Leigh Hunt Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

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Born as	James Henry Leigh Hunt
Occup.	Poet
From	England
Born	October 19, 1784 Southgate, London
Died	August 28, 1859 Putney, London
Aged	74 years

Early Life and Education
James Henry Leigh Hunt was born in 1784 in England, the son of American Loyalist parents who had left the United States after the Revolutionary War. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, the Bluecoat school in London, where he developed a lifelong love of poetry and the stage, and absorbed a humane, liberal outlook that never left him. A stammer kept him from proceeding to university, but it did not prevent him from cultivating a public voice in print. His earliest poems, gathered in a volume of Juvenilia while he was still very young, revealed a taste for warmth, urbanity, and a relish for everyday experience alongside classical and Italianate themes that would mark his mature writing.

Early Journalism and The Examiner
Hunt's literary life was inseparable from journalism. After brief clerical work, he turned to letters in earnest and, with his brother John Hunt, founded The Examiner in 1808. The weekly paper became a platform for reformist politics and a new kind of cultural criticism that combined elegant prose with fearless comment. Hunt's theatre reviews and essays treated the stage and literature as vital public arts, and his commentaries on civic life were uncommonly frank. This candor drew the attention of the authorities when The Examiner criticized the Prince Regent's conduct and character. In 1813, Hunt was convicted of libel and sentenced to prison.

Imprisonment and a Formative Literary Identity
Hunt's incarceration from 1813 into 1815 in the Surrey County Gaol proved paradoxically productive. He turned his cell into a salon painted with flowers and furnished with books and keepsakes. Friends and admirers visited him, including Lord Byron, Charles Lamb, and Thomas Moore, and he continued to write. His prison years consolidated his public identity: a principled liberal man of letters with a gift for sociable prose, an ear for musical, conversational verse, and a stubborn independence of temper. Works of this period and soon after, such as The Feast of the Poets and The Story of Rimini, helped define his reputation. In Rimini, his reimagining of the Francesca episode from Dante championed tenderness and domestic feeling over convention, pointing younger writers toward a looser, more intimate poetic line.

The "Cockney" Circle and the Young Poets
Hunt's London home became a bustling meeting place for writers and painters. He befriended Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, whose essays shared his emphasis on sensibility and metropolitan life. He encouraged new voices and offered them space in his periodicals. In 1816 he published an essay spotlighting the "young poets", among them John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom he helped to introduce to readers. The Examiner printed early work by Keats; Hunt praised his promise and welcomed him to a circle that met for talk, books, and music. This openness provoked the notorious "Cockney School" attacks in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which mocked Hunt's taste and manners and, by extension, Keats's work. Though the attacks were cruel, the conviviality around Hunt sustained genuine creative exchange. He also knew the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon and was linked socially with Thomas Moore and other London men of letters.

Italy, Shelley, and Byron
In the early 1820s, Hunt accepted an invitation to join Shelley and Lord Byron in Italy to launch a new periodical, The Liberal, intended as a vehicle for free-thinking politics and literature. He arrived in 1822, but the plan was struck at once by tragedy when Shelley drowned that summer. Mary Shelley, already part of the circle, was left widowed, and tensions emerged amid grief, practical hardship, and mismatched temperaments. Byron contributed formidable work, notably The Vision of Judgment, yet was often distant, and the experiment never achieved the harmony Hunt had hoped for. The Liberal ran for only a few numbers and collapsed; Hunt, encumbered with debts and a young family, returned to England after several difficult years abroad.

Return to England and Critical Controversy
Back in London, Hunt kept writing for magazines and brought out Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), a memoir of the Italian episode and of the literary world he knew. Its frank portrayals displeased many of Byron's admirers and fed controversy around Hunt's name. Yet the book was also part of his broader effort to demystify fame and write intimately about authors as people. Through the 1830s and 1840s, he produced a stream of essays and volumes that distilled his tastes and reading: Imagination and Fancy, Wit and Humour, and A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, among others. These books, together with his periodicals The Indicator and The Companion, created a recognizable Huntian mode: graceful, companionable, hospitable to anecdote, and fond of bringing classical and Italian literature into everyday conversation.

