died of being himself

In 1896 William Morris died at the age of sixty-two. Morris was one of the most talented and respected figures in the Victorian Era, but the superhuman range and pace of his vocations—painter, architect, designer, craftsman, writer, book-maker, socialist crusader—caused one physician to attribute his death to "simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."

http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/3/1896

art of non-words

About a secret of poetry: It has been said that poetry is an art of words. But poetry is an art of words only to the extent to which it is also an art of non-words; indeed, silence ought to be omnipresent in poetry, very much as death is forever present in life.

—Lucian Blaga, from The Élan of the Island, 1946. (Translated by ANDREI BANTAÛ.)

great themes

Well, I am preoccupied with the great themes: death, love, the weather.

—John Ashbery, interview by Peter Rose, Melbourne Writers Festival in 1992, 24 Hours (journal of the Australian Broadcasting Corp./ABC)

time itself

Hegel said that art was a thing of the past. It pleases me to say: to the contrary, poetry is a question for the future, so much so that the future itself belongs to poetry, is poetry. Without poetry there will be no future. The time that would see poetry die will itself be just another death.

Poetry does not have a time: it is time.

—Adonis, "A language that exiles me," boundary 2, (Vol 26, No.1, Spring 1999) translated by Pierre Joris

live and/or die

Famous controversial revision: W.H. Auden changed the last line of his poem "September 1, 1939," from "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die."

regal word

Gold rusts, steel decays, marble
crumbles. Everything readies for death.
The firmest thing on Earth is sorrow,
and most lasting is the regal word.

—Anna Akhmatova

step barefoot into reality

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of
    life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
     among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into
     reality,

They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

From “Large Red Man Reading” by Wallace Stevens

et in arcadia ego

and they shall read on the beautiful square monument
the inscription that chills my heart at all hours,
that makes me strangle so much sorrow in my breast.

—Jacopo Sannazano (1458-1530), Italian poet, Arcadia, 1502

Et in Arcadia ego: 'Even in Arcadia I am', this Latin phrase implies that death comes even in a place of great beauty and ease. The painting above, by Nicolas Poussin(1594–1665), is titled "Et in Arcadia ego."