From Publishers Weekly
Seldom read today, Fletcher was a Pulitzer Prize-winning Imagist poet, a close associate of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, and a leading American exponent of modernism. The articulate, engaging essays collected here first appeared in Poetry , Dial and Yale Review ; most of them deal with poetry, which Fletcher claimed as central among all the arts. In one combative piece he calls Wallace Stevens "a dramatist without a theme" and observes that Robert Frost is "neither temperamentally nor by birth a New Englander." Although he admires Pound, he objects to the latter's "purely aesthetic and non-moral sensibility." There are discerning appreciations of Hardy, Sandburg, Blake, Whiteman, Conrad Aiken, as well as critical appraisals of Southern Fugitive-Agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom, with whom Fletcher was associated after he returned to the U.S. from self-imposed exile in Europe. The essays on Chinese and Japanese art, politics and Oriental versus Occidental attitudes, however, are lightweight.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
