ABSTRACT
Devoting much of his time to the preparation of Foliage, Hunt published little new poetry in 1817. Only two poems appeared during the year, both in The Examiner: a sonnet ‘To the Grasshopper and the Cricket’, and a lament on the death of Princess Charlotte, ‘Elegy on our Lost Princess’. The sonnet actually dates from late 1816. At Hunt’s cottage at Hampstead, he and Keats participated in a sonnet competition. According to Richard Woodhouse’s annotated copy of Keats’s Poems, 'The author and Leigh Hunt challenged each other to write a sonnet in a Quarter of an hour. The Grasshopper and Cricket was the subject. Both performed the task within the time allotted’. According to Charles Cowden Clarke, Keats’s ‘On the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ triumphed in terms of swiftness of composition: ‘Keats won as to time’.
