POETS Day! Leigh Hunt
I think you call this a “study,” so this is a study on Louis Édouard Fournier’s “The Funeral of Shelley” as painted by Rene Sears. That’s Hunt in the middle of the trio.
My nephew’s twelve years old. He just started little league practice for the spring season. That sounds crazy to me because it’s not baseball weather. It’s not even Valentine’s Day. Now, kids’ sports require commitment that was never asked of me when I was young. Whether or not youth athletics are too structured or too demanding is an interesting question, but not one I’m planning on addressing right now.
I bring up my nephew because he’s frogspawn, blossoms, buzzing bees, and W-2s in the mail: a sign of coming spring. He’s at practice, the herald signaling greater things and right on cue, MLB pitchers and catchers started reporting. The Cubs were the first to get going on the 9th. By the 13th, every battery in the league is scheduled for post-workout ice baths; by the 18th, full squads.
POETS Day is never purposeless, but soon – maybe not soon, but in the foreseeable future – you’ll Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, and there’s a Friday afternoon game on. Thinnest line on the horizon. Barely in sight. It’s beginning though, and a little league shall lead them.
Take off, enjoy the anticipation and the afternoon. First some verse.
***
In 1844, Leigh Hunt published a collection of essays called Imagination and Fancy. I couldn’t find a copy of it online. It seems like something Project Gutenberg would have, but no. us.archive.org has Essays of Leigh Hunt: Selected and Edited by Reginald Brimley Johnson. It doesn’t contain the whole 1844 collection, but it has the essay “An Answer to the Question, What is Poetry?” I was after. That’s the one where, I’ve read, he famously lays out his philosophy of poetry. Reginald Brimley Johnson was kind enough to select and edit that one.
Hunt begins,
“Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see it in the poet’s book, is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity.”
That’s on page 127. Unfortunately, the well meaners at us.archive.org either didn’t scan or didn’t have pages 128 or 129. That’s an annoying setback and I’ve yet to find the full text. I know Hunt was the first to publish a poem by John Keats. One from Poetry Foundation’s reliably wonderful suite of biographers writes that Hunt, “introduced the public to many poets, among them John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.” I don’t know if that means he first published the others as he did Keats or that he provided a larger audience than they’d had before. It doesn’t really matter. He had an eye for talent and was a capable promoter. I suspect there are more things on pages 127 and 128 to be learned from his philosophy.
us.archive.org skips us right to page 130, where we pick up in the middle of, per the intact table of contents, the essay “Wit and Humour.” I’m assuming it’s from his 1846 book Wit and Humour.
From that one,
“Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner; the flashing of an artificial light from one object to another, disclosing some unexpected resemblance or connection. It is the detection of likeness in unlikeness, or sympathy in antipathy, or of the extreme points of antipathies themselves, made friends by the very merriment of their introduction.”
I don’t know if I would have otherwise read as far as those lines, so I’m thankful for the us.archive.org skip. I like “made friends.” Where I’d gone in search of insight into Hunt to editor, I think I got a bit of Hunt the poet. He can be damn funny.
“Jenny Kiss’d Me” is Hunt’s lone entry in Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book, which is how I’m referring to The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch. I was flipping channels last Saturday and caught the Ghostbusters scene where Egon talks about Tobin’s Spirit Guide. Egon really seems to know his stuff.
The poem’s original title was “Rondeau,” which is a poetic form you may or may not be familiar with. I have one book that says a rondeau is a fixed form of thirteen lines and two others that say it’s fifteen lines. Poetry Foundation says the eight line “Jenny Kiss’d Me” is a rondeau and links to a definition claiming the form is between ten and fifteen lines.
Rondeau is from the French “rond,” meaning round, and takes its name from the circular nature of the poem. The first line or the last line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the poem. Or something sounding similar to the first line is repeated… No one seems to agree on any of this.
Rondeau or not, it’s a pleasing little ditty (“A DITTY is any simple song—see balada.” – Turco’s Book of Forms)
Jenny Kiss’d Me
Leigh Hunt (1786-1859)Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
He wrote that one after meeting Jane Welsh, who was Thomas Carlyle’s wife and I guess went by Jenny. It’s silly and sweet and well composed. I feel like Quiller-Couch stole one that should have been in Amis’s Light Verse, which is what I’m calling The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, edited by Kingsley Amis.
