"Monody on the Death of Chatterton" was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1790 and was rewritten throughout his lifetime. The poem deals with the idea of Thomas Chatterton, a poet who committed suicide, as representing the poetic struggle. Background The 1790 version was part of Coleridge's collecting his juvenilia in 1793. It was first printed in 1794 as a preface to Chatterton's Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. The 1794 version was slightly altered, had 36 lines added to it, and was included in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796). These changes reflect Coleridge's involvement over the summer of 1794 with Southey, his experience with his later wife Sara Fricker, and pursuing a democratic ideal society dubbed Pantisocracy. After his marriage with Fricker, his involvement with William Wordsworth and his sister, and his progressing further into a Romantic mindset, Coleridge altered the poem again for the 1797 second edition of Poems on Various Subjects. With Wordsworth as his close poetic companion, Coleridge began to look down on the "Monody" as an inferior poem. When Southey wished to print a revised version of the poem for a work on Chatterton, Coleridge wrote: on a life and death so full of heart-going realities as poor Chatterton's, to find such shadowy nobodies as cherub-winged Death, Trees of Hope, bare-bosomed Affection and simpering Peace, makes one's blood circulate like ipecacuanha. But it is so. A young man with strong feelings is impelled to write on a particular subject, and this is all his feelings do for him. They set him upon the business and then they leave him. he has such a high idea of what poetry ought to be, that he cannot conceive that such things as natural emotions may be allowed to find a place in it; his learning, therefore, his fancy, or rather conceit, and all his powers of buckram are put on the stretch. The "Monody" wasn't printed again until 1803 for the third edition of Poems on Various Subjects. When Coleridge collected his works in the 1817 Sibylline Leaves, he did not include "Monody". It was not until the 1828 edition of the work that "Monody" was added to the "Juvenile Poems" section, but it was the 1796 version although Coleridge did alter the work between 1803 and 1828. However, the 1829 edition of Sibylline Leaves did