Eleanor M. Gates. Leigh Hunt: a Life in Letters.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Essex, CT.: Falls River Publications, 1998. Pp. xxxi+693. $44.95.

Whether or not Leigh Hunt knew everyone that was anyone in nineteenth-century letters (as it is sometimes said), he was undeniably at the center of one of the most important literary circles of the romantic period. Jeffrey Cox has recently suggested that second-generation romanticism could be known simply as "the Hunt era," since the cluster of writers Hunt brought together and labeled the "Young Poets" and the "New School"--Keats, Shelley, Byron--in the event became the core of the Regency-era poetic canon. (That Hunt included J. H. Reynolds in the list is a salutary reminder of the vagaries of canon-formation.) Moreover, Hunt's suggestive if ambivalent association of this New School with the Lake School was among the earliest constructions of the British romantic canon as a whole. This is one reason so many critical treatments of the reception of the younger romantics, in particular, from Marilyn Butler on the "Cult of the South" and Marjorie Levinson on Keats's "vulgarity," to more recent books by Jeffrey Cox and Nicholas Roe on the significance of the "Cockney School," have perforce focused on Hunt and his wide influence.

All of this lends support...

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