SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Rowley Poems by Thomas Chatterton, Woodstock Books, 1990, n.p.

In the following essay, the anonymous critic contends that Chatterton's popularity with later writers such as John Keats and William Wordsworth had more to do with the romance surrounding Chatterton's youth, his suicide, and his forged poetry than with the specific quality of his literary output.

In September 1819, two days after composing To autumn—‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’—Keats remarks in a letter, ‘I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn’. To which he adds, apparently without connection:

He is the purest writer in the English Language. He has no French idiom, or particles like Chaucer—’tis English Idiom in English Words. I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it … English ought to be kept up.

The previous autumn Keats had spent nursing his dying younger brother, Tom. That...