The Rowley Poems, 1794

Chatterton--forger, poet and prodigy--took arsenic at the age of seventeen in 1770, the year of Wordsworth's birth. In so doing he established a Romantic myth that has distracted attention from the extraordinary qualities of his poetry. Still more discouraging to modern readers is the pseudo-medieval spelling adopted by Chatterton in passing his poems off as the work of a fifteenth-century priest. The myth, however, can be ignored, and the diction ceases very rapidly to be a problem. To Sharpe, as editor of the 1794 edition (with its first printing of the Coleridge Monody) it seemed that 'Whether the author may have been Rowley or Chatterton. . . [his poems] fully entitle him to be ranked in the fourth place among our British Poets'. Certainly they entitle him to be read.