Some of the best poetry has been written by people on the verge of death. It is hard for me to credit this because I myself cannot imagine writing, indeed doing, anything valuable when I am feeling low and out of sorts much less when in the throes of coping with that fearful and final antagonist. But then, I suppose, no one can really know until the thing actually happens. Certainly the imminent prospect of death seems to have been a spur for some of the finest compositions by artists, musicians and poets.
One of the greatest poetic meditations on death itself is contained in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. In this poem Keats, already doomed to die at the age of 26 from the then untreatable scourge of tuberculosis, muses on the immortal sublimity of the nightingale’s song and in the peace of that beauty accepts the welcome release of death: “Now more then ever seems it rich to die/To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Composed in the shadow of the poet’s dying, this is one of the most beautiful lyric poems ever written.
Other poets have faced up to and very exactly described the brutal experience which dying most often is. The American writer John Updike’s extraordinary collection of poems Endpoint never flinches for a
