"To a Poet Who Died Young" in Second April (1921), p. 52
Context: Many a bard's untimely death
Lends unto his verses breath;
Here's a song was never sung:
Growing old is dying young.
“Such were the notes thy once lov'd poet sung,
Till death untimely stopp'd his tuneful tongue.”
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet
"Epistle to Robert, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer" preface to Thomas Parnell's Poems on Several Occasions (1721).
“The Bards also, who by the praises of their verse transmit to distant ages the fame of heroes slain in battle, poured forth at ease their lays in abundance.”
Vos quoque qui fortes animas, belloque peremptas
Laudibus in longum vates dimittitis aevum,
Plurima securi fudistis carmina, Bardi.
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia
Book I, line 447 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
“Ah! when will this long weary day have end,
And lende me leave to come unto my love?
- Epithalamion”
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet
Source: Amoretti and Epithalamion
“There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath,
For a time.”
Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer
Battle of the Baltic (1805), st. 2 http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=3042&poem=17248; a poem about the Battle of Copenhagen
John Ross Macduff (1818–1895) Scottish religious writer
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 66.
“Vanquished in life, his death
By beauty made amends:
The passing of his breath
Won his defeated ends.”
Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) English poet
By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross (1895)
Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868) English historian and churchman
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 180.
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector
Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)
F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet
Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914
