Bright Stars

Solicitor, dandy and pugilist, Cornwall - pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874) - published his first poems in the Literary Gazette in late 1817. By February 1820, under the tutelage of Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, Cornwall had produced three volumes of verse. It is difficult to square Cornwall's early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect. This book concentrates on Cornwall's success between 1817 and 1823 and explores Cornwall's rivalry and political camaraderie with Keats, whose career exists in a mirrored relationship with his own trajectory into celebrity.