ABSTRACT
First published in The Indicator, I, 2 August 1820, pp. 337–44. It was reprinted in Reiman, Part C., vol. ii, pp. 479–83. Keats’s Lamia volume of 1820 had only been in print a few weeks when Hunt issued the first half of a laudatory two-part review in The Indicator. This first section takes up the entirety of the week’s Indicator (for the second half, see headnote below, pp. 296–306). Although Hunt frequently sprang to Shelley’s defence during the Cockney School wars of 1818–19 (see headnote above, pp. 144–7) he was less activist about supporting Keats in print, perhaps because he realized how particularly damaging his public association with Keats could be for the younger poet. He did, however, construct a substantial defense of Keats in the 11 October 1818 issue of The Examiner (see p. 648 and above, pp. 170– 1). Now, with this extensive analysis of Keats’s new volume, he offers some of the most insightful early assessments of Keats’s great accomplishment in the 1820 volume. He commends, for instance, the passionate and imaginative qualities of Keats’s poetry. He is also one of the first to comment on the compression of phrasing and the lustrous pictorial dimension of Keats’s later poetry, especially The Eve of St Agnes. For details on the history and structure of The Indicator, see headnote above, pp. 222–4.
