ABSTRACT
First published in The Indicator, 20 September 1820, pp. 398–400. This brief essay, published just a few days after Keats’s departure on his final journey to Italy (he would die in Rome on 23 February 1821), serves as a kind of follow-up to the Indicator essay on which Hunt and Keats collaborated, ‘A Now’ (see above, pp. 268–72). It incorporates even more richly the phrasing and imagery of Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’, and concludes with a poignant farewell, made all the more touching by our knowledge of its thwarted optimism, to the young poet Hunt continued to associate with his own strongest aesthetic and political ideals. Even here at this last farewell, Hunt elliptically inserts the kind of social criticism that helped consolidate their partnership. He jokes about the Corn Laws (see below, p. 365, n. 1), which imposed higher taxes on bread, if not air, and scorns the Tory critics, those ‘others’ (below, p. 317) who tried to inflict so much pain on Keats. For Hunt’s earlier responses to Keats’s poetry, see headnotes above, pp. 170, 281. For details on the history and structure of The Indicator, see headnote above, pp. 222–4.
