Shelley, Alastor [etc.]

Shelley, Keats, Reynolds, Alastor, etc.; notice by Leigh Hunt, Examiner, Dec. 1, 1816, pp. 761-762. Hunt’s article on “Young Poets,” though scarcely a review in the strict sense, was to prove a milestone in the poetic careers of both Shelley and Keats. Hunt introduces the three young poets by identifying them as part of the second wave of a “new school of poetry” that, he says, “promises to extinguish the French one.” Hunt congratulates the Edinburgh Review for recognizing the downfall of the neo-classic school that it had always championed. Hunt shows the haste with which he writes by mistaking Reynolds’ name, giving it as “John Henry” instead of John Hamilton Reynolds.