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Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker

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Flecker was a British poet who died young but still managed to produce a brilliant collection of poems which are almost totally unknown among Americans. He is one of my favorite poets. He was a friend of Lawrence of Arabia and it is with Arabia that he is identified -- not the real Arabia, but a fantasy Arabia that was the locale of a play called Hassan, which was produced with music by Delius. At his best he is wonderful -- "the dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea"! One of his finest achievements was to write two poems, "Pillage" and "The War-song of the Saracens", which present the same situation from the viewpoints of the conquerors and the conquered, both poems being in the same metrical structure, but the first one being languid and the other one energetic.

This book is a reprint, page for page, image for image, of the 1916 edition of "The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker." After the horrible looking, grey blob photograph of Flecker, the rest of the book is thankfully legible, except for a poem or two where the first letter of each line is cut off/cut in half. But these negatives do not detract much from the book as a whole.

As it is with many other volumes of "Collected Poems", so this book contains some ok efforts and then there are some truly excellent poems, all mixed together. There is some humour, some exoticism (of the "Parnassian" school), some fine examples of pure Georgian verse, but I find that Flecker is at his best when he chooses as his subject a kind of "Arabian Nights" style orientalism (Note: Flecker was a friend of T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia"); which sometimes means quaint verse-dialogue retellings of biblical tales, and which at other, better times means narrative poems such as the acknowledged classic "Golden Journey to Samarkand" (unfortunately not finished during the author's brief lifetime).

Included also are poems that take the reader on stranger, less familiar journeys to dark places. Flecker's translation of a part of Virgil's Aeneid in which the characters descend into a terrifying depiction of Dis (the Roman hell) is awesome, as are his other efforts, such as following example:

"The Second Sonnet of Bathrolaire"

Now the sweet Dawn on brighter fields afar
Has walked among the daisies, and has breathed
The glory of the mountain winds, and sheathed
The stubborn sword of Night's last-shining star.
In Bathrolaire when Day's old doors unbar
The motley mask, fantastically wreathed,
Pass through a strong portcullis brazen teethed,
And enter glowing mines of cinnabar.
Stupendous prisons shut them out from day,
Gratings and caves and rayless catacombs,
And the unrelenting rack and tourniquet
Grind death in cells where jetting gaslight gloams,
And iron ladders stretching far away
Dive to the depths of those eternal domes.

-It is unfortunate that Flecker died of tuberculosis when he was just hitting his stride as a talented writer. Had he lived longer, I am sure he would have been lauded as one of the great English poets, as renowned as Keats or Milton, or other English poets whose work I don't enjoy nearly as much as I enjoy Flecker's. Readers who enjoy James E. Flecker's poetry may also enjoy the poems of American author Robert E. Howard (1906-36), who named Flecker as one of his major influences.