Thomas Chatterton: Poet and a Fraud

I may be inconsistent in posting but you can be sure that I will post on Saturdays, just to let you guys know.
I am like half asleep now but let's do a post! (talking partly to myself and partly to you)

Unusual Death: Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton was a poet whose gifts are largely unnoticed, he would sit and write and read all day when a child. He was a child of the eighteenth century and also was a fraud.

A representation of his death by Henry Wallis.

Poetry gives poets the opportunity to paint the world in their own image, though Tom chose to write in the guise of another.  He said that the were by Thomas Rowley who was a fifteenth century poet and monk. Yet even though he was proclaimed a fraud, the brilliancy of his poetry is unanimous. A modernized snippet from exclassics.com of a poem of his:

"[Look in his gloomed face, his sprightly there scan;How woe-be-gone, how withered, forewarned, dead!Haste to the church graves, accursed man!Haste to the coffin, the only bedroom bed.Cale, as the clay which will grow on thy head,Is Charity and Love among high elves;Knights and Barons live for pleasure and themselves.]"

You must notice how beautiful flowing his poetry is, but when you read it closely you can see a little of the depression he suffered. He had stopped eating, depression had overcome him. When he was offered food, he said he was not hungry, in truth he had not eaten in three days.  He returned to his attic where he had once written marvelous poems, now he was poor in money and in happiness. He carried with him a bottle...of arsenic. He drank it then tore his literary remains. He was only seventeen.



Yet you might not know that he is a Romantic poetry icon, a poem by John Keats was dedicated to him, and he is the subject of novels.


Sources:

1911 Encyclopedia Britannia: Thomas Chatterton: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Chatterton,_Thomas

Special Collection Department: Forging a Collection: Thomas Chatterton and the Rowley Forgeries: http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/forgery/rowley.htm