ABSTRACT
Leigh Hunt’s account of Keats in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries was the first full-scale, conventional memoir of the poet. It occurs halfway through the volume, after the commissioned memoir of the more famous, and therefore more marketable, Byron and the far more hagiographic and warm memoir of Shelley. Hunt’s account of Keats is measured, proprietorial, muted. And yet Hunt was arguably Keats’s most important – and certainly most controversial – friend, the person who did most to forge and shape Keats’s career as a poet, and who, later, turned out to be the main cause of Keats’s troubled relationship with the critics.
