Keats, Lamia, Isabella [etc.]

Keats, Lamia [etc.] (1820); review by Leigh Hunt, Indicator, Aug. 2, 1820, pp. 337–344; Aug. 9, 1820, pp. 345–352. Hunt had intended not to review new publications in the Indicator, but to cull flowers form the past; hence, his opening apology. Hunt probably decided to publish his remarks on Keats’s third volume of poems in the Indicator rather than the Examiner, because readers of the Indicator were almost all sympathetic to Hunt’s literary taste, whereas the Examiner, as a leading political newspaper, was read by a larger and more diverse group, including Hunt’s enemies. Note, on page 341, Hunt’s answer to Keats’s embodiment of Hazlitt’s doctrine that the growth of knowledge destroys poetry. Hunt follows Shelley’s line that first causes and the human heart, not superficial phenomena, are the true realm of the poet, as well as Coleridge’s concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief.”