Leigh Hunt
1784-1859

Publisher

(James Henry) Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt was born in 1784. His first collection of poems appeared in 1801. In 1808 he founded and edited The Examiner, the first of many journals he was to initiate. In 1813 he and his brother John were sentenced to two years' imprisonment for libelling the Prince Regent in The Examiner. Hunt was a lifelong supporter of the Romantic Movement in general and of Keats, Shelley and Byron in particular. His name was linked with Keats and Hazlitt in attacks on the so-called “Cockney School”. In his Hampstead home he gathered together a group of seminal poets, writers and artists.

In his journal The Indicator he published in 1821 Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", and in a journal founded jointly with Byron, The Liberal, appeared in 1822 works not only by himself but also those of Shelley and Byron.