By Daniel Cook
Lengthy sooner than Wordsworth etherealized him as 'the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride', Thomas Chatterton used to be touted because the 'second Shakespeare' through eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, ranked one of the prime British poets by way of popular literary critics, and likened to the modern smooth prose stylists Macpherson, Sterne, and Smollett. His pseudo-medieval Rowley poems, specifically, engendered a renewed fascination with historic English literature. With Chatterton as its case examine, this booklet deals new insights into the formation and improvement of literary scholarship within the interval, from the periodical press to the general public lecture, from the evaluate to the anthology, from textual to biographical feedback. cook dinner demonstrates that, whereas significant students came across Chatterton to be a pertinent topic for a number of literary debates within the eighteenth century, through the top of the Romantic interval he had turn into, and nonetheless continues to be, an unsettling version of hubristic genius.
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Extra info for Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830
Example text
His alleged suicide dramatically substantiated the link between poetic rapture and madness, and demonstrated to young readers the need to fortify inborn talent with hard-earned judgement. Some attributed his achievements to the irrational, unfathomable powers of natural genius, while others seized the opportunity to undermine from within the academy’s garish fascination with ancient English poetry. The linguistic rust, some said, masked rather ordinary modern writing or, at best, extended the ballad tradition newly popularized by Percy.
Eighteenth-century textual criticism emerged from classical philology and biblical hermeneutics, most notably in Richard Bentley’s essays on Phalaris and his edition of Paradise Lost (1732) and in Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753). The intention in those accounts, as in Shakespeare studies increasingly, was to recover the uncorrupted meaning of the verbal texts. ’66 The Rowley papers, likewise, needed an authorial figurehead. It did not matter which one. Like Ossian the Gaelic bard, or even James Beattie’s minstrel, the medieval priest seemed most appropriate.
45 Without maturity genius lacks restraint. Wordsworth, of course, had Chatterton firmly in his purview when he conceded that ‘we poets in our youth begin in gladness / But thereof in the end comes despondency and madness’ (‘Resolution and Independence’). ’46 Dryden, too, famously proclaimed that ‘Great wits are to madness near allied’ (‘Absalom and Achitophel’), not, it is worth noting, as the result of intrinsic flaws but as a consequence of frustrated social ambitions. Many commentators in the eighteenth century assumed that an educated person would progress from childhood to adulthood in distinct stages of improvement.
