This reminds me of the time-travel novel The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. In it, a professor of literature, an expert on the romantic era poet William Ashbless, travels back in time and gets stranded. He tries to meet Ashbless at several locations the poet had reported being at and Ashbless never shows up. Eventually the professor starts calling himself William Ashbless and wrote all of the poet's works by memory and had them published in the same places that he knew that Ashbless had published them. Which means that no one actually wrote these poems. I remember a golden age science fiction short story where a traveler to the future brings back a knife from the future, which eventually winds up in a museum. A time traveler travels to the future and retrieves the knife from the wreckage of the museum. The knife was never made, it just exists in an endless loop like Ashbless' poetry.
This reminds me of the time-travel novel The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. In it, a professor of literature, an expert on the romantic era poet William Ashbless, travels back in time and gets stranded. He tries to meet Ashbless at several locations the poet had reported being at and Ashbless never shows up. Eventually the professor starts calling himself William Ashbless and wrote all of the poet's works by memory and had them published in the same places that he knew that Ashbless had published them. Which means that no one actually wrote these poems. I remember a golden age science fiction short story where a traveler to the future brings back a knife from the future, which eventually winds up in a museum. A time traveler travels to the future and retrieves the knife from the wreckage of the museum. The knife was never made, it just exists in an endless loop like Ashbless' poetry.