Novel about a poet suicide...

[zapomel]

Hi all. I don’t know why I don’t post more often…

I have a shadowy idea in my head of something I read in many places. There was a young poet, contemporary of Byron’s. He killed himself, or died, anyway, very young.

Later, someone wrote a novel about him, in which it turned out he had faked his death and become ANOTHER famous poet, this time in France.

Does anyone know this book? And if so, was the story of his second life made up by the author, or was it contemporary with his “lives”? And of course, was the book good enough to read?

[AnnaLivia]

@zapomel

Hi all. I don’t know why I don’t post more often…

I have a shadowy idea in my head of something I read in many places. There was a young poet, contemporary of Byron’s. He killed himself, or died, anyway, very young.

Later, someone wrote a novel about him, in which it turned out he had faked his death and become ANOTHER famous poet, this time in France.

Does anyone know this book? And if so, was the story of his second life made up by the author, or was it contemporary with his “lives”? And of course, was the book good enough to read?

Might be Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton about Thomas Chatterton, who died at the age of about 18 (and may or may not have been a suicide).

If so, the second life is an authorial invention (which will become apparent in reading).

Can’t say anything about the quality, though.

AL