John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, January 3, 1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts) and Harvard (1903-7) and, after spending several years in Massachusetts, moved to England, where, except for brief visits to the United States, he has lived ever since.

In 1913, Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which he has referred to as “his literary wild oats,” five small collections of experimental and faintly interesting verse. Two years later, Fletcher appeared as a decidedly less conservative and far more arresting poet with Irradiations—Sand and Spray (1915). This volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; imagination riots through it, even though it is often a bloodless and bodiless imagination. It is crowded—even overcrowded—with Æsthetic subtleties, a sort of brilliant and haphazard series of improvisations.

In the following book, Goblins and Pagodas (1916), Fletcher carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates him; the ambitious set of eleven “color symphonies” is an elaborate design in which the tone as well as the thought is summoned by color-associations, sometimes closely related, sometimes far-fetched, “It contains,” says Conrad Aiken in his appreciative chapter on Fletcher in Scepticisms, “little of the emotion which relates to the daily life of men and women.... It is a sort of absolute poetry, a poetry of detached waver and brilliance, a beautiful flowering of language alone—a parthenogenesis, as if language were fertilized by itself rather than by thought or feeling. Remove the magic of phrase and sound and there is nothing left: no thread of continuity, no thought, no story, no emotion. But the magic of phrase and sound is powerful, and it takes one into a fantastic world.”

Meanwhile, Fletcher has been developing. After having appeared in the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths rather than surfaces. Beginning with his majestic “Lincoln,” his work has had a closer relation to humanity; a moving mysticism speaks from The Tree of Life (1918), the more obviously native Granite and Breakers (1921) and the later uncollected poems. Although the unconscious too often dictates Fletcher’s fantasies, a calm music dominates his shorter poems, a grave and subdued lyricism moves and enriches them.