ABSTRACT
In the years between 1815 and 1823, Procter published a profusion of poems and was dubbed by one magazine the ‘poetical rival of Mr Keats’. Certainly he seems to have been considered one of Blackwood’s ‘Cockney Poets’, often reviewed together with Keats and damningly associated with the denigrated Leigh Hunt. Hunt compounded this association by including Barry Cornwall’s poems in his Literary Pocket Book, alongside poems by Keats, Shelley and himself. While Keats admitted privately to some difficulty in reconciling his ‘esteem’ of his new friend’s ‘kindness’ with his opinion of his poetry. Keats, divested of too many personal details, is more easily fitted into a certain type with which the public has become familiar – ‘self-consuming meteors’ or poets who die young. The adjectives used to describe Keats are applied without much specificity – ‘young’, ‘solitary’, ‘helpless’ – while the quotation from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ identifies the poet’s life with his work in a conventional way.
