ABSTRACT

Leigh Hunt’s account of Keats in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries was the first full-scale, conventional memoir of the poet. Keats was first introduced to Hunt by his schoolfriend and tutor Charles Cowden Clarke while he was still working at Guy’s Hospital, with only vague poetic aspirations. If Keats expressed some doubts about Hunt’s taste in poetry and suitability as a mentor in 1817, what finally confirmed the uneasiness of the relationship between the two was the series of ‘Cockney Poets’ articles in Blackwood’s, which began in October 1817. As a result of the fluctuating relationship between Hunt and Keats, the portrait of Keats in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries is both possessive and patronising. Hunt accuses Keats of occasionally degenerating into ‘poetical effeminacy’, and of covering up his humble origins, both characteristics of which he himself was accused by Blackwood’s.