Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle.(Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Jeffrey N. Cox. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii+278. $59.95.

We have been using the notion of a group or "circle" of individuals in romantic studies for decades--for example, in the title of Hyder Rollins' collection of papers centered on Keats (The Keats Circle, 1948), in the title of Kenneth Cameron and Donald Reiman's more elaborate assemblage centered on the Shelleys (Shelley and His Circle, 1961--), and in such routine phrasings as show up in the headnote to the Keats-Shelley Journal's annual bibliography covering "articles, reviews, and book-length studies of Byron, Hazlitt, Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, John Keats, and their circles." But until quite recently, these circles have designated little more than an accumulation of superficial connections among people who corresponded with one another, or lived in the same town or neighborhood, or worked in the same office, or published with the same journal or press. The ways in which the group as a whole might have influenced a writer's style and thinking have not been much considered, and the writer's style and thinking have not been much considered, and the writers have continued to be...

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