3 - Keats and the “Cockney School”

Summary

In October 1817 Blackwood's ”Z.” launched a notorious attack on what he christened “The Cockney School of Poetry.” “Cockney” was (and still is) a name for anyone born within the sound of Bow Bells in the City of London, but Z. expanded the definition:

Its chief Doctor and Professor is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects. He is a man of little education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of Latin, and his knowledge of Italian literature is con- fined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr Hoole.

In Z.'s anatomy, a “Cockney” lacked taste and education but was full of “vulgar” pretension. The term was a class slur by which the well-educated Tories portrayed their liberal counterparts as ill-bred social climbers. Its most important aspect by far, especially in the case of Keats, was poetic manner. This essay examines “Cockney style” and traces Keats's shifting, and problematic, relation to it.