Although John Hamilton Reynolds has been remembered primarily as the intimate friend of John Keats and Thomas Hood, and as the friend of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, he also deserves recognition as a significant minor poet in his own right. His strongest genre was satire, and he would still be known for his satirical masterpiece, Peter Bell, with its uproarious mockery of William Wordsworth's faults and limitations, even if he had not been so close to the four greater Romantics. It would be ironic if he should be recalled only for that ridicule, for he was strongly indebted to Wordsworth in three of his best poems: to An Evening Walk in The Eden of Imagination; to the Lucy poems in Margaret; and to Tintern Abbey in Devon. His most ambitious poem, The Romance of Youth, written during his early friendship with Keats in his period of intense...