Leigh hunt poet biography websites

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Windows

A window is a frame for other pictures besides its own. He influenced and reviewed John Keats and was the first to publish his poetry.

Before him are Robert Graves (1895), Brian O'Nolan (1911), Boris Karloff (1887), Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671), James Clark Ross (1800), and Alfred Molina (1953). Read more on Wikipedia

His biography is available in 24 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 22 in 2024).

An earth upon heaven

It is a pity that none of the great geniuses, to whose lot it has fallen to describe a future state, has given us his own notions of heaven.

He was an intimate friend of both Percy and Mary Shelley, and staunchly defended the poet’s genius. He was also one of the most outspoken and effective journalists in the age of the French Revolution, and an innovative poet whose Story of Rimini(1816) is one of the great Romantic narrative poems.

Hunt’s first book of poetry, Juvenilia (1801), put him firmly on the literary scene at 17, and went to four editions in as many years.

He outlived many of his contemporaries and bridged the gap between the Romantic poets and Victorian authors, and the eras of the French Revolution and nineteenth-century imperial Britain.

Leigh Hunt was at the center of the literary and publishing world during the Romantic and Victorian early 19th century: he was the fundamental piece of the literary network in London.

He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the "Hunt circle". His close associations with great writers like Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, and Byron, along with his own writings attest to his ability to recognize and create great literature, but at the same time, his many public blunders call into question his judgment and tact.

Both books engage with Hunt’s life writings in ways that have not been attempted since Edmund Blunden’s Leigh Hunt: A biography was published in 1930.

Of dreams

Being writers, we are of necessity dreamers; for thinking disposes the bodily faculties to be more than usually affected by the causes that generally produce dreaming.

Hunt continued to edit The Examiner from prison, where he was eventually allowed to bring his family to stay with him.

On the graces and anxieties of pig-driving

Remember, gentle reader, that talents are not to be despised in the humblest walks of life; we will add, nor in the muddiest.

A day by the fire

It is part of my business to look about for helps to reflection; and, for this reason, among many others, I indulge myself in keeping a good fire from morning till night.

Hunt co-founded The Examiner, a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was accommodated in a disused prison infirmary, redecorated and wallpapered in a fanciful manner. His writing built his life and broke it, and built it again, giving him notoriety and success on the one hand, and poverty and imprisonment on the other.

Between 1840 and his death in 1859, Hunt produced several successful plays, translations, memoirs, multi-volume collections, poems, as well as an autobiography.

(Compiled by Joey Franklin)

Essays by Leigh Hunt

The cat by the fire

A blazing fire, a warm rug, candles lit and curtains drawn, the kettle on for tea, and finally, the cat before you, attracting your attention—it is a scene which everybody likes, unless he has a morbid aversion to cats.

Among people deceased in 1859, Leigh Hunt ranks 19. Before him are Washington Irving, Louis Spohr, John Brown, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Archduke John of Austria, and Bettina von Arnim. However, Shelley’s tragic death a few weeks later cut short that endeavor and only four quarterly issues were published.