Lit Genius Editors - Young Guns and Old Masters: An Age Comparison Chart for Writers lyrics

Youthful Fire 16 Arthur Rimbaud writes “Le Bateau ivre” (The Drunken Boat). 18 Rimbaud writes “Une Saison en Enfer” (A Season in Hell). 19 Dylan Thomas writes (or publishes) his first major poems, including “And d**h Shall Have No Dominion,” “Before I Knocked,” and “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” 20 John Keats writes “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.” Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein. Rimbaud retires from writing. 23 Keats writes his sequence of Great Odes. Carson McCullers publishes The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. 24 Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes “Ulysses.” Langston Hughes publishes The Weary Blues. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes The Sorrows of Young Werther. 25 Ernest Hemingway publishes In Our Time. W. B. Yeats publishes “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Keats dies. 26 T. S. Eliot publishes Prufrock and Other Observations, which includes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge joint-publishes Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth (who was 28). Percy Bysshe Shelley writes “Ozymandias.” Dylan Thomas begins to slow down, having produced over eighty percent of his body of published work. Hart Crane completes his debut poetry collection, White Buildings. 27 Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises. 28 John Milton writes “Lycidas.” William Wordsworth joint-publishes Lyrical Ballads with S. T. Coleridge (who was 26). Flannery O'Connor publishes “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Albert Camus publishes L'Etranger (The Stranger). F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby. 29 Emily Brontë publishes Wuthering Heights. James Baldwin publishes Go Tell It on the Mountain. Allen Ginsberg debuts “Howl.” Sylvia Plath writes most of her Ariel poems, many in the few weeks preceding her 30th birthday. Percy Bysshe Shelley dies, possibly by suicide. 30 William Shakespeare completes Romeo and Juliet. Hart Crane publishes The Bridge. Plath composes her final Ariel poems and dies by suicide. Middle-Aged Inspiration 39 George Eliot publishes her first novel, Adam Bede. Ralph Ellison publishes his first novel, Invisible Man. Robert Frost publishes his first poetry collection, A Boy's Will. 42 Vladimir Nabokov publishes The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel written in English. Marcel Proust publishes the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. 44 Wallace Stevens publishes his first poetry collection, Harmonium. 56 Sophocles writes Antigone, arguably his first major play. 57 Miguel de Cervantes publishes the first volume of Don Quixote. 58 John Milton publishes Paradise Lost. Late Mastery 65 Laura Ingalls Wilder publishes the first book in her Little House series. 66 Elizabeth Bishop publishes Geography III. 67 Miguel de Cervantes publishes the second volume of Don Quixote. 68 Sophocles debuts Oedipus Rex. 73 W. B. Yeats completes his final poems, including “Lapis Lazuli” and “Under Ben Bulben.” 75 Leo Tolstoy completes his final novel, Hadji Murat. Wallace Stevens completes his final poems, including “Of Mere Being,” written a few days before his last hospitalization. 76 Anna Akhmatova works on her magnum opus Poem Without a Hero, begun 20 years earlier, until her d**h. 82 Goethe finishes writing Faust Part Two (Part One having been published when he was 59). 83 Jorge Luis Borges publishes his last short story, “Shakespeare's Memory.”