ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, XI, 11 October 1818, p. 648. It was reprinted in Reiman, Part C, vol. i, p. 438. Hunt had already established himself as a substantial advocate for Keats in the pages of The Examiner (see his famous ‘Young Poets’ article of 1816, above, pp. 72–5, and his three-part review of Keats’s 1817 volume, Poems, above, pp. 115–7, 122– 9). The case of Keats’s public reputation assumed a critical urgency, however, with the vitriolic Cockney School attack by ‘Z’ in the August 1818 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (pp. 519–24; reprinted in Reiman, Part C, vol. i, pp. 90–5), and the equally virulent review by John Wilson Croker in the April 1818 issue of The Quarterly Review (pp. 204–8; reprinted in Reiman, Part C, vol. ii, pp. 767–70). Although Hunt had responded briefly to ‘Z’ in The Examiner of 14 December 1817 (see above, pp. 142–3), he did not produce a substantial defence of Keats until his 1820 Indicator review (see below, pp. 281–90, 296–306). However, he did reprint John Hamilton Reynolds’s spirited rejoinder to The Quarterly, initially published in the Exeter Alfred (pp. 648–9 of this Examiner issue; reprinted in Reiman, Part C, vol. i, pp. 438–9), and prefaced it with this endorsement of Keats’s poetry and his formidable spirit. Croker’s review, often and misleadingly cited as the blow that broke Keats’s spirits and hastened his death, condemns Keats because of his political as well as his aesthetic associations with Hunt. The response here by Hunt reveals not only the depth of support a far from crippled Keats received, with Hunt, Reynolds and the Morning Chronicle writer mobilizing strong support, but also the degree to which aesthetic judgements advanced Hunt’s political purposes in the post-Waterloo years. He had recently included a brief footnote praising Keats in a Political Examiner excoriating the conservative politics of The Quarterly Review and other Tory publications (see The Examiner, XI, 27 September 1818, p. 609). For the role of this preface within Hunt’s overall reviewing strategies of 1818, see headnote above, pp. 144–7. For Hunt’s continuing clashes with The Quarterly Review, see below, pp. 214–21).
