Home

The Rowley Poems by Thomas Chatterton

“Most people know the legend of Thomas Chatterton -- brilliant poet who failed to make a living, starved himself to send expensive presents to his family, and died by his own hand at seventeen -- much better than his poems. Like all legends, it is partial and exaggerated, but was a powerful influence on the Romantic movement and long after. The painting "The Death of Chatterton" by Henry Wallis epitomises this reputation. His fame rests, apart from this almost unbearably romantic life story, on his "Rowley Poems". These he wrote in a sham Middle English dialect, and passed off as the work of Thomas Rowley, a priest of Bristol in the fifteenth century, and some of his friends. The imposture was quickly detected (though some continued to believe in him for many years), but they were published in a collected edition after his death and were popular and much admired by the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, who dedicated "Endymion" to the memory of Thomas Chatterton.”

Pseudodoxia Epidemica:
OR,
ENQUIRIES
Into very many Received
Tenents
And commonly presumed
Truths.

By Thomas Brown Knight, M. D.
Based on The Sixth and Last Edition of 1672

Thomas Brown’s Vulgar Errors treats the opposite of orthodoxy, pseudodoxy. An intelligent and readable presentation of an amusing classic.

Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791)

“Throughout his political career Hopkinson wrote poetry and satire on the politically derisive issues of the day. He penned a popular and humorous work on the 1787 Constitutional Convention. He was also an accomplished harpsichordist and composer. His work "My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free," set to the words of Thomas Parnell's "Love and Innocence," is the first extant secular song by a native American composer.”


“WHEN FROM THE TENSE CHORDS OF THAT MIGHTY LYRE.”

I
WHEN from the tense chords of that mighty lyre
The Master’s hand, relaxing, falls away,
And those rich strings are silent for all time,
Then shall Love pine, and Passion lack her fire,
And Faith seem voiceless. Man to man shall say,
“Dead is the last of England’s Lords of Rhyme.”
II
Yet — stay! there’s one, a later-laureled brow,
With purple blood of poets in his veins;
Him has the Muse claimed; him might Marlowe own;
Greek Sappho’s son!—men’s praises seek him now.
Happy the realm where one such voice remains!
His the dropt wreath and the unenvied throne.
III
The wreath the world gives, not the mimic wreath
That chance might make the gift of king or queen.
0finder of undreamed-of harmonies!
Since Shelley’s lips were hushed by envious Death,
What lyric voice so sweet as this has been
Blown to us on the winds from over seas?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich [1836–1907]