence, composed when he was in jail and after his release back to Hampstead, personifies the setting as a woman, but in this instance one who is welcoming and health-giving. Finally, the two poets’ use of the ballad and the sonnet will be further compared and contrasted to demonstrate how the poets create characteristic moods and tones.

31 October 2014 at the KEATS-SHELLEY HOUSE, Rome
An Academic Seminar organized by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and the Keats Foundation, and supported by the British School at Rome.

“I Must Tell a Tale of Chivalry”: Keats’s Early Reading of Spenser in
‘Specimen of an Introduction to a Poem’

‘Specimen of an Induction to a Poem’ reveals all the immaturity
of Keats’s approach to romance in the “eerie proximity to…technical failure”
its style presents by this early stage of poetic development (Barnard 1987: 17).
At the root of such un-ripeness lies Keats’s deliberate partiality to mere poetic
enchantment, particularly evident in his love of Spenserian bowers of bliss. By
focusing on the poem’s formal arrangement as an incipit to Keats’s later
narrative quests, this paper means to reconsider the poet’s “anxiety of origins”
and his complex commitment to a traditional and native line of poetic descent,
chiefly led by Edmund Spenser. Considered from this angle, the poem
represents a fundamental step in Keats’s gradual recognition of the bower’s
regressive drives, and reveals the poet’s partiality to the pleasure principle in
art as a “defence against the onset of the doubts and miseries…of which he
had a clear presentment” (Murry 1955: 180-181). Besides laying the
foundations for Keats’s sustained engagement with the mode of romance, the
form of the induction determines moreover the poem’s technical success: its
self-contained formula in fact does not bind Keats to the narrative exigencies
of plot development which the poet was evidently not ready to face by the
time he wrote the poem.

«On Reading Paolo and Francesca: the Dreams of Keats, Hunt and Pellico»

This paper investigates three rewritings of the famous episode in the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno: The Story of Rimini by Leigh Hunt (1816), A Dream, After Reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca by John Keats (1819) and Francesca da Rimini by Silvio Pellico (1816). I consider the texts taken into exam as examples of Romantic ‘creative criticism’, of a kind of reading in which the Commedia functions as go-between. Within the logic of such interpretative method, the hint of a critic becomes literary device and formal principle. In all three of them, the character of Paolo, besides having a greater role, works as alter ego of the authors. In Hunt’s romance and Keats’ sonnet, the compassion, that in the Commedia caused Dante’s fainting, is amplified, thus removing the lovers’ guilt and punishment. In Pellico’s tragedy, instead, divine providence still determines their destinies.

We are accustomed to thinking of works of ekphrasis as using language to prod a visual representation of a static moment into narrative motion. Rightly, then, criticism of ekphrastic poetry tends to focus on visuality and the gaze. But what exactly does it mean for an object to be representational? This article traces the way that not only traditional art objects, but also hair – in locks, on the head, and (occasionally) incorporated into hair jewelry or collages – functioned representationally during the Romantic period. But while an art object typically represents a static moment perceived visually, a moment that can be prompted into narrative motion through ekphrasis, hair, as we will see, typically represents the social existence of a human being made tangible, with complex implications for the continuity of a self that progresses in time as its representation remains changeless. By examining both sight and hair in “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci” and The Cenci, this article shows how Shelley develops an ekphrastic trajectory that moves not just from sight to speech, but from the politics of witness to the politics of social implication.