Juvenilia (poetry collection)

The successful publication of these works prompted his father Isaac Hunt to collect his son's childhood poetry to publish them.

Under an agreement with the printer James Whiting, the Hunts collected subscribers with the support of his uncle and aunt, Benjamin and Elizabeth West.

The miscellaneous poems include: "Retirement, or the Golden Mean", "Remembered Friendship", "Christ's Hospital", "The Negro Boy, A Ballad", "Epitaph on Robespierre", "Written at the Time of the War in Switzerland", "Speech of Caractacus to Claudius Caesar", and "Progress of Painting".

Hunt's "Remembered Friendship" is similar to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's depiction of a childhood watching of the sky in Frost at Midnight.

[8] In an immediate review, the Monthly Mirror claimed that the poems were "proofs of poetic genius, and literary ability, which reflect great credit on the youthful author, and will justify the most sanguine expectations of his future reputation".

[2] Edmund Blunden, in 1930, argued: "The best poetical promise in Juvenilia was an occasional floweriness of colouring and personal fancy [...] But even in most juvenile passages the collection informs us of Hunt's boyish attainments and natural tastes, anticipating his later characteristics in several tendencies.

"[11] Anthony Holden argued, "The opening ode on Macbeth [...] is declared, as if by way of apology for its orotund emptiness, to have been written at the age of twelve.

Even so, it shows a remarkably precocious technique, as do the marginally more mature teenager's fluent if florid pastiches of Spenser and Pope, Dryden and Gay, Thomson and Johnson, even Akenside and Ossian".