"But they who shared with me my life's adventure. Who tossed their ducats like dandelions into the sunlight, I know that somewhere they with songs are building, Golden Towers more beautiful than my own."
—"Golden Symphony"
Here we have a series of books—two more are planned—that restore to view the literary career of John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950), a writer whose work has been heretofore more often cited than read. These handsome books give a new and well-framed access to the lifework of a significant modern man of letters.
Fletcher is today remembered best as a pioneering Imagist poet, one present at the creation, one to be mentioned with T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and H.D., but also one who went his own way, being the disciple of none. It's rather quaint to read in Amy Lowell's Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) that "for the discerning eye, no living poet has more distinction of vision or of style. In [John Gould Fletcher], indeed, we see the beginning of that new order of which I have so often spoken. To the poet, he is a real teacher, indicating new directions, opening up untrodden ways of thought." The new directions and untrodden ways of the revolution of the Image led toward modernist masterpieces like Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, The Waste Land, The Bridge, Paterson,...