Daisy Hay. Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. ISBN: 978-0374123758. Price: US$27.50

Daisy Hay’s group biography starts from the engaging premise that both Romanticism and biography have tended to focus on the individual. It has, of course, been a long time since we believed that Romantic poets spent their days wandering lonely as clouds. The Romantic poets, both the first generation of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and the second generation of Shelley, Keats and Byron (to limit to the canonical), are now seen as political and sociable writers who often collaborated and revised each other’s work. The solitary genius has, then, been toppled in scholarship on the poems, but have biographies tended to retain their focus on the life of the individual? Biographies of Shelley, Mary Shelley, Hunt, Byron and Keats have already portrayed these figures in relation to each other, and explored the political and poetic importance of sociability. Hay does offer something different though, in the first group biography which seeks to characterize all five lives through their friendships, and which pays almost equal attention to all its protagonists. Young Romantics combines a focus on friendship with a return to intentionality; the readings of the poems are focused on what they reveal about the friendships, and how the friendships illuminate the text. In a book which will reach a wider audience than academic articles and monographs, Hay portrays the Romantics as champions of sociability, friendship and community, rather than solitary, tragic individuals. Leigh Hunt is central to this project of socializing the Romantics, and Nicholas Roe and Anthony Holden (among others) have portrayed him as intrinsically enmeshed in a social and political network, never allowing him to be an isolated figure. As his friendships with Shelley and Byron developed, Hunt lead The Examiner into more literary ventures and it was he who first characterized these poets as an identifiable group. In an 1816 Examiner article entitled “Young Poets,” Hunt heralded the birth of a new school of poetry. He claimed that a new generation of poets “called to mind the finer times of the English Muse,” before the stiff neoclassicism of Pope, he suggested. The poets Hunt had yoked together, John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats and Shelley, were pleased with the publicity but, as Hay shows, Hunt’s move was not entirely philanthropic; “Young Poets” was also a way for him to claim them as his finds. A year after the “Young Poets” article, Keats’ and Shelley’s connection with Hunt would leave them the objects not of praise but of censure and scorn. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published the first of two articles on the “Cockney School,” articulating stunning (and politically motivated) snobbery, sneering at Hunt and Keats in particular as suburban, politically radical and insufficiently educated. These personal and bigoted attacks damaged Keats, but Hunt seems to have twisted them to his advantage. The articles further solidified the notion of a ‘school’ of poetry connected with Hunt, whether praised as the “Young Poets” or dismissed as “Cockneys.” A year later, Hunt published Foliage, a collection of his poems including those addressed to Shelley, Keats, Byron, Reynolds, Marianne Hunt, her sister Bess, Lamb and Hazlitt. Hunt’s collection was also explicitly about friendship, as he asserted that the “main features of the book are a love of sociality [and] of the country.” For Hunt, friendship and sociability were not only the optimum conditions for creativity but also political, philosophical and aesthetic principles: “I write to enjoy myself; but I have learnt in the course of it to write for others also; and my poetical tendencies luckily fall in with my moral theories.” This was a powerful statement of intent, but not all Hunt’s …