Wednesday 16th October 2013
Book Launch and talk
WORDSWORTH’S CHATTERTON
Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), author of Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760 – 1830 (Palgrave, 2013)
Thomas Chatterton haunted generations of poets and artists long after his untimely death in 1770 at the age of seventeen. Coleridge, Southey, Robinson, and countless others dedicated elegies, odes and monodies to his memory. Keats, by his own claim, favoured the boy-poet’s quirky neo-medieval idiom over Milton’s Latinate style.
Rossetti, Browning and Wilde, among others, rediscovered him anew in the second half of the century. Wordsworth, though, did more than any other poet to shape the reception of Chatterton, whom he famously, perhaps even infamously, dubbed ‘the marvellous Boy / The sleepless soul that perished in its pride’. But what did Wordsworth glean from the youngster’s works?
Ticket £10; £7.50 Students and Friends of Chawton House Library
6.30 p.m. Drinks, 7.00 p.m Talk