Leigh Hunt's revised Feast of the Poets surveys the community of writers whose work sustained him during imprisonment in Surrey Gaol, including Moore and Byron who visited him there. The Feast of the Poets encapsulates the leading passions of Hunt's life—poetry and politics. The British Critic detected in the poem 'an affectation of the easy and the familiar style' amounting to 'low and vulgar flippancy'. Building on this work, this chapter explores Hunt's rhetoric of sociality, its ethical and aesthetic implications, its impact on the value of his poetry, and the effect of placing Hunt's verse in a Victorian context. Surprise is of key importance at the levels of sense and sound in Hunt's poetry, and his poems are most effective when intimacy is momentarily forgotten so that it can be re-introduced in a way that startles the reader. Hunt achieves sudden revelations of intimacy in two poems well known for different reasons.