Alan Seeger - I Have a Rendezvous with Death

This book… contains the record of a short life, into which was crowded far more of keen experience and high aspiration—of the thrill of sense and the rapture of soul—than it is given to most men, even of high vitality, to extract from a life of twice the length.
Alan Seeger had barely passed his twenty-eighth birthday, when, charging up to the German trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre, his «escouade» of the Foreign Legion was caught in a deadly flurry of machine-gun fire, and he fell, with most of his comrades,… To his friends the loss was grievous, to literature it was—we shall never know how great, but assuredly not small. (Introduction by William Archer to Poems by Alan Seeger.)