SOURCE: "Leigh Hunt's 'Cockney' Aesthetics," in The Keats-Shelley Review, No. 10, Spring, 1996, pp. 77-96.

In the following essay, Wu examines Hunt's poetical aesthetics, his relations with Wordsworth as a critic, and his influence on Keats's poetry.

In October 1817 J. G. Lockhart launched his notorious attack in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine on what he christened the 'Cockney' school. 'Its chief Doctor and Professor', he wrote, 'is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects.'¹ Most critical accounts of Hunt's influence on Keats approach the subject from the point of view of such detractors as the ideologically-motivated Tories who regarded it as their duty to attack such radicals as Hunt. In this paper I want to examine Hunt's 'Cockney' aesthetics through his eyes, using...