Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement by Michael Steier (review)

As Michael Steier reminds us on his opening page, Byron called Hunt a '"man worth knowing"' while for Hunt Byron was a man '"worth listening to"'. Steier's study aims to 'broaden our understanding of the Byron-Hunt friendship by attending to such statements' and 'the creative engagements that engendered them'. It chronologically follows these creative engagements through 'the first three decades of the nineteenth century', tracing the ways in which Byron and Hunt 'engaged each other as authors as they developed, refined, and marketed their poetry and politics'. It shows the friendship between Byron and Hunt 'highlight[ing] significant aspects of the politics that shaped Romantic authorship'. It also seeks to reveal new insights into the 'unquestionable' 'intimacy' of this friendship, and its 'importance' for both writers, by drawing on newly available Hunt letters alongside Byron's better-known letters and reading these documents 'more meaningfully as part of an on-going dialogue' than has been possible to date.

Chapter 1, 'Byron, Hunt, and the Juvenile Tradition', traces the origins of the Byron-Hunt relationship to Byron's early reading of Hunt's Juvenilia. Hunt recalled Byron telling him that this volume was '"one of [Byron's] incentives to write verses, and that he had the same passion for friendship that"' Hunt had '"displayed in it"'. Steier reads this direct influence, however, as part of 'an emerging juvenile tradition of literature in Britain' that Hunt's volume helped 'to shape' and that Byron's earliest publications inherited. This tradition was defined by 'self-conscious dramatic performance or role-playing', and especially the 'performance of youth' in a 'world of letters typically reserved for adults'. This 'performance' quickly developed a set of rhetorical tropes – the adoption of the role of the 'deferential prodigy of [poetic] ambition', for example – and characteristic themes – the young poet's 'Alma Mater', the ('Platonic') male friendships formed there, and the young poet's 'maturation' beyond 'childish pleasure', for instance. Hunt's Juvenilia 'closely followed the formal conventions of this tradition' to become a 'popular model' of it. In response, Byron 'decided to challenge many of these conventions in Hours of Idleness' – only then to be 'forced' to 'reassert himself firmly within the conventional bounds of juvenile authorship' in Poems, Original and Translated by the 'public reception' of Hours.

Byron came back out fighting, of course, and Steier's second chapter, 'Early Satire: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and The Feast of the Poets' sees Byron's 'maiden' satire as a direct influence on Hunt's. It also demonstrates that the two poems 'served as the basis of an extended literary dialogue between the two friends', 'preserved in the correspondence and in the poetry', about the 'direction British poetry had taken in 1814 and 1815' and about, in particular, 'renewed public interest in Wordsworth' – a dialogue that had a 'significant impact' on the poets' 'literary relationship' and on Byron's 'thoughts (and writings) on the state of British literature during his years in exile'. As Steier shows, however, the 'important […] epistolary exchanges about Wordsworth' also show Byron 'seriously questioning Hunt's attitudes about Pope'. The satires address the issue of Pope too: English Bards is a 'ringing endorsement of the Popeian tradition of satire'; Feast urges a 'formal break from the Popeian model' and a return to 'earlier English writers' such as Suckling. Yet 'the two friends' remained friends, to 'carry on their conversations by addressing new topics in an altogether different context: The Examiner'.

In his third chapter, 'The Politics of Intimacy: Byron and The Examiner', Steier covers 'the period of the earliest personal acquaintance of Byron and Hunt' and the ways in which they 'frequently engaged each other' in the pages of The Examiner 'during a turbulent period in England between 1812 and 1816'. On Hunt's side, these ranged from his support of Byron during the break-up of...