Those Who Write for Immortality by H. J. Jackson

Author:H. J. Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

Barry Cornwall

Keats was not the only small, boyish, pugilistic, sensitive young poet whose talent was fostered by Hunt and his circle in the last years of the Regency; who rejected the legacy of the eighteenth century and emulated classic English poets and the great writers of Greece and Italy instead; who wrote movingly about love and melancholy; but whose poetic career was cut short early in the 1820s before he had realized his full potential.97 Barry Cornwall, a few years older than Keats and a few younger than Hunt, began his career as an author in much the same way as Keats did. Though qualified in a profession—in his case, the law—he became completely devoted to literature and aspired to make his living by writing. (The nom de plume that he adopted, made up from the letters of his real name and at best a thin disguise, was devised originally to separate his literary and professional identities.) Like Keats, he started by contributing poems to periodicals. Like him, he published three volumes of verse before 1821: Dramatic Scenes and Other Poems (1819), A Sicilian Story, with Diego de Montilla, and Other Poems (1820), and Marcian Colonna, an Italian Tale, with Three Dramatic Scenes, and Other Poems (1820). These books established a pattern. As the titles indicate, each began with a few substantial works but also included miscellaneous shorter poems such as sonnets, songs, and verse epistles. Cornwall’s publisher at this stage was the firm of C. and J. Ollier, who also published Hunt, Lamb, and Shelley, but who had broken with Keats after his first volume. Later on, in 1829, Cornwall and Keats both enjoyed the advantage of a Galignani compendium volume (fig. 14), though Cornwall was linked with Milman, Bowles, and John Wilson rather than with Coleridge and Shelley, so the advantage would turn out to be a mixed blessing.

Keats and Cornwall had many interests and topics in common; both, for example, wrote poems on the seasons, the arts, and mythological subjects. Both looked to books for inspiration, especially to English writers of the Elizabethan age, though both also admired and imitated some of the great names of the generation just before their own, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge. They were published side by side in Annals of the Fine Arts in 1820: Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with Cornwall’s sonnet to Michelangelo. Cornwall’s A Sicilian Story, its title echoing Hunt’s The Story of Rimini, was his version of the tale from Boccaccio that Keats also reworked and published as “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” some months later. They knew one another, though they were not close friends; it seems that Cornwall thought more highly of Keats’s work than Keats did of his.98 But that might have had something to do with the fact that the reviewers and the public took an opposite view. At the time that Keats left for Italy, Cornwall was a rising star. His books had sold out and been reprinted—by 1821 there were

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