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Unit 16: Hazlitt--On Genius and Common Sense...

the enjoyment of a first and deep passion, than in becoming the wife of some brother in iniquity Notes
to whom her pirating father would have trucked her for lucre?
The ironic cadences of that last sentence cut to the bone, not merely as wit but as incisive criticism
of social sickness in his age. Hunt interprets Byron more deeply perhaps than Byron intended. In
a sense, Hunt extends Byron’s poem to a level of application that the apparent levity and flippancy
of Byron’s tone might not otherwise reach with the general reader. Hunt reveals in Byron that
which Byron’s tone might have concealed. Finally, the concluding paragraph of Hunt’s review is
surely an example of tact andfinesse yielding “the prophetic spirit of common sense.” It is short,
but to students of romanticism it cannot but suggest the struggles of Los with Vala in The Four Zoas
or of Los with his Spectre in Jerusalem, which Blake was working out at the very time Hunt was
writing. Here is the paragraph. The fact is, at the bottom of all these questions, that many things
are made vicious, which are not so by nature; and many things made virtuous, which are only so
by calling and agreement: and it is on the horns of this self-created dilemma, that society is
continually writhing and getting desperate.
For another exhibit of Leigh Hunt’s role as romantic critic, let us turn to his only extended effort
at theoretical exposition, the essay “What Is Poetry?” which opens the 1844 volume Imagination
and Fancy. This essay has been most severely — and strangely — denigrated by scholars in the
past quarter century. The negative estimates concerning Hunt’s intelligence and critical achievement
quoted at the beginning of this discussion are directed mainly at the 1844 essay. The essay has
received more mockery than sympathetic reading in recent years. Ernest Bernbaum in 1929 called
it “one of the clearest and most comprehensive, though not the profoundest, treatment of the
subject by any of the Romantics.” But M. H. Abrams wittily set the tone for contemporary reception
of the essay by reminding his readers of a critical joke made at Hunt’s expense in the previous
century. After summarizing differences between Coleridge, Hazlitt, Shelley, and Byron in the
definition of poetry, Abrams quips, “Finally Leigh Hunt reconciled these differences by the simple
device of a definition which, as David Masson has remarked, is ‘constructed on the principle of
omitting nothing that anyone would like to see included’. “
It seems to have been the elaborateness of Hunt’s opening definition that has led his detractors to
deny him judgment or distinction of mind. Yet it seems to me that if one reads his opening
paragraph, keeping in mind the relevant background of Hazlitt, Shelley, and the other great
critical geniuses of the era, one may well be enlightened, pleased, and indeed impressed by the
distinguished qualities of mind revealed. Hunt gives an imaginatively integrated account of
romantic poetic theory that begins with a lucid, tightly structured outline, that is developed with
clarity and cogency, and that ends with a fruitful juxtaposition of passages from Milton, Coleridge,
and Shelley, which resonate with new significance in the context he has prepared for them. Perhaps
by 1844 the principles expressed are no longer revolutionary. But neither are Hunt’s intentions
revolutionary. They are, rather, “to furnish such an account, in an essay, of the nature and
requirements of poetry, as may enable readers in general to give an answer on those points to themselves
and others” [Hunt’s emphasis] .
Turning to the essay, one discovers that Masson’s and Abrams’s word is not precisely accurate.
The paragraph in question is not a “definition” according to the meaning by which one expects a
man of abstract thought to summarize a topic or concept broadly and memorably in a short pithy
expression. Rather, Hunt’s paragraph is an announcement and outline of the aspects of his subject
to be covered at length in the essay, all brought together in a connected, if full, statement of his
intent (current academic rhetoricians call such a passage occurring at the beginning of an essay the
thesis statement). Indeed Hunt’s 1844 essay might seem to lack the lightning flashes of genius
used by the romantic essayists, but Hunt’s procedure ably organizes for the wider, though educated
Victorian reading public the complex theories of the romantic innovators. Here is the opening
statement of “What Is Poetry?”

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