Leigh hunt bio

Leigh Hunt

James Henry Leigh Hunt was born 19 October 1784 in Southgate, Middlesex and died on 28 August 1859 in London. As a writer, Hunt was a jack-of-all-trades, achieving early success as a critic, essayist, journalist, and poet, and establishing himself as an editor of influential journals in an age when the periodical was at the height of its cultural influence.

Hunt's poems, of which "Abou Ben Adhem" and "Jenny Kissed Me" are probably the best known, reflect the influence of foreign versification.

From the beginning, even in his first volume, Juvenilia (1801), his poems reveal a love for Italian literature.

He looked to Italy, he said, for a "freer spirit of versification," and in The Story of Rimini (1816), published in the year of his meeting with Keats, he reintroduced a freedom of movement in English couplet verse lost in the eighteenth century.

His unapologetic delight in color and imaginative sensual experience, which owed much to Italian poetry, had a p