Pyramid of Cestius an essential sight for many who undertook the Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was much admired by architects, becoming the primary model for pyramids built in the West during this period. Percy Bysshe Shelley described it as "one keen pyramid with wedge sublime" in "Adonaïs", his 1821 elegy for John Keats. In turn the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy saw the pyramid during a visit to the nearby Protestant Cemetery in 1887 and was inspired to write a poem, "Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats", in which he
The Death of a Soldier unpredictable. One is always writing about two things at the same time in poetry and it is this that produces the tension characteristic of poetry. One is the true subject and the other is the poetry of the subject. Then Lemercier's death would be the true subject, and the poetry of the subject would be anyone's death. "The Death of a Soldier" and other works by Stevens lead Bates to describe Stevens as "a war poet, after his fashion", and Ramazani's "Stevens and the War Elegy" expands on that idea, especially as it relates to post-"Harmonium" poems that are informed