XXIV ELEGIES POEMS FLETCHER SANTA FE 1935 SIGNED
XXIV Elegies, by John Gould Fletcher. Writer’s Editions, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1935. Limited edition of four hundred copies. This is copy 367. Signed by the author.
Hardcover with dustjacket. Volume Very good, minor darkening to spine. Dust jacket, fair, sunning to edges, minor tears.
John Gould Fletcher, born January 3, 1886 , died May 20, 1950 was a Pulitzer Prize winning Imagist poet and author. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to a socially prominent family, and went on to attend Harvard University from 1903 to 1907, when he dropped out shortly after his father's death.
Fletcher lived in England for a large portion of his life. While in Europe he associated with Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and other Imagist poets, enjoying the vibrant social scene.
His early works include Irradiations: Sand and Spray (1915), and Goblins and Pagodas (1916). In later poetic works Fletcher returned to more traditional forms. These include The Black Rock (1928) and XXIV Elegies (1935).
In XXIV Elegies Fletcher ranges widely over subjects as diverse as Thomas Edison, Napoleon, a Civil War cemetery, the Russian Revolution, and the Last Judgment.
Fletcher also wrote Selected Poems (1938), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939, and The Burning Mountain (1946).
Fletcher later returned to his home in Arkansas and reconnected with his roots. The subject of his works turned increasingly towards Southern issues and Traditionalism.
In the late 1920s and 1930s he was active with a group of 11 other Southern writers and poets known as the Southern Agrarians. This group published the classic Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, a collection of essays rejecting Modernism and Industrialism. In 1937 he wrote his autobiography, Life is My Song, and in 1947 he published Arkansas, a beautifully written history of his home state.
