Thomas Chatterton | Biography

Of all English poets, Thomas Chatterton seemed to his great Romantic successors most to typify a commitment to the life of imagination. His poverty and untimely suicide represented the martyrdom of the poet by the materialistic society of his time. William Wordsworth, listing in "Resolution and Independence" (1807) those poets to whom he owed most, describes Chatterton as

       the marvellous Boy,

The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a monody on Chatterton; Robert Southey edited his poems (1803); John Keats dedicated Endymion (1817) to him; in "Adonais" (1821) Percy Bysshe Shelley ranks Chatterton with Sir Philip Sidney as "inheritors of unfulfilled renown":

                      Chatterton

Rose pale,--his solemn agony had not

   Yet faded from him...

Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. Alfred de Vigny, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Francis Thompson wrote about him;...
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