ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, IX, 1 December 1816, pp. 761–2. Hunt’s other comments on Keats and Shelley are too many to list here, but they include a review of Keats’s 1817 Poems (The Examiner, X, 1 June 1817, p. 345; 6 July 1817, pp. 428–9; 13 July 1817, pp. 443–4; and below, pp. 115–17, 122–5 and 126–9), a review of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (The Examiner, XI, 1 February 1818, pp. 75–6; 22 February 1818, pp. 121–2; 1 March 1818, pp. 139–41; and below, pp. 144–50, 154–6 and 157–60), a review of Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen (The Examiner, XII, 9 May 1819, pp. 302–3, and below, pp. 191–5), a defence of The Revolt of Islam from attacks in the Quarterly Review (The Examiner, XII, 26 September 1819, pp. 620–1; 3 October 1819, pp. 635–6; and below, pp. 214–17 and 218-21), reviews of Shelley’s The Cenci and Keats’s 1820 volume in The Indicator (19 July 1820, pp. 321–8; 26 July 1820, pp. 329–36; 2 August 1820, pp. 337–44; 9 August 1820, pp. 345–53, and below, pp. 273–80, 281–90, and 296–306), a number of poems addressed to them as well as to Reynolds (see Vol. 5, pp. 231–3), and reflections on his friends in his Autobiography. We should also note the presence of work by these poets in Hunt’s periodicals, with Keats, for example, having his first poem published in The Examiner (‘To Solitude’ by ‘J. K.’, 5 May 1816, p. 282) as well as a series of poems leading up to the publication of his first volume (The Examiner, X, 16 February 1817, p. 107; 23 February 1817, p. 124; 9 March 1817, p. 155; and 16 March 1817, p. 173); he also published two poems in Hunt’s Literary Pocket Book for 1819 (1818) and two in The Indicators for 10 May 1820 and 28 June 1820. Hunt also published a number of poems from the circle’s sonnet contests, with both his and Keats’s poems ‘On the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ appearing in the 21 September 1817 Examiner, p. 599, and Shelley’s and Horace Smith’s sonnets on Ozymandias printed in the 11 January 1818, p. 24, and 1 February 1818, p. 73, Examiners.
