The Double Cosmic Births of Thomas Chatterton and the Rowley Myth
Poets involved
What happened
In Bristol, England, a dirt-poor, brilliant teenager named Thomas Chatterton discovered a cache of ancient parchment scraps in a church chest. He used them to forge an entire corpus of beautiful, complex medieval poetry under the pseudonym of a fictional 15th-century monk named Thomas Rowley. He successfully deceived the entire literary establishment for years before his desperate poverty led him to commit suicide by drinking arsenic at the tragic age of 17, right before his genius was fully recognized.
Literary impact
Chatterton's tragic life and uncanny literary deception became the ultimate founding myth for the Romantic poetry movement. He was romanticized by John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the 'marvelous boy,' directly inspiring the Romantic obsession with doomed youth, tragic genius, and medieval revivalism.
Source: Wikipedia
