"I am not quite satisfied with the Chatterton, and with your leave shall try my hand at it again. A master joiner, you know, may leave a cabinet to be finished, when his own hands are full" but Coleridge refused any of his suggestions. During the late 19th century, J. D. Campbell points out that "'Monody' was one of the first poems (if not the first) of any importance composed by Coleridge, and, down to the end of his life, he never missed an opportunity of tinkering it". In 1942, I. A. Gordon declared that "Coleridge's Monody on the Death of Chatterton can never be regarded as one of his greatest poems, but it can lay a fair claim to be considered one of his most interesting; and in one respect at least it is unique. The Monody took him no less than forty-four years to beat into its final form, and if we can credit his statement that some lines of it were written 'in his thirteenth year as a school exercise' the forty-four years are stretched to almost fifty." By 1975, Samuel Chew and Richard Altick declared: "[Coleridge's] addiction to 'turgid ode and tumid stanza,' clogged with pompous rhetoric and frigid personification, is evident in the Destruction of the Bastille (1789) [...] and in the Monody on the Death of Chatterton which was later (1794) completely rewritten.". Notes References Campbell, J. D (editor). The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London, 1893. Chew, Samuel and Altick, Richard. A Literary History of England (1789–1939). London: Routledge: 1975. Fairbanks, A. Harris. "The Form of Coleridge's Dejection Ode". PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 5 (October 1975): 874–884. Mays, J. C. C. (editor). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge British poems 1790 poems 1794 poems 1796 poems 1797 poems 1803 poems 1829 poems 1834 poems