Selected Writings

Hunt Leigh

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a prolific, versatile and engaging writer. He outlived many of the poets and essayists of his generation whose reputations overshadowed his, but Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats all owed a debt to his advocacy, as did Tennyson and Browning. A poet of charm and technical skill, and an able translator and playwright, Leigh Hunt excelled as an essayist, literary critic and letter writer. His concern was always, in the words of his son, to "open more widely the door of the library", to share his literary enthusiasms and extend his readers' tastes. This anthology draws on the range of Hunt's poetry and prose, revealing a writer committed to the humane and civilising powers of literature and friendship.

About the Author

Leigh Hunt, (1784-1859), dubbed the "spirit of the age" by Hazlitt, became a journalist in 1805, after eight years at Christ's Hospital and the publication of his "Juvenalia". He made his debut as a drama critic in "The News", edited by his brother John. In 1808 the brothers launched their best-known weekly paper, "The Examiner", which they were to edit five years later from separate gaol cells, having libelled the Prince Regent. Hunt's wife and baby daughter joined him in Surrey gaol and he was comfortably off there, with his piano and a string of visitors including Byron, Thomas More, Hazlitt and Lamb.

He befriended Shelley and Keats, commending their poetry in "The Examiner" in 1816. His friendship with the Carlyles blossomed after his return from Italy. His reputation, at its peak in 1821, then declined. In 1832 and 1844 his "Collected Poems" were published, and in 1844 his most substantial critical works, "Imagination and Fancy" and "What is Poetry"? appeared. His later years were impecunious: Dickens evokes him as Skimpole in "Bleak House".

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