Songs About People # 83 Thomas Chatterton

Reading an anniversary article about Cobain's death and the writer states:

'The tortured rock star is only the most recent incarnation of the troubled artist cliché that has been around for centuries. From troubled painters like Caravaggio and Van Gogh and Rothko to poets and writers like Plath and Sexton and Hemingway. Creative talent and tormented minds, we are told, are sides of the same coin. 

I hate this idea.'

This reminded me of the Eighteenth Century British poet Chatterton who also committed suicide young, perhaps in his case to avoid the pressing charges of plagiarism that were gathering around him. A myth of course grew around him after his death too.