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Notes have come to these assessments because a fair judgment must discriminate, and in the comparison
with his great contemporaries, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt — geniuses all — Hunt is
left behind. If that is the case, however, why do we bother to remember him?
In saying that Hunt was not a genius in the way that his great contemporaries were, I was
thinking of Hazlitt’s discussion in the essays “On Genius and Common Sense” that appeared in
Table Talk (1821). If we cannot praise Hunt for his genius, we can perhaps praise him for his
common sense and, by studying the term and his embodiment of it, appreciate a quality, important
to the romantic critics, that is by no means contemptible, nor even always easily achieved.
Approaching him in this vein, we may approximate the view held by his great contemporary
admirers. Shelley, for instance, dedicated The Cenci to Hunt thus: “Had I known a person more
highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for the
work the ornament of his name.... One of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer
life and manners I never knew.” When a writer as serious in his ideals as Shelley speaks this way,
saying he uses his words “in the highest sense,” we know he doesn’t simply mean that Hunt is a
pleasant man without notable vulgarities of manner or motive. Hazlitt, too, has judicious but high
praise for Hunt. In The Spirit of the Age (1825) he notes the faults in Hunt’s writing, which are that
“he perhaps takes too little pains, and indulges in too much wayward caprice.” But he also says,
“He is the only poet or literary man we ever knew who... united rare intellectual acquirements
with outward grace and natural gentility.” Furthermore “a wit and a poet, Mr. Hunt is also distin
guished by fineness of tact and sterling sense.’’ Compare this praise with a sentence from the first
essay “On Genius and Common Sense”: “Tact, finesse, is nothing but the being completely aware
of the feeling belonging to certain situations, passions,& c. and the being consequently sensible to
their slightest indications or movements in others.’Hazlitt uses this sentence to introduce his
culminating example of the quality of common sense, Lord Shaftesbury’s discovery of Anne Hyde’s
secret marriage to the Duke of York from subtle changes in her mother’s bearing toward her.
“This,” Hazlitt concludes, “was carrying the prophetic spirit of common sense as far as it could
go.” If we consider Hazlitt’s remarks carefully, it thus seems that something akin to the “prophetic
spirit of common sense” is one of the “rare intellectual acquirements” he attributes to Hunt when
praising his “fineness of tact and sterling sense.”
So far as “prophetic spirit” goes, even Hunt’s severest detractors agree that he had an uncanny
ability to discover and encourage young poetic talent. Stephen F. Fogle, for instance, recognizing
Hunt’s great contribu tions to practical criticism, says, “To have brought out in The, examiner, one
of the most influential papers of the day, the first published work of John Keats, and to have used
its power to assist both Keats and Shelley is an act of prescience from which nothing can detract.’’
Amy Lowell earlier created the phrase that subsequent writers have seized as the most favorable
and least controversial judgment they could make concerning Hunt’s critical achievement, though
even she feels obliged to disclaim any illusions that he was greater than he should be: “Hunt was
not a great creator certainly, but he was a great introducer .... I can never forget that it was his
Imagination and Fancy which first taught me what poetry was. There is no better text-book for the
appreciation of poetry than that volume.’’ James B. Misenheimer, Jr. elaborates on Lowell’s concept
of “introducer,” in a similarly defensive way:
Although his own creative powers were not great, his appreciation of creative ability in others was
wide and sound.... Hunt had an almost uncanny power to single out good poets and good works
and to make independent evaluations that would stand the test of time.
But when Hazlitt referred to the “prophetic spirit of common sense” he surely meant something
other than a good record of accurate prediction. Among the liberal romantics of Hunt’s acquaintance,
the notion of prophecy had a special force. Let us consider Shelley’s use of the term in his “Defence
of Poetry” which, like Hazlitt’s essay “On Genius and Common Sense,” first appeared in the
world in 1821, the crucial year in which Hunt began his Italian adventure and his renewed hopes

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