Serious and Lively: Leigh Hunt and Romanticism

The exhibition Serious and Lively: Leigh Hunt and Romanticism at Keats-Shelley House aims to highlight the important role of Leigh Hunt as a poet and intellectual of the Romantic period and his relationship with the three best-known poets of the second generation of Romanticism .

Leigh Hunt was one of the leading British men of letters of the nineteenth century, who played a key role in facilitating the meeting between the Romantic poets: it was thanks to the latter that John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley met as well as it was thanks to his editorial work that The Liberal was written, a joint work of Shelley and Lord Byron.

English journalist, critic and poet, James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784 - 1859) was at the centre of English literary life for many years and first brought to attention the poetry of J. Keats and P.B. Shelley with an article published in 1816 in the Examiner, a weekly newspaper he edited. In 1821 he was with Shelley and G.G. Byron in Italy; a brilliant poet, he wrote the famous autobiography Autobiography with reminescences of friends and contemporaries (1850).

Photo credits: courtesy of the Keats-Shelley House official site