David Schurman Wallace David Schurman Wallace is a writer living in New York City.

Dead Poet Anxiety | John Ashbery in the Age of Social Media

David Schurman Wallace

Sometimes the best thing for a poet’s reputation is to die. It is preferable to do this while still young — a brief life can acquire a powerful shape, in the way Keats’s “This Living Hand” is more charged for breaking off abruptly. We stand, as they say, on the shoulders of giants, and after they are interred in the pantheon, we draw from their mythos as well as their...