It is August 24, 1770. A seventeen-year-old boy lies lifeless in an attic in Brook Street, London. He took opium and arsenic and fell into an eternal sleep. Three days earlier he was walking in the cemetery of Saint Pancras with a friend and, absorbed in his own thoughts, he did not notice an open tomb and fell into it: the friend, playing down the incident, said he was happy to witness the resurrection of a genius. The boy's response was not in the same tone: "My dear friend, I've been fighting with the grave for some time now."

The genius in question is the very young and talented poet Thomas Chatterton, known in those decades that preceded the full rise of Romanticism. He was one of the clearest examples of how a strong interest in the ancient poetic style was gradually growing. He was in fact obsessed with the Middle Ages and the poetry of that time. He strove to write in an English that could resemble the language of the fifteenth century as closely as possible, composing verses that one could believe belonged to three centuries ago.

Born in Bristol in 1752, Chatterton always had a certain fascination with the ecclesiastical and ancient world. He grew up in the aisles of the church of Saint Mary Redcliffe, learning to read from an old musical folio. He was always disinterested in purely childish activities. His sister in fact narrated how, when asked what he wanted painted on a bowl, he replied: "An angel with wings and a trumpet, so that he can make my name resound on the world." He spent his childhood locked up in the archive of Saint Mary Redcliffe, imagining that he lived in the Middle Ages, at the time of Edward IV (mid-15th century).

His literary work revolved around the name of Thomas Rowley, a 15th-century monk he imagined: this was the pseudonym he adopted in composing his own poems. Not finding a patron in Bristol, he turned to Horace Walpole, the famous author of the gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, but when he discovered that the poet was sixteen, he chased him away.

In London he began to collaborate with some magazines, even if this activity did not allow him to live an economically serene condition. He wrote eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, both in prose and in verse. In Holborn (London) he shared his room with a companion who was able to notice how he spent the night writing non-stop. He composed a novel that he pretended to have transcribed from a parchment, Excelente Balade of Charitie, which was rejected by the publishers.

He ended his days as already mentioned, between starvation and poverty, refusing the offers of food that were made to him by his neighbor. A couple of days after Chatterton's death, Dr. Thomas Fry was able to recompose (from some fragments found scattered on the floor of the room and collected by the owner in a box, with the hope that there might be a note written there before the suicide ) the piece from one of the poet's last lyric compositions: an alternative ending of Aella, A Tragical Enterlude, the tragedy that tells of Aella's battle against the Danes and the betrayal of her faithful knight Celmonda, who tries to abuse Birtha, wife of the protagonist. Aella, having returned to the castle wounded after the battle, and discovering that his wife has run away with a "stranger" (Celmonda had thus presented himself taking advantage of Aella's absence to kidnap Birtha), stabs himself, dying as soon as his wife - in meanwhile saved by the Danes - she crosses the threshold of the building. Birtha collapses on the body of her deceased husband.

This tragedy contains the song of a minstrel that seems to foretell the end of the couple. Here is a fragment:

"His hair is black like a winter night.
Her skin is white as snow in summer,
Vermilion like the morning light on her face,
Cold he lies down there in the grave:
My love is dead,
He went to his deathbed
Under the weeping willow "

Despite the sad end of the young poet, posterity has made his figure immortal: famous is the picture painted by the painter Henry Wallis, which portrays Chatterton in his deathbed. It was also an inspiration for romantic poets such as William Blake and John Keats, who was united to him by the untimely and tragic death of him and who dedicated Endymion to him in 1818.

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever": this is how Endymion opens, to celebrate the beauty that never dies out.