Poetry, Drama, and the Pageant of Daily Life
Hunt's poetry prized accessibility and genial feeling. His best-known lyrics include Abou Ben Adhem, a parable of charity and spiritual breadth, and Jenny Kissed Me, a brief, unforgettable salute to sudden joy, traditionally associated with a warm greeting from Jane, the wife of Thomas Carlyle. He also wrote for the stage; A Legend of Florence found success on the London boards and showed his dramatic instinct for sentiment restrained by moral reflection. Though never a poet of epic architecture, he excelled in the miniature, in descriptive pieces and occasional verse woven from urban walks, gardens, concerts, and friendships.

Networks, Friendships, and Influence
Hunt's life unfolded through friendships. He was close to Lamb and Hazlitt; he nurtured Keats in his earliest phase and maintained affectionate ties with Shelley; he dealt with Byron in Italy at a high personal cost; and he remained a point of contact among reform-minded writers and artists. In later years he knew Thomas Carlyle, whose more rugged temper differed from Hunt's but who respected his sincerity; the connection gave rise to the cherished lyric about "Jenny". Charles Dickens admired Hunt and supported him publicly, helping to raise funds during lean periods and advocating for his welfare. These relationships, together with his brother John Hunt's steadfast partnership in journalism, frame his career as a node in the literary networks of Regency and early Victorian Britain.

Personal Life and Financial Strain
Hunt married Marianne Kent, and they had a large family. Affection at home coexisted with chronic money troubles, a condition exacerbated by the precarious economics of independent journalism and by the costs of the Italian venture. He worked indefatigably, contributing to newspapers and magazines, issuing volumes of essays and poems, and seeking the steady base that eluded him. Relief came in part through friends and political allies; he eventually received a civil list pension, reflecting recognition of his service to English letters and to the liberal public sphere.

Style and Critical Legacy
As a critic, Hunt championed breadth of reading and pleasure in art over pedantry. He wrote as a companionable guide rather than a judge, preferring to illuminate beauties and trace kinships between works, eras, and nations. He helped acclimate English readers to Italian poetry, recovered neglected charms in the minor classics, and promoted a humane ethics of criticism rooted in sympathy. As a poet, he exerted influence less by single grand achievements than by modeling a talkative, sensuous line that celebrates flowers, music, friendship, and the civic gaiety of London. His encouragement mattered decisively to Keats and Shelley, and his essays formed an early template for the genial critical voice that runs through Victorian periodicals.

Final Years and Death
Hunt's later decades brought him a measure of stability and honor. He continued to publish, to mentor younger writers, and to enjoy the society of friends. The pension eased his most acute difficulties, and the regard of admirers such as Dickens sustained him. He died in 1859 in London, having lived through and helped to shape the passage from the Regency to the Victorian age. By then he was widely recognized as a central figure in the culture of his time: a reforming journalist with a poet's ear, the friend and supporter of some of the century's most celebrated authors, and a steadfast advocate for cheerfulness and civility in letters.

Enduring Significance
Leigh Hunt's place in literary history rests on a cluster of roles he made his own: editor of an influential journal of opinion; master of the light essay; introducer and encourager of genius; and lyric poet of companionship and delight. Around him, names such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Mary Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens define an age. His best pages preserve the conversational ease of a hospitable mind, finding moral argument in everyday scenes and setting imaginative freedom against cant and cruelty. Whether writing in a newspaper column, a stage preface, or a sonnet, he kept faith with the pleasures of reading and the duties of sympathy, leaving an influence that outlived fashions and controversies alike.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by Leigh, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Nature - Health.

Other people realated to Leigh: Douglas William Jerrold (Dramatist), George Byron (Poet), George Henry Lewes (Philosopher), Barry Cornwall (Poet)

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