Ironhorse wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2017 8:03 pm
I went with Percy Bysshe Shelley for FJ, knowing he was a libertine and that he died early in that decade. I completely forgot about Lord Byron.
Me too, even though I just finished re-reading
The Anubis Gates in which he figures as a character. (Great read, BTW.) So I even knew his approximate dates. Shelley just seemed like such a great guess. He has a mural tablet in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. He was noted for his atheism which is a pretty solid reason to believe Westminster Abbey would have declined to house his mortal remains. But when Mrs P suggested Byron at the end of the think music, I instantly suspected she was right.
Keats (died 1821, buried at Protestant Cemetery in Rome, has a mural tablet in Poets' Corner at Westminster) didn't strike me as a good guess because I didn't remember any scandalous behavior. Ditto for Coleridge (died 1834, buried at Old Highgate Chapel, London, has a memorial bust at Poets' Corner), whose opium addiction probably excited more pity than censure in that time period. Wordsworth was a non-starter because he's well-known as the only major Romantic poet to have lived into old age. (Died 1850 at age 80, buried at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere, no known scandals and was in fact Poet Laureate and has a monument at Poets' Corner.) The only other possibility is William Ashbless who isn't non-fictional enough to be a good guess.
I hereby declare Shelley to be the best wrong guess for this FJ.