James Elroy Flecker was a British poet, playwright and novelist, born in 1884. He attended Oxford and Cambridge. Flecker's death at age thirty-one from tuberculosis was a premature literary loss on the order of Keats, it was said at the time. Flecker wrote these words undoubtedly anticipating his own demise:
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
"To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence" by James Elroy Flecker
Flecker’s works include “The Golden Road to Samarkand,” “Hassan,” and “Don Juan.”
They always seem to have tragic ends, or maybe the ones with the tragic ends are famous because of that? Thought provoking and I always love a good 19th century poem!