Epistle to Lord Byron and other poems

In the early nineteenth century, Leigh Hunt's Hampstead home was the gravitational center of English Romanticism. His dinner table drew Byron, Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Lamb into spirited conversation, and these verse epistles capture that remarkable congregation in its most intimate form. The title poem addressed to Byron crackles with wit, philosophical speculation, and the particular tenderness of a writer who counts a scandalous nobleman as his friend. Elsewhere, Hunt writes to Moore with playful erudition, to Hazlitt with essayistic candor, and to Lamb with a gentility that reveals his deepest literary affection. Also included are Hunt's translations from the ancients: Homer, Theocritus, Anacreon, and Catullus rendered into English with a lyricism all his own. These poems matter because they preserve the voice of the Romantics when they weren't performing for posterity, but simply writing to each other. For anyone curious about how genius talks to genius when no one else is listening.