535. EBB to John Kenyon

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 188.

74 Gloucester Place

[mid-August 1836] [1]

Offered for sale in Sotheby’s Catalogue, 5 April 1894, lot 215. 2 pp., 8vo. On the subject of “Paracelsus,” EBB writes: “The poetry is ‘a living creature’ is it not? deficient perhaps in harmony and concentration, but beautiful and powerful …” Speaking of Hunt she says: “Smile at and be angry with his singularities as we may, when all is done, we feel that he is a poet … Where did he get his affectations, when his own Chaucer was so natural?” [2]

1. Dated by the comments on Paracelsus, which EBB mentions reading in the previous letter.

2. “The First Canto of the Squire’s Tale of Chaucer Modernized,” published by Leigh Hunt in The Liberal, IV (1823), 317–331.

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