ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of the concept of the genius artist. It briefly discusses these two notions and their combination in the legacy of Addison and Young in England, Diderot and Rousseau in France, and of the German pre-romantic movement Sturm und Drang. Schiller’s notions of naïve and sentimental poetry and their impact on the romantic image of the artist are discussed. The second part of this chapter examines the emblematic figure of Chatterton and its uses by the romantic poets in constructing the myth of the artist. It explores how the figure of “the boy poet” and the idea of forgery were creatively integrated into romantic aesthetics, and briefly illustrates this with two examples from the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alfred de Vigny.
