stopped by a poet

It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens. When I was very young, reading Shakespeare and Blake and Keats, or when, in adolescence, I began reading Yeats and Eliot and Pound, my experience of reading invariably strengthened an existing sense of vocation. Because this experience, the fact that reading great poets increased my confidence, never varied, I had no reason to examine it. Then something completely different happened; then a door was shut very sharply. Reading Stevens, I felt I would never write, and because I didn’t want this to be true, I had to look more closely at those early experiences, and at the new, to find the source of the verdict.

—Louise Glück, “Invitation and Exclusion,” Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994)

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