Bibliography
- This Side of Paradise. 1920.
- Flappers and Philosophers. 1920. (Short stories.)
- The Beautiful and Damned. 1922.
Studies and Reviews
- Lond. Times, June 23, 1921: 402.
- See also Book Review Digest, 1920.
John Gould Fletcher—poet, critic.
Born at Little Rock, Arkansas, 1886. Studied at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and at Harvard, 1903-7. Has lived much in England.
Suggestions for Reading
1. Read the prefaces to Irradiations and Goblins and Pagodas for Mr. Fletcher’s theory of poetry before you read the poems themselves. Has he succeeded in making the arts of painting and music do service to poetry?
2. After reading the poems, consider the justice or injustice of Mr. Aiken’s criticism: “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.”
3. Do you find any poems to which the quotation given above does not apply? Are these of more or of less value than the others?