ABSTRACT
During 1814, the imprisoned Hunt contributed poems to The Examiner. As Edmund Blunden writes, ‘The versifying habit grew upon Hunt himself, and from this time a series of political satires in doggerel metre variegates his newspaper. His sonnets on Hampstead, flowery little pieces blooming like poppies, also showed how his mind was proceeding’. In January 1814, Hunt published two satires on the former radical Robert Southey, who had been appointed Poet Laureate in September 1813 following the death of the previous incumbent Henry Pye. The first, ‘On the New Poet Laureat’, attacks Southey’s tergiversatory politics. A fortnight after the appearance of ‘On the New Poet Laureat’, Leigh Hunt published ‘The New Year’s Ode’, an acerbic review of the Laureate’s first ex officio offering, ‘Carmen Triumphale, for the Commencement of the Year 1814’. Embedded within the review are two parodic stanzas penned by Hunt himself.
