The poems were scribbled - sometimes in ink, sometimes in pencil - very carelessly on the first pieces of paper that came to hand - sugar bags, the back of bills and torn bits of white paper. I rescued them from among old school copybooks and some later notebooks. These poems were written between his sixteenth year and the time of his death at eighteen years and nearly six months. He was buried in Adath Jeshurun Cemetery, in Frankford, Philadelphia, on April 3. He was identified by a library card in his pocket. His body was found on April 1 of the same year by some workmen doing river work at the foot of Arch Street. His mysterious disappearance caused a great deal of comment in the Philadelphia papers, on one of which, The Press, he was employed as a copyholder in the proof-room at the time of his death. His heart was the Mystical Rose stuck in a dung-heap.WALTER DECASSERES was born in Philadelphia on August 12, 1881, and threw himself into the Delaware River some time during the night of February 4, 1900. On the exquisite keyboard of his nerves Satan and Medusa executed in thunder-tones the Ninth Symphony of Pain. There was a colossal mirror in his brain that reflected the hells of the Past and the grinning disillusions of the Future. He was the mystery of precocious and elemental genius. He abridged the agony of years he curtailed his Drama to a curtain-raiser he compressed life to a song and a curse. He was a boy who spurned his manhood before he had lived it. The fury of a Titan foiled of his heaven, the frenzied paroxysms of a star-traveling eagle trying to gnaw its way out of its cage of flesh and bone, the rage of Ixion as he picks up the stone that he is doomed to roll forever and hurls it with imprecations against the ramparts of the gods: that was Walter DeCasseres, who, in his eighteenth year, went with the same passionate hurry and joy to the Everlasting Sleep as Youth hurries to the breasts of Venus. He walked out of life with a gesture of sublime disdain that raised him to the shining summits of the Morning Star, where the souls of all child-gods go. He walked in the few years of his life with the Crazy Beauty which hallucinated the souls of Shelley, Keats, Poe, Blake and Heine.

SUBLIMITY is that which transcends circumstance by an act of beauty or sacrifice.

The Sublime Boy by Walter de Casseres