A Connection between Chatterton and Wordsworth in Two Coleridge Poems

Abstract

Chatterton’s precocious display of talent, the scandal surrounding the cre ation of the so-called Rowley manuscripts, his premature death by suicide at the age of seventeen and a half in 1770 all conspired to turn him into the Romantic embodiment of young, misunderstood genius, the “marvellous Boy, / The Sleepless Soul that perished in his pride” (ll. 43 – 44) of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” the dedicatee of Keats’s Endymion , the inspiration behind Shelley’s “Adonais.” 1 David Fairer points out that “ode-writers who wished to address a personified Fancy, Pity or Despair, found they could address Chatterton and thereby evoke all three.” 2 Over the course of his much longer life, Coleridge identified closely with Chat terton’s plight, and most biographical and critical studies about Coleridge dwell on his and others’ interpretation of him as someone whose preco cious promise did not lead to the results one might have expected of one so talented. Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” has received rela tively little critical attention despite the fact that Coleridge worked on vari ous versions of this poem from 1785, when he was thirteen years old, until the year of his death, 1834. 3 I agree with I. A. Gordon that a “poem which for half a century continued to exercise an author of Coleridge’s abilities