13 - Byron reads Keats

Summary

Among Keats's contemporaries Byron has a distinctive place. His astonishing public success, his close connections with Leigh Hunt, his recurrently negative and snobbishly sarcastic or condescending judgments of Keats's writing - these and other related factors make Byron's dismissiveness of Keats a painful thing to contemplate. We should be wary, though, of dismissing Byron's dismissiveness. The reasons for, and terms of, his animus against Keats's verse reveal much that is important about Keats's career and his talent - and much about Byron as well. Even the relatively sympathetic and praising remarks he made soon after Keats's death are worth more curiousminded attention than they have received, not least because, in the end, Byron returns to a mainly negative stance. His latest known comment is in a letter to John Murray, 10 October 1822. As usual, and tellingly, the immediate context is Hunt and the Cockney-Suburban School: “I do not know what world [Hunt] has lived in - but I have lived in three or four - and none of them like his Keats and Kangaroo terra incognita - .” The Hampstead world of Keats and Hunt may as well have been a penal colony down under, populated by transported Cockneys, for all Byron cares to know of it. Or so he says to his old Tory publisher.