whole stratum of society that neoclassical writers generally ignored. Hunt’s conviction that it was the business of poetry to do these things led him, much more than Wordsworth, Coleridge, and his other illustrious contemporaries who shared these ideas, to overlook yet another major principle of composition that had so concerned the neoclassicist: decorum.

Decorum demanded that all the various elements of a work of art contribute to the unified effect of the work as a whole. Thus, diction must be appropriate to character and action; a king suffering tragedy should not speak like the common man in the street. Decorum made the poet responsible to the propriety of the particular work. Hunt too often forced the work to comply with principle, and while the principle of natural poetic language suited certain poems, lines such as “The two divinest things this world has got,/ A lovely woman in a rural spot” are jarring. The many critics who have viewed Hunt’s poetry with disfavor have really played variations on a single theme: the unevenness of the work. The tone is inappropriate for the subject; good writing is not maintained throughout; the central idea is lost for the digressions. These are all pitfalls into which a reliance on personal taste might lead one, and though Hunt is guilty of all this, it must also finally be acknowledged that this same disregard for uniformity resulted in an important contribution to English poetry of the nineteenth century.

The Story of Rimini

The unfortunate couplet just quoted is from The Story of Rimini, a retelling of Dante’s tragic story of Paolo and Francesca and Hunt’s most ambitious poetic effort. At the time of its composition, Hunt found John Dryden “The most delightful name to me in English literature.” In The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt he confesses that while The Story of Rimini was intended to reflect the vigor and music of Dryden’s natural style, his personal taste produced some variations, such as a more simple diction and less vigorous versification. Obviously the results of these liberties were not always happy. The effect of The Story of Rimini on English poetry, however, was certainly positive. The poem contributed greatly to the breakup of the highly polished closed couplet perfected by Alexander Pope; Hunt called for a less rigid couplet structure making use of run-on lines and feminine endings. The poem had a marked influence on the styles of several of his contemporaries. Some of Keats’s most important early pieces, such as “I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry,” show the influence of Hunt’s couplet. Indeed, the motto for “I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill” was borrowed from The Story of Rimini.

Still, the vicious political critics from Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly who dubbed Hunt the leader of the cockney school of poetry were not completely wrong in their identification of the poem’s faults. The freer couplet form resulted in an easy, almost conversational tone that was only aggravated by colloquial diction. Hunt simply did not recognize that some of the ingredients he selected to mix in this noble experiment were not appropriate to the dignity of the subject. Regardless of particular theories of poetic composition or the unique tastes of any age, a character such as Francesca deserves better than “She had strict notions on the marrying score.”

Despite its several flaws, The Story of Rimini does contain passages of natural grace and elegance. Clearly Dryden’s lesson was not completely lost on Hunt. Moreover, the canon of Hunt’s poetry includes some astonishingly pure gems that prove the truth of the judgment of The Cambridge History of English Literature (1916) that Hunt’s best poetry is better than his best prose. These best efforts are short—sonnets and brief narratives. The rigid structure of the sonnet seems to have provided the direction that Hunt was likely to lose sight of in his longer experiments, and brief narratives prevented those digressions that he was likely to engage in for their own sake and at the expense of the clarity of his theme. The sonnet on “The Nile” is an example of Hunt at his best. Critics have generally praised it over the sonnets on the same topic by Keats and Shelley. In this poem, Hunt achieves smooth versification with natural rhymes and diction reflective of the tranquil progress of the river through an ancient and glorious landscape. Very unobtrusively, in only the last one and a half lines, meditation on the river is allowed to slide gracefully into a metaphor for meditation on human experience. Had Hunt more often shown the sense of dignity and decorum obvious in “The Nile,” his place as an important English poet would be secure.

“Abou Ben Adhem”

The best of the brief narratives is also Hunt’s most famous poem. “Abou Ben Adhem” first appeared in Samuel Carter Hall’s The Amulet (1835) and is certainly one of the most frequently anthologized poems in the English language. The poet relates a simple tale, and while an incident of angelic visitation might seem to demand the most heroic language, Hunt wisely understood that the point of the tale is not so much the magnificence of the angel as it is the intimacy that exists between a good person and the divine. The character of Abou Ben Adhem, then, is most important; that character had to be made to appeal to human readers. Thus, Abou Ben Adhem, secure in his knowledge of what he is, is not intimidated by the angel. His address is respectful but relaxed and touched by humor. He does not disagree with the angel’s omission of his name from the list of those who love God but politely suggests an alternative: “I pray thee then/ Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.” In this poem of only eighteen lines, Hunt successfully drew a quite sophisticated character and suggested a relationship between God and human beings more subtle than the implied message that God loves people who love their neighbors. In the hands of a lesser poet, “Abou Ben Adhem” might have been an undistinguished exercise in lofty language and baroque figures; the theme would allow such an approach. Indeed, in the hands of Hunt it might have been a hodgepodge of styles and words at war with themes, but in this poem and several others, he managed to keep his eye on the poem itself rather than on assorted notions about poetry.

In his An Essay on Criticism (1711), Pope describes two kinds of literary genius: the genius to create the material of poetry, the rhetorical figures, the variety of styles, and the genius to know how to arrange the material into a unified whole. In this latter respect, Hunt too often showed himself deficient. When he managed to overcome that deficiency, as he often did, he showed himself the worthy companion of Keats, Shelley, and the many immortal Romantics who loved him so well.