James Elroy Flecker was a late-Romantic lyric poet of considerable technical accomplishment who also wrote two plays. The first was an apprentice work, Don Juan; the second was the poetic drama Hassan, a near masterpiece, which illuminated the English theater of the 1920s and which stands as a unique contribution to modern poetic drama.

Although he was born in South London, Flecker grew up in Cheltenham, a pleasant spa town on the edge of the Cotswolds. His father was a clergyman and headmaster of Dean Close School, a Victorian public school with a strong evangelical connection. The young Flecker received a classical education at the school and at Uppingham before gaining a scholarship in 1902 to read classics at Trinity College, Oxford. The university saw the first flowering of his talent after a thorough but somewhat oppressive Victorian upbringing. At Oxford he encountered the last flourishes of the Aesthetic...