The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt?Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics
by Anthony Holden
Category: Biography & Autobiography

Poet, playwright and novelist, editor and critic, literary and political essayist, Leigh Hunt uniquely spanned two eras of English life and literature. A major player in the Romantic movement, the intimate and first publisher of Keats and Shelley, friend of Byron, Hazlitt and Lamb, he lived on to become an elder statesman of Victorian letters, companion and champion of Carlyle and Tennyson, Browning and Dickens. Jailed in his mid-twenties for insulting the Prince of Wales in The Examiner, Hunt was visited by many famous sympathizers. He continued to edit his paper throughout his two-year imprisonment. Dogged all his life by illness and debt, Hunt wrote an autobiography hailed by Carlyle as 'by far the best of Ýits¨ kind' in English, and ended his long, prolific life a candidate for the poet laureateship. He died otherwise forgotten, though once a celebrated national figure, the centre of a historic circle of poets, musicians and thinkers.