John Gould Fletcher was associated with two major groups of poets: Amy Lowell's imagists and the Southern renaissance group The Fugitives. He was, however, a rugged individualist, who believed that as a modern writer he must be open to every kind of experiment. His innovations with poetic form, based on painting, music, and French symbolism, along with the innovations of his associates under the banner of imagism, were an important force in the breakdown of the rigid conventions that they felt had dominated verse composition for at least two hundred years.

Like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Fletcher fled as a young man from the barren materialism of America to the cultural oasis of Europe. Later he became friends with Pound, and it was Fletcher's library and his practice of French symbolist ideas that introduced Pound to modern French poetry. Fletcher and Lowell, too, borrowed extensively from...