Essayist, journalist, editor (of the Examiner, Indicator, Liberal), Hunt had much to do with establishing the reputations of Keats and Shelley, and collaborated at various times with Hazlitt and Byron. Rimini, relating the story of Dante's tragic lovers Paolo and Francesca, is his major poem, and important also for the post-Wordsworthian literary criticism of its Preface. Byron and Jeffrey praised it, Lockhart and Croker abused it, and out of the feuding came the notion of Hunt as King of the Cockney School of Poetry.
