18th Century
A01=Thomas Chatterton
Author_Thomas Chatterton
Category=DCF
Category=DSB
Category=DSC
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9781857546927
- Weight: 153g
- Dimensions: 134 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 24 Apr 2003
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'The marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride'
Wordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, he fell in love with the medieval world and escaped into it from miserable schooling and the drudgery of apprenticeship. He read and then wrote 'medieval' poetry which he passed off as genuine. When the poems he wrote in his own name brought him some success, he went to London to seek his fortune as a writer. After six months' struggle, too proud to admit defeat, starving and alone, he killed himself in his attic room. He was seventeen.
There is more to Chatterton than the romantic archetype. His poetry was admired by Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth; as Grevel Lindop says in his introduction, 'Chatterton's work contains in essence the whole of Romanticism'. This selection, with its detailed notes, shows the historical significance and unexpected range of Chatterton's poetry, and also enables the reader to enjoy it for its rich resonance and wonderfully memorable rhythms.
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride'
Wordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, he fell in love with the medieval world and escaped into it from miserable schooling and the drudgery of apprenticeship. He read and then wrote 'medieval' poetry which he passed off as genuine. When the poems he wrote in his own name brought him some success, he went to London to seek his fortune as a writer. After six months' struggle, too proud to admit defeat, starving and alone, he killed himself in his attic room. He was seventeen.
There is more to Chatterton than the romantic archetype. His poetry was admired by Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth; as Grevel Lindop says in his introduction, 'Chatterton's work contains in essence the whole of Romanticism'. This selection, with its detailed notes, shows the historical significance and unexpected range of Chatterton's poetry, and also enables the reader to enjoy it for its rich resonance and wonderfully memorable rhythms.
Thomas Chatterton was an English Poet whose distinguishingly precoicious career ended with his suicide, aged 17. From the age of 11, he was producing mature work - by nature he was a thoughtful child, tending to sit deep in though for protracted periods. In 1770, in London, after a dissapointing search for a patron, he poisoned himself with arsenic. GREVEL LINDOP was born in Liverpool and now lives in Manchester, where he was formerly a Professor of English at the Victoria University. His books include A Literary Guide to the Lake District; The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey and editions of Chatterton, De Quincey and Robert Graves's The White Goddess. He has published six volumes of poems, including Playing With Fire (Carcanet, 2006) and Luna Park (2015).
