Famous Literary Feuds Explored at Lit Hub

Lit Hub's Emily Temple ranks 25 "legendary literary feuds"! The intro alone is worth the read:

...I wouldn’t count Hans Christian Andersen overstaying his welcome at Charles Dickens’s house a feud, no matter how bad his manners. Same goes for Rimbaud and Verlaine’s gun-toting lovers’ quarrel. And alas, I must also exclude Ayelet Waldman’s 2011 Twitter-salvo to Katie Roiphe: “I am so BORED with Katie Roiphe’s ‘I like the sexist drunk writers’ bullshit. She happily trashes my husband, but guess what bitch? He not only writes rings and rings and rings around you, but the same rings around your drunken literary love objects.” (Oh look, there, I included it. Hey, no wonder Roiphe doesn’t like Twitter.) On the other hand, some writers have had so many good feuds (ahem, Salman Rushdie) that I’ve had to pick and choose from among them (John le Carré over Mo Yan; Updike over Francine Prose). 

And yes, the poets do make an appearance:

John Keats vs. Lord Byron

To be fair, this is more of a perennial rivalry than a true feud. Bryon was a snob and mega-privileged; Keats was middle-class and jealous of Byron’s success. Neither liked the other’s work, and both were weirdly bitter about it. John Keats, who was quite short, reportedly exclaimed to a friend after reading a good review of Byron’s work: “You see what it is to be six foot tall and a lord!” Lord Byron, after reading a good review of Keats’s, wrote to a friend:

Of the praises of that little dirty blackguard KEATES in the Edinburgh—I shall observe as Johnson did when Sheridan the actor got a pension. “What has he got a pension? then it is time that I should give up mine.”—Nobody could be prouder of the praises of the Edinburgh than I was—or more alive to their censure—as I showed in EB and SR—at present all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article.—Why don’t they review & praise “Solomon’s Guide to Health” it is better sense—and as much poetry as Johnny Keates.

Keats died of tuberculosis at only 25, and some of his friends, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, claimed that his death had been hastened by the stress caused by negative reviews of his work in The Quarterly Review. Byron found that hilarious. He even made fun of him, posthumously, in his famous epic poem Don Juan:

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, —without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: —
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Find more feuding at Lit Hub.