Amis was a real Hunt fan. According to Peter Schwendener in “Shorter notice” (The New Criterion, October 2010), “Amis in fact remarked in a letter to Philip Larkin that ‘Hunt was a better man and poet than either Shelley or Keats.” His choice for his anthology was “Three Sonnets,” made up of “i, To a Fish,” “ii, A Fish replies,” and then this next, from which I’ve excerpted. I’m fond of the last two lines in particular.
from Three Sonnets, iii, The Fish turns into a Man, and then into a Spirit, and again speaks
Man’s life is warm, glad, sad, ‘twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
Charles Dickens, a friend, based a Bleak House character on Hunt. Of the character Harold Skimpole, Dickens wrote, according to Wikipedia, in a letter in 1853, “I suppose he is the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words! … It is an absolute reproduction of a real man.” On the Bleak House Wikipedia page, Skimple is described as “a friend of Jarndyce’s ‘in the habit of sponging his friends’ (Nuttall). He is irresponsible, selfish, amoral, and without remorse. He often refers to himself as “a child” and claims not to understand human relationships, circumstances, and society but actually understands them very well.”
From what I’ve read, Hunt seems fun loving, blithe, and inconsiderate, but not malicious. Impish.
Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard
We, the Fairies, blithe and antic,
Of dimensions not gigantic,
Though the moonshine mostly keep us,
Oft in orchards frisk and peep us.Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
Stolen kisses much completer,
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen, be your apples.When to bed the world are bobbing,
Then’s the time for orchard-robbing;
Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
Were it not for stealing, stealing.
There’s a great deal on about his friendships with Keats, foremost, and Shelley. Byron’s usually around somewhere, but there’s a sense of him and Hunt getting along as a concession to friendship with the other two.
Hunt was to join Byron and Shelley in Italy to start a new magazine in 1822. Money was tight, but Hunt counted on some help from Shelley so he packed up his wife, Marianne, and their five or six kids (he would eventually have ten – not a one named Michael) and sailed for Livorno. Shelley died one week after their arrival.
He and Byron were able to collaborate on the quarterly Liberal, as they called the magazine, despite any differences of personality. It was wildly successful at first, dipped into the red, and then settled as manageably profitable, all over the course of four issues. Byron buggered off to fight for Greek independence. Without Shelley or a grudging Byron, Hunt was stuck in Italy; not penniless, but unable to afford the trip back to England.
This wasn’t the first time magazine work left him unable to go where he wanted. In 1813, while serving as editor for The Examiner, he wrote that the Prince Regent, later to be crowned King George IV, was a fattie. Specifically, he called him “corpulent.” That landed him in prison for two years. It wasn’t the worst prison. He played Ur-badminton and kept working as The Examiner’s editor, but it was still prison. His friend Shelley did a better job hitting the gout-ridden, White House burning George IV with “Ozymandias,” but corpulent was pretty good.
In 1825, Hunt funded his English return with an advance for Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, published 1828. He said nasty things about Byron in that book and the public turned on him for picking on a dead famous (assumed) friend. Poetry Foundation says opinion pinned him as an opportunist.
There are a lot of famous writers you can say he was friends with if you’re specific about the date. He was in and out of favor. I think I’d have liked him. Walter Landor, with whom he was at least provisional friends, and Hunt strike me as the most interesting lesser-known pair of their time. Both could be damn funny.
The Glove and the Lions
King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport,
And one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court;
The nobles filled the benches, and the ladies in their pride,
And ‘mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he sighed:
And truly ’twas a gallant thing to see that crowning show,
Valour and love, and a king above, and the royal beasts below.Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws;
They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws;
With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another;
Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thunderous smother;
The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air;
Said Francis then, “Faith, gentlemen, we’re better here than there.”De Lorge’s love o’erheard the King, a beauteous lively dame
With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same;
She thought, the Count my lover is brave as brave can be;
He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me;
King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine;
I’ll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine.She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady’s face.
“By God!” said Francis, “rightly done!” and he rose from where he sat:
“No love,” quoth he, “but vanity, sets love a task like that.”
