This page is intended to briefly introduce our readers to what is now known as the "Cockney School." The phrase was introduced and developed in Blackwood's Magazine in a serious of obstreperously critical articles published in 1817-9.

What emerged was a grouping that we call a "school," but which seemed to develop out of Blackwood's recognition of a literary coterie that centered on Leigh Hunt. The "Cockney School" has subsequently been used to periodize the Romantic movement and has guided twentieth-century critical responses to the poets so grouped in important ways. The Cockney School included: Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, John Keats and, to some degree, Charles Lamb, P.B. Shelley, and Lord Byron. The last two poets on this list were also considered to be of the "Satanic School."

A number of important literary/theoretical questions emerge from the notion of the "school." Some of them are:

How does a "school" get made? (This assumes that there is some sort of activity that makes a school; schools do not simply emerge, Athena-like. As well, is there a difference between a coterie and a school?) The process of canonization is raised with this question. If Hunt is seen as the center of the coterie, but, retrospectively, more canonical authors (particularly Keats) represent the school, we may ask if there is a cruscial difference between these two constructions.