Do Only Poets Die Too Young?

I’m an instant fan of any man who calls our language “sweet.”

James Elroy Flecker at Cambridge, ca. 1905

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.”