Selected Essays of John Gould Fletcher

About

Like most of his contemporaries, poet John Gould Fletcher was drawn to criticism because of the opportunity it presented to express his own deeply held philosophical beliefs. Critical journalism also offered Fletcher a chance to make his living as a man of letters.

Selected Essays of John Gould Fletcher brings together for the first time a representative selection from Fletcher’s voluminous critical writings. Ranging in subject from Modernist poetics to Asian art, these essays reveal a keen, insightful intellect coming to grips with the central artistic problems of the most revolutionary period in modern literature, painting, music, and philosophy.

First published in Poetry, North American Review, Southern Review, and Criterion, and other leading cultural journals of their day, Fletcher’s essays are arranged in three groups: poetry and poetics; appreciation of individual writers; and essays on art and philosophy.

Significant and long overdue both in terms of the light it sheds on Fletcher and the evolution of the Modernist movement, the collection should challenge all serious students of literature and general readers alike.

Series

“The intent of the series is to present the best of Fletcher’s writing along with a generous selection of critical studies concerning Fletcher’s life and work. It is to be hoped that the series will reawaken and stimulate interest in a writer who, almost forty years after his death, is becoming known as perhaps the most representative poet of American literary modernism.”
—Lucas Carpenter in the preface to Selected Poems of John Gould Fletcher