ABSTRACT
Foliage: or, Poems Original and Translated, London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818, Leigh Hunt’s first substantial collection of verse since Juvenilia, published some eighteen years previously, is an impressive and influential book. It offers a representative selection of Hunt’s verse, satire apart, combining verse previously published in the Hunts’ various periodicals, alongside a significant number of newly published works. Though Hunt labelled the collection a ‘hasty set of miscellaneous poems’ in his Autobiography, the prefatory essay to Foliage indicates that a more considered rationale underpinned the structure of the volume. Foliage is divided into two parts, with Hunt’s own verses grouped in a section entitled ‘Greenwoods, or Original Poems’ and his renderings of classical poetry gathered as ‘Evergreens, or Translations from Poets of Antiquity’. In the ‘Cursory Observations’ he loads the concept with ideological and ethical resonance, stressing the importance of sociability in contemporary society; its therapeutic potential in England’s ‘war and money-injured land’.
