Word: whelp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This prototype of the self-annihilating artist seems yet another casualty of the rock culture; in fact, Thomas Chatterton perished in a London garret in 1770. Pondering the tragedy, William Wordsworth labeled him "the marvellous boy," and Samuel Johnson burbled, "It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." Not all the appraisal was so rhapsodic. Horace Walpole called Chatterton "an instance that a complete genius and a complete rogue can be formed before a man is of age." Genius because Chatterton's verses were so prodigious, rogue because the young poet once wrote in an archaic style, artificially...