ABSTRACT
‘Hero and Leander’, ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, and ‘The Panther’ were the only new poems to be published in the three-volume collection The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, London: Charles and James Ollier, 1819, an edition which mainly consists of reprints – of The Story of Rimini and The Descent of Liberty and Foliage. The second volume of 1819 brings together The Feast of the Poets with these three narrative poems on classical and mythological themes. Hunt republished ‘Hero and Leander’ in a slightly truncated two-canto form in 1832, 1844 and 1860, in a version which contains significant textual variants (which are included in endnotes). In 1832, Hunt replaced the first forty-one lines of ‘Hero and Leander’ with a new introduction to the poem. The revised opening is an important and personal statement of Hunt’s conviction that classical mythology still has power and immediacy in the modern world and that ‘Truth is for ever truth, and love is love’.
