Keats had many and intense literary admirations. Some of these were seasonal and passed away with maturity: such were his youthful fondness for Beattie and Mrs. Tighe. Others were permanent and deepened with time: among these were his affection for Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer and his continued love for Homer and Dante. Keats's attitudes toward important writers of his day were varied. Toward a considerable group of them he appears to have been more or less neutral, at least non-committal; for others early admiration was later wholly or partially reversed, with Hazlitt, among those he first esteemed, virtually the sole exception to a modified estimate. Thus, his early devotion to Leigh Hunt gave way to critical coolness as he began to see through the fellow's weakness; and though he once read Byron with pleasure and praised his poetry in a sonnet, he later learned to despise him for what he regarded as insincerity and perverted taste. He sometimes praised Moore and on occasion imitated his verse, but in a more final judgment he classed him with Southey and Rogers as poets he did not like. His feeling for Wordsworth alternated between almost reverential acceptance and modified rejection. Keats owed much to Wordsworth and was, perhaps, in one way or another influenced by him to the end; but after meeting the poet in London in the winter of 1817-1818, he began to see traits in him not to his taste and was thereafter inclined to speak of him and of some of his work with reservations.