The Sublime Boy: The Poems of Walter De Casseres

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. 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 body was found on April 1 of the same year by some workmen doing river work at the foot of Arch Street. He was identified by a library card in his pocket. He was buried in Adath Jeshurun Cemetery, in Frankford, Philadelphia, on April 3. These poems were written between his sixteenth year and the time of his death at eighteen years and nearly six months. I rescued them from among old school copybooks and some later notebooks. 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 have held them for twenty-six years with only a vague thought of having them published "some day" because of their great and intimate value to my personally. For when I read these poems the very fragrance and aroma - the distilled, unearthly essence - of the exquisite soul of Walter DeCasseres bathes me not only psychically but physically. He was literally a part of me, and in his poems I have always been able to summon the immaterial part of him to mingle with my own emotions and visions. So I resolved, many times, never to have his fragile creations published, but to let them die with me. But I have shown them to so many discriminating lovers of poetry (in whom the personal equation could not possibly enter) who have said such fine things about them that I have at last resolved to have them published.