Selected Poems
by John Gould Fletcher
Summary
This 1938 Selected Poems traces John Gould Fletcher's full arc as a poet, from his early experiments as a founding member of the Imagist movement through to the more traditionally rooted, regionally grounded work of his later career, and reading the volume in order shows how completely his style changed across that span rather than settling early into a single fixed manner. His earliest collections, including Irradiations: Sand and Spray in 1915 and Goblins and Pagodas the following year, worked in the free verse, sharp visual imagery and long, color saturated sequences that Ezra Pound praised for their individuality of rhythm and that Amy Lowell called an absolute mastery of free verse's own rhythm, poems built from foreign cities and landscapes observed with an outsider's heightened visual attention.
The later poems gathered in this selection move in a different direction entirely, toward the more measured, regionally rooted poetry Fletcher wrote after his eventual return from England and Europe to his native Arkansas, where he became active with the Southern Agrarian movement and contributed to its manifesto, I'll Take My Stand. That later work trades the earlier collections' modernist experiment for a settled attention to the hills and landscape of the American South, still carrying Fletcher's long visual sequences and feel for color but now rooted in a single, specific home landscape rather than the cosmopolitan settings of his Imagist years.
Reading the Selected Poems means tracing one poet's complete journey from cosmopolitan modernist experiment to regional rootedness, and it suits a reader curious about how an original member of a major modernist movement could arrive, decades later, at poetry openly aligned with a very different, more traditionalist regional literary politics.
Historical Context & Significance
John Gould Fletcher won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this Selected Poems, becoming the first poet from the American South to receive the award. Fletcher had spent much of his early career in England and Europe as one of the founding Imagists, working alongside Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell before eventually returning to his native Arkansas and aligning himself with the Southern Agrarian writers.
He and his second wife, the author Charlie May Simon, co founded a home called Johnswood after his return to Arkansas, and he remained active in Southern literary circles for the rest of his career. Fletcher died by suicide in 1950, drowning himself in a pond near his home, closing out a career that had moved further, in both geography and literary politics, than almost any other poet's in this stretch of Pulitzer winners.