ABSTRACT
First published in The Indicator, I, 9 August 1820, pp. 345–52. It was reprinted in Reiman, Part C., vol. ii, pp. 483–7. This is the second and even more compelling instalment of Hunt’s laudatory review of Keats’s 1820 Lamia volume (for the first part, see above, pp. 281–90). As with his previous Indicator essays on Keats and Shelley (for Shelley, see above, pp. 273-80), this review takes up the entire week’s issue. Hunt continues to deliver new and incisive observations on the astonishing powers of Keats’s latest poetry: its voluptuousness; passion and energy; the formidable weightiness of its measure, especially in blank verse; and the sublimity of its visionary scenes. All of these strengths, Hunt concludes, raise a young Keats to the first rank of England’s living poets. One of the most remarkable features of this panegyric is Hunt’s association of Keats’s lofty poetic powers with a high social purpose. He actually puts Keats on the cutting edge of the same cultural campaign against intransigent despotism that drives such a large part of the literary endeavours of The Examiner. Thus, the leading components of Keats’s poetic character become ‘sympathy’, one of Hunt’s main catch words for progressive tolerance, and ‘natural justice’ (below, p. 305). Moreover, the narrative of progress in Hyperion, glossed by Oceanus’s speech, appears to Hunt as the idealized consummation of a ‘deep-thoughted cause’, the very triumph of ‘Intellect’ over ‘brute power’ that had long been the chief goal of Hunt’s cultural criticism in The Examiner (below, p. 300). His promotion here of that ‘sublime moral’ (below, p. 300) in Keats’s poem actually brings The Indicator and The Examiner back into a shared room where the work of aesthetic and political rejuvenation goes forward together. Such a union of energies, Hunt concludes in one of the most precise articulations of his overall aims as a writer, may offer the best hope of ‘altering the world faster and better’ (below, p. 306). For Hunt’s initial characterization of the two periodicals as separate rooms, see headnote above, pp. 222–4. For Hunt’s earlier responses to Keats’s poetry, see headnotes above, p. 170, 281.
