ABSTRACT
Leigh Hunt liked to display his worship for Spenser, to criticize poetry, and to write of Mayday and rural pleasures. Hunt, whose experience of the festival was limited to the London processions of chimney sweeps, suggests that the May Day of his time has been reduced to a remnant' of its former glory by the necessities of war and trade'. Hoping to revitalize interest amongst all classes, Hunt promotes a festival that is to be part of a shared culture; he is uninterested in regional variation, preferring instead to champion a generic national May Day inspired by Elizabethan literature. Attributing the decline of May Day to the dominance of commerce and con ict, Hunt describes nature as having been abandoned. Hunt's stress on the continuity between human activity and nature suggests that his discussion of May Day would be pro tably addressed in relation to eco-criticism.
