20:20 vision presents a long list of geniuses who died young:
Keats added to art’s martyrology by dying at 25. Shelley lasted until he was 29 when, recklessly eager for extinction, he drowned in a storm off the Italian coast. Byron, having reached decrepitude at 36, pointlessly perished during a chivalric escapade in the Greek war of independence.Romantic writers worked with an almost crazed acceleration, aware that maturity was a death sentence. Georg Buchner, battling meningitis and depression while fending off political persecution, revolutionised dramatic form in plays like Danton’s Death (written in five weeks) and Wozzeck (part of the Barbican’s Young Genius season), which he hadn’t quite finished when he died of typhus in 1837, aged 23.
Pushkin single-handedly invented Russian literature, then died in the same year as Buchner in an inane duel; he was 38, and had disgraced himself by outliving his self-destructive idol, Byron. Baudelaire paid tribute to the artist’s stubborn refusal to accept inexorable time: genius, he said, was childhood recovered at will (and with the aid, although he didn’t say so, of hashish).
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A Lancashire lad called Jeremiah Horrocks noticed errors in the calculations of planetary orbits while he was still a teenager, and correctly calculated the transit of Venus. Horrocks published his findings in 1639, and died suddenly two years later; he was 22.In 1832 Evariste Galois challenged an acquaintance to a duel in order to avenge a woman’s honour. The night before the meeting, he sat up to record his mathematical testament, a prophetic exposition of abstract algebra. In those few hours, he invented what we call group theory. Galois was killed the next morning. As peritonitis from his wound wracked him, he said to his brother: ‘Don’t cry. It takes all my courage to die at 20.’