Richard Howard on Frank O'Hara, quoted at Isola di Rifiuti: Alfred Leslie’s The Killing Cycle

“A man, in particular that emblematic man a poet, who by his surrogate office must stand, in particulars, for the generality—a man who dies at forty is at every moment of his life, we say, a-man-who-has-died-at-forty . . . and retrospectively we glean, in the course of a broken-off existence, the seeds of a destiny which, planted perhaps only by ourselves and cultivated however arbitrarily by our hunger for the inevitable, will bestow upon the blasted biography this flowering: a more grateful contour, an acceptable outline. We say, he was death-ridden, doom-haunted, and that he belonged to the race—as Thomas Mann said of Cocteau—which dies in the emergency ward.”