HUNT, (JAMES HENRY) LEIGH

born Oct. 19, 1784, Southgate, Middlesex, Eng. died Aug. 28, 1859, Putney, London English essayist, critic, journalist, and poet, who was an editor of influential journals in an age when the periodical was at the height of its power. He was also a friend and supporter of the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Hunt's poems, of which Abou Ben Adhem and Jenny Kissed Me are probably the best known, reflect the influence of foreign versification. Though he falls short of greatness, Hunt, at his best, in some essays and his Autobiography (1850; a rewriting of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 1828), has a charm that has gained him a high place in his readers' affection. He excels in perceptive judgments of his contemporaries, from Keats to the Victorian Tennyson; and, as Radical journalist, though not much interested in politics, he attacks oppression with indignation. He considered himself to be essentially a dilettante. The poems in Juvenilia (1801), his first volume, show his love for Italian literature. He looked to Italy for a freer spirit of versification, and in The Story of Rimini (1816), published in the year of his meeting with Keats, he reintroduced a freedom of movement in English couplet verse lost in the 18th century. From him Keats derived his delight in colour and imaginative sensual experience and a first acquaintance with Italian poetry, a potent influence long after he had outgrown Hunt's tutelage. In 1808 Leigh Hunt and his brother John had launched the weekly Examiner, which advocated abolition of the slave trade, Catholic emancipation, and reform of Parliament and the criminal law. For their attacks on the unpopular prince regent, the brothers were imprisoned in 1813. Leigh Hunt, who continued to write The Examiner in prison, was regarded as a martyr in the cause of liberty. After his release (1815) he moved to Hampstead, home of Keats, whom he introduced in 1817 to Shelley, a friend since 1811. The Examiner supported the new Romantic poets against attacks by Blackwood's Magazine on what it called the Cockney school of poetry. In Hunt's writings for the quarterly Reflector (181011), politics was combined with criticism of the theatre and of the fine arts, of which he had considerable knowledge. Imagination and Fancy (1844), his most sustained critical work, draws interesting parallels between painting and poetry. It was in the weekly Indicator (181921) and The Companion (1828), however, that, taking a holiday from politics, Hunt published some of his best essays. He continued to edit and write for periodicals to 1853.