Forging Fame

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. Examining Iris' grandiose fantasy, Craig Abbott exposes his forgery, plagiarism, and imposture.

As a child, Iris had emigrated 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, and continued publishing until two years before his death in 1967. With energy and persistance, the minor Chicago poet insinuated himself among the great and famous and simulated a life of literary stardom. Iris's self-projection as a neglected poetic genius often was designed to translate into monetary value, while confirming his role behind the scenes of twentieth-century literary history. Granting Iris the attention he haplessly courted all his life, Abbott discovers a forger of fame whose story provides a commentary, often parodic, on the place of poetry in his time.