Abstract
“Ods Bodyguards!” to quote Leigh Hunt parodying Robert Southey,”1 my title seems odd; but the political, literary and personal antagonism between Southey and Hunt marks one of the oddest, most vitriolic disputes in literary history. It was conducted by eccentric, strong-willed personalities engaged in a unique clash over cultural and political power that helped define the character of Regency Romanticism. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey Cox,2 scholars of Romantic-era writing have become well aware of the great significance of this intense conflict, particularly in its wider role within the sustained culture wars between so-called Lake and Cockney Schools that determined much of the poetical and political character of Romanticism during the Regency era. The last decade has witnessed a substantial outpouring of new work on Hunt’s Cockney coterie and its various reactions against Southey’s apostasy from the cause of liberal reform to assume the government position of Poet Laureate in 1813. This important work has received a useful balance even more recently by an impressive surge of innovative editorial and critical work on Southey.3 Those developments, coupled with the current volume’s fresh outlook on the Regency years as a key, demonstrable phase within the history of Romanticism, has created a ripe opportunity for revisiting this famous quarrel between Hunt and Southey while also re-appraising both its internal dynamics and its overall impact on Romantic-era literary culture.
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Notes
The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. Greg Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox. vols 1–2, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003, 2: 108. 6 vols, gen. eds., Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-Sinatra. References to this edition will hereafter be noted parenthetically in the text.
Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
For Hunt, see Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe, London: Routledge, 2003; Nicholas Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt, London: Pimlico, 2005; Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene: A Reception History of his Major Works, London: Routledge, 2005. For Southey, see Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, 5 vols, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004; Robert Southey: Later Poetic Works, ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, 4 vols, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012; Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006; Carol Bolton, Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.
David Stewart, “The Examiner, Robert Southey’s Print Celebrity and the Marketing of the Quarterly Review” Prose Studies, 31.1 (2009): 22, 34.
Charles Mahoney, Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 115.
Hunt, The Examiner, May 9, 1813, “Table-Talk,” p. 300; Charles Mahoney, “‘The Laureate Hearse Where Lyric Lies’: Hunt, Hazlitt, and the Making of Romantic Apostasy, 1813,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24.3 (2002): 240.
Greg Kucich, “‘The Wit in the Dungeon’; Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries,” Romanticism on the Net, 14 (1999). https://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1999/v/n14/005850ar.html. Accessed May 28, 2015. Kucich, “Cockney chivalry: Hunt, Keats and the aesthetics of excess,” Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe, London: Routledge, 2003, 118–34.
Tim Fulford, Lynda Pratt, and Daniel E. White, eds. Poems from the Laureate Period 1813–23, vol. 3 of Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811–38, ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, 4 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012, 15.
Hunt, The Story of Rimini, London: J. Murray, 1816, 3: 257–258.
Keats, Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott, London: Longman, 1970. All citations from this edition are noted parenthetically by line number in the text.
Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. 1: 193.
Byron, The Vision of Judgment, Byron. Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page; Corrected by John Jump. London: Oxford University Press, 1970, 514, 608, 640.
Stewart, “The Examiner, Robert Southey’s Print Celebrity and the Marketing of the Quarterly Review,” 30.
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© 2016 Greg Kucich
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Kucich, G. (2016). Of Precious Loobies, Bag Wigs, and Posthumous Orators: Leigh Hunt’s “Resurrection” of Robert Southey. In: Fulford, T., Sinatra, M.E. (eds) The Regency Revisited. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137504494_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137504494_9
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