A minor episode of deception is associated with Schack Staffeldt. When he published his first volume of poetry in 1804, it was almost identical in appearance to a work that had appeared the year before--Digte (Poems, 1803), by Adam Oehlenschläger, who was Staffeldt's colleague but ten years his junior. It had the same title, the same title page, the same modern typography, the same publisher, and a similar division of the contents into two separate sections. In spite of the conspicuous physical resemblance, Staffeldt included with his poems a statement that the contents had been written before Oehlenschläger's collection was published. This claim was demonstrably not true, and two years later, when the younger rival cemented his status as foremost poet of Denmark with the two-volume Poetiske Skrifter (Poetic Writings, 1805), Staffeldt's work was already a thing of the past. For a long time his unfortunate...