ABSTRACT
The 'Cockney School of Poetry' was a term coined in Blackwood's Magazine (Oct. r8r7) as a way of denigrating Leigh Hunt and his circle, esp. Hazlitt and Keats, for the vulgarity and licentiousness supposed to be attendant on their low birth and urban manners. B.'s own background and literary-political sympathies make it inconceivable that he seriously endorsed such sneers; he later knew Hunt personally and greatly admired both Keats and Hazlitt. The sensual subject-matter of the first poem, and the reductive punning of both poems, do however represent some of the qualities for which the 'Cockney School' was attacked. B. himself did not escape the 'Cockney' label; Carlyle, who first met him at Leigh Hunt's house in 1836, recalled him later as 'speaking in the Cockney quiz-dialect' and as 'a dainty I.eigh-Huntish kind of fellow, with much ingenuity, vivacity and Cockney gracefulness' (Maynard 7 and 392 n. 16). Edward Fitzgerald, less charitably, referred to B. in a letter as 'Cockney Profound or Metaphysical'.
