Forging fame

Craig S. Abbott

"If poets are "liars by profession," Sharmel Iris was truly professional. Poet, plagiarist, imposter, and forger, Iris engaged in a lifelong campaign of self-promotion that linked him to a constellation of leading writers and public figures - among them T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, Ezra Pound, Dame Edith Sitwell, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, William Wrigley, and Woodrow Wilson. "Of poets writing today, there is no greater," states a preface, signed by W.B. Yeats, to one of Iris's volumes of poetry - although at the time of publication Yeats had been dead for several years." "As a child, Iris had immigrated from Italy with his mother, who arrived in Chicago in pursuit of the American dream. Driven by ambition and narcissism, he began publishing poetry in 1905, participated in the Chicago Renaissance,...

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