"Leigh Hunt is the forgotten giant of English Romanticism. The man Virginia Woolf called the 'spiritual grandfather' of the modern world was descended from black Caribbeans and grew up a child of the American and French Revolutions. A poet and radical journalist, he threw off the shackles of the old order and campaigned tirelessly for Irish freedom and the abolition of slavery. Unwilling to see the Prince of Wales as an 'Adonis in Loveliness', Hunt was jailed for a 'diabolical libel' that presented the Prince as he was: a corpulent fifty-year-old, sodden with drink and drugs." "Hunt was at the centre of a charismatic generation. In prison he drew the homage of Lord Byron, and soon afterwards discovered the Romantic geniuses of Keats and Shelley. He was also a man riven by contradictions, enjoying a controversial public role while battling with private demons. Hunt's own poetry glows with the sexual frankness that characterised all his relationships, male and female."--Jacket.