13 July 1817: No Natural Proportion: Hunt Reviews Keats’s Poems & the Vast Idea
No. 15, Beaufort Buildings, Strand, London
Some time during the first week or two of June 1817, Keats (aged 21) moves back to
Well Walk
in Hampstead. Money troubles continue, and he asks his publisher, Taylor & Hessey,
for a loan of 30 pounds. By some point early in June, Keats likely completes a first
draft of
the first book of his ambitious project poem, Endymion. Keats’s motivation: he sees the
long poem as a guiding test of Invention
undertaken by all great Poets
(Keats
quoting himself in letter written earlier in the year, and copied into a letter of
8 Oct). The
project from the beginning seems so overly deliberate—young Keats out to prove something,
to
himself and to the literary world—that having something truly remarkable emerge is
unlikely,
especially given Keats’s relative poetic immaturity. But we understand the shortcomings,
in
both motivation and execution; thankfully, so does Keats.
No. 15, Beaufort Building: the offices of The Examiner, the
independent journal published by Keats’s good friend and (initially) mentor, Leigh Hunt. (Hunt’s brother, John, also runs the paper, and Hunt’s other brother, Robert, also at times contributes to it.) Keats is
introduced to Hunt back in October 1816—and, understandably, he is absolutely thrilled
at the
prospect of meeting one of his heroes; starry-eyed Keats writes that it will mark
an Era in
my existence
(letters, 9 Oct 1816), and it is. Yet in the last few months of mid-1817,
Hunt’s luster has dulled: in particular, Keats at moments has become put off with
aspects of
Hunt’s egotism, and mainly with Hunt’s delusions about being a great poet.
On this day, the third and final part of Hunt’s review of Keats’s first collection of poetry—Poems, by John Keats—appears in The Examiner. The other two appear 1 June and 6 July, though the first review only mentions Keats in the first paragraph. The gaps in the dates between the first and second installments seem odd, though Hunt simply tells his readers that there were other pressing matters. That Hunt takes so long to get around to writing the first installment is also odd, given that Poems is published in early March. The lag may have been a result of Hunt’s own personal issues (financial, as well as a move from Hampstead—did he misplace the book?), and there is some evidence that Hunt at the last moment did not want the first installment to be published. The final complication is that Poems is in fact dedicated to Hunt, and so the question of patronage—nepotism, in fact—hangs in the air. This point will not be lost upon some reviewing quarters.
The second installment of the review (6 July) explains Keats’s faults,
errors,
and mistakes common to inexperience
—mainly, the indiscriminate
description and poor use of versification. Hunt is
right, though his own verse sometimes is guilty of awkward and off-putting versification.
In
truth, Hunt is a better critic, journalist, and essayist than he is a poet.
The third installment of the review (13 July) applauds the warm and social feelings
in
Keats’s poetry. Hunt concludes that the best poem in the collection, Sleep and Poetry, is a striking
specimen of the restlessness of the young poetic appetite.
Once more, Hunt is largely correct on both accounts: Keats’s early work does
indeed often express or carry the sentiments of cozy sociability that Hunt himself
fully
embraces and promotes. And so Hunt notes that Keats’s early poetry is often about
his desire,
his appetite,
to be a great poet; but the poetry too often exhibits some carelessness
via inexperience—it is without an eye to natural proportion and effect,
Hunt adds.
Given that many of the poems in the collection could, technically, be classified as
juvenilia
(Keats admits as much), this is hardly surprising. Keats at this point is a poet in
the
making.
Hunt has a further connection to his favoured Sleep and Poetry. The poem’s speaker
(too obviously Keats) makes various self-admitted boyish yearnings to some day be
a poet (ten
years will do, he suggests); and then, after repeating that the vast idea before me
(291) is his hope to embrace and participate in the end and aim
(293) of poetry, at the
end of the poem he situates himself in what we know, and what Hunt knows, is Hunt’s
own study,
with all its artsy and eclectic nicknacks, and where Keats used to nap and spend the
night. In
a way, then, Hunt stands behind the inspiration for Sleep and Poetry. No wonder he likes it.
Hunt’s critical observations about Keats’s
collection are generally correct, and his comments may have been in some degree useful
for
Keats, though we also have to imagine a deeply ambivalent response from Keats. If
we piece
together the three installments of Hunt’s review, we get this kind of narrative: Hunt
rightly
confesses he is Keats’s friend, but that their initial connection was made by nothing but
poetry.
Then, by way of analyzing the course and graces of a natural style in English
poetry (with Hunt declaring William
Wordsworth the most advanced contemporary poet in this respect), Hunt comes to
Keats’s poetry, which he suggests inherits and reinvigorates some of these natural
tendencies.
Keats, Hunt writes, deeply possesses a sensitiveness of temperament,
but his passion for beauties
in fact takes him to the faults of inexperience and
non-discrimination in his work—his poetry, suggests Hunt, struggles with the differences
between the need for microscopic detail and general feeling.
Moreover, Hunt adds, Keats
struggles with the more complex relationship between versification and meaning. But
in the
end, Hunt concludes that the beauties of the poetry vastly outnumber the faults.
As mentioned, Keats, then, will have to move beyond these subjects and this style for his poetry to progress. In doing so, he will go far beyond Hunt’s own poetry and poetic abilities, and in a very different direction. But first, Keats must (so to speak) get Endymion out of his system; the second of its four books will be completed this summer.
