‘Cockney School of Poetry. No. IV’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. III, no. XVII

August, 1818

Storage Journal AP4 B53

Edinburgh: William Blackwood

Today, John Keats is a bright star in the poetic constellation. However, in his lifetime he was considered part of the ‘Cockney School’, a group of writers associated with the weekly paper the Examiner and its editor Leigh Hunt. John Gibson Lockhart produced a series of articles for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine mocking the Cockney School, and his arrogant critique of Keats was particularly vicious. Noting Keats’s previous employment, Lockhart wrote, “It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John’. Another journal, the Quarterly Review, also attacked Keats, leading poet Percy Shelley to claim (falsely) in his 1821 elegy Adonais that harsh reviews had doomed his friend.