Hunt, like Byron and Shelley, had curious ideas about the relation of the sexes, ideas which Hazlitt said, were "always coming out like a rash."[47] This "crotchet" was taken over likewise from Godwin, who thought it checked the progress of the mind for one individual to be obliged to live for a long period in conformity to the desires of another and therefore disapproved of the marriage relation. But, like Godwin and Shelley, Hunt bowed to the conventions. His life was a singularly pure one.
The influence of Hunt's poetry upon Keats and Shelley, in its general romantic tendencies, particularly in respect to diction and metre, deserves equal consideration with the influence of his politics upon Shelley and Byron. _Juvenilia_, a volume of Hunt's poems collected by his father and issued by subscription in 1801 contains original work and translations which show wide reading for a boy of seventeen and some fluency in versification. Otherwise the writer's own opinion in 1850 is correct: "My work was a heap of imitations, all but absolutely worthless.... I wrote 'odes' because Collins and Gray had written them, 'pastorals' because Pope had written them, 'blank verse' because Akenside and Thomson had written blank verse, and a 'Palace of Pleasure' because Spenser had written a 'Bower of Bliss.'"[48] Hunt's chief defect in taste, that of introducing in the midst of highly poetical conceptions, disagreeable physical conditions or symptoms, is as conspicuous in this volume[49] as in his more mature work.
The _Feast of the Poets_, 1814,[50] is a light satire in the manner of Sir John Suckling's _Session of the Poets_. It spares few poets since the days of Milton and Dryden, and it includes in its revilings most of Hunt's contemporaries. Gifford, the editor of the _Quarterly Review_, comes in for the worst castigation. It is not remarkable that the satire antagonized people on every side in the literary world as _The Examiner_ had done in the political. Hunt believed that "its offences, both of commission and of omission, gave rise to some of the most inveterate enmities" of his life.[51] It is important in the history to be discussed in a later chapter of the literary feud which resulted in the creation of the so-called Cockney School. Later revisions included some poets who had been intentionally ignored at first in both poems and notes, or who, like Shelley and Keats, naturally would not have been included in the 1814 edition; and it softened down the harsh criticism of those who were unfortunate enough to have been included, except Gifford, whom Hunt could never forgive. The irony is fresh and there are occasional spicy flashes of wit. The narrative is clear and the characterization vivid. Byron pronounced it "the best Session we have."[52]