Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Gould Fletcher
Nijinsky's ballet, Stravinsky's music, and the city of Paris all helped create John Gould Fletcher's "first period of full poetic inspiration." The Sacre de Printemps (1913) confirmed his determination to become a modern poet, rebelling against saccharine prettiness and attempting to fuse painting, poetry, and music in his work. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Fletcher was the son of a banker and cotton broker. He was educated privately and at Harvard (1903-1907), from which he resigned in his senior year. In 1908, after having inherited a sizeable income upon the death of his father, he traveled to Italy and then settled in London, which remained his home until 1933.
In 1913 Fletcher spent seven weeks in Paris, enjoying Postimpressionist art, opera, and theatre. He met Ezra Pound with whom he shared an interest in the French Symbolists, and Pound persuaded him to lend financial support to Harriet Weaver's little magazine the Egoist, for which Pound had agreed to serve as literary editor. Other expatriate friends included the artists John D. Ferguson and Anne Rice and the poets Horace Holley and Skipwith Cannell. Cannell became Fletcher's disciple, abandoning rhyme and meter for vers libre. Pound later introduced Fletcher to Amy Lowell, and as foreign correspondent for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Pound sent Fletcher's work to its editor Harriet Monroe.
Before going to Paris, Fletcher had begun a series of poems he named "Irradiations." Intoxicated by Parisian life, he now forged his own style, writing a poem a day. Attempting to "follow the inner rhythm of [his] moods," and discarding precedent, he soon completed the series. To him Stravinsky's music had revealed that great art is Dionysiac, ecstatic; "Irradiations" reflects this insight. In 1915, upon the appearance of his work in the first volume of Amy Lowell's anthology Some Imagist Poets, and the publication of Irradiations Sand and Spray, Fletcher won acclaim as an Imagist and innovator. Though he soon left the Imagist movement, his work is often mistakenly considered only in the context of that movement.
In 1923 Fletcher returned to Paris, where James Joyce was the idol of the postwar expatriates. Though Fletcher had seen Joyce only once, he had read Ulysses (1922) and considered the book as the manifestation of a breakdown of values following World War I. Fletcher admired Joyce's courage and honesty, but he believed that Ulysses portrayed mankind as "merely animal, grovelling in a sty." Fletcher found the life-force not in Stephen Dedalus, but instead in the unsavory Leopold Bloom, and therefore he concluded that the novel showed idealism to be a failure. As a counterblast to Ulysses, which he believed to be a portrayal of man motivated by lust and greed, Fletcher wrote Parables (1925) and Branches of Adam (1926), which upheld man's search for God as the theme of all great poetry. Despite this difference in philosophy from Joyce, Fletcher had some influence upon postwar poets,most notably Conrad Aiken and Hart Crane.
In contrast to his frequent appearance in the Egoist, T.S. Eliot's Criterion, and many American little magazines, Fletcher wrote little for the postwar publications in Europe. In 1922 his poems appeared in two issues of Broom, edited by Harold Loeb in Rome, and later in the decade he published one poem in the May 1927 issue of Eugene Jolas's Paris-based transition. Another Paris little magazine, This Quarter, edited by Edward Titus, published a poem and an article about French painting by Fletcher in 1930.
Though Fletcher returned to Paris again in 1925 and 1930, the experience was disheartening. To him Paris was "a mob of barbarians": no longer a cultural center but "a seething chaos." Perhaps partly in reaction he turned to Agrarianism, writing his "regional" books XXIV Elegies (1935), South Star (1941), and The Burning Mountain (1946), all of which express his love of nature and the primitive, and his despair over a mechanized civilization. Fletcher had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1932, and as Edmund S. de Chasca says an "atmosphere of defeat surrounds his later career," although his 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems (1938) enhanced his reputation as an established poet. In 1950 he drowned himself in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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