The Man Who Died Twice by Edwin Arlington Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1925. The narrator of the poetic novel bumps into an old acquaintance, Fernando Nash, playing in a Salvation Army band in NYC. Nash had once been a promising young composer who cracked under the jealous scorn and derision of his peers. He descended into drunkenness and/or drug abuse. Now near the end of his life he has found God. Much of the poem is Nash telling his life story to the narrator, chronicling his pain, his degradation and final realizations.

Early in the poem, he is cursing himself:

"You insufficient phoenix
That has to bake at last in his own ashes --
You kicked out, half-hatched bird of paradise
That had to die before you broke your shell --
Who cares what you would be if you had flown?"

A rather tragic saga of a failed artist, but one who clings to the belief that he had it once:

"Once for an hour my cup was full
With wine that not a hundred if a score,
Have tasted that are told in history."

And the narrator agrees, seeing in him: "the ruin of a potential world shaker." ( )