Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School : Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Rating:
Summary: A superb re-imagining of the Keats and Co.
Review: This is perhaps the first study I've read that gives Leigh Hunt his due both as a writer and as the leader of the circle of writers we usually call "the Cockney School." It connects well-known writers of the second-generation of British Romanticism (Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Hazlitt) to very talented and important contemporaries like John Hamilton Reynolds, Horace Smith, and Hunt himself. We usually think that between 1798 and 1819 very little in the way of a cohesive movement for literary and political reform existed--what we usually read of is scattered and isolated--but this book shows something far more social, raucous, and celebratory.