Beware of those who recite poetry at parties

The Boston Globe investigates Adam Wheeler, accused of lying his way through the East Coast's elite universities, and finds the lies began with a little poetry:

Early in Adam Wheeler’s freshman year at Bowdoin College, he began cultivating the persona of what one friend called “an English guy,’’ a whiz with words who recited poetry at parties and infused even simple conversations with self-conscious and elaborate vocabulary. It had made some classmates regard him a misfit. And it did not impress his professors, several of whom thought him immature or simply unremarkable.

But then, in the spring of 2006, he submitted to an annual English department writing contest a spare, haunting poem called “This Much I Know’’ and won.

It would be a turning point for a boy so retiring that he was almost invisible. He became known as “the campus poet,’’ one of the most vaunted writers at the school. He made new friends. At parties and other occasions, he showed off poems scribbled on crumpled scraps of paper. Wheeler reveled in the elevated status, and in the years ahead he would transform himself again and again, always hungering for something bigger.

Bowdoin would learn only last year that Wheeler had stolen the poem from contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon, using its first line as his title, and revoked the prize. But long before that, some friends had recognized something overwrought in their classmate, a striving for something he could not attain . . .