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This article unravels an apparent paradox: an imitation of John Pomfret's 1699 poem of the same title, Leigh Hunt's 1823 “The Choice” appears in a reformist journal but embodies a retirement poem, the retirement mode typically viewed as quietist or reactionary in its politics. Grasping Hunt's goals in turning to the retirement mode requires recognizing the upsurge of lower-middle-class interest in such poetry after 1790, an increase reflecting a new concept of retirement among city-bound readers barred from the rural estates celebrated in such poems: retirement as the reading or writing of retirement poetry. Once retirement poetry internalized the ideal-real contrasts central to its urban, middle-class reception, such verse acquired a reformist function that attracted Hunt. Such poems highlighted the trammels of Cockney life and, through their foregrounding of the unreality of rural retirement, invited utopian speculation. The association of Hunt's poem with Pomfret also amplified its reformist resonances: not only a favorite of middle-class professionals reading to escape daily cares, Pomfret's ubiquity in canon-making anthologies, in an era when taste and politics were fused, represented a challenge to elite literary and political judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]