Symphonies: 'Because I dare dream yet of joy''

John Gould Fletcher was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on 3rd January 1886 to a socially prominent family.

He was educated at Phillips Academy, Andover before advancing to Harvard University which he attended from 1903 to 1907, before dropping out after his father's death.

As a young man Fletcher spent many years in England where he became part of the influential Imagist group of poets together with Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound.

His first marriage came from a resumed relationship with the now married Florence Emily ‘Daisy’ Arbuthnot. Her adultery with Fletcher was the grounds for her divorce from Malcolm Arbuthnot. They married on 5th July 1916 but later divorced.

Fletcher first published in 1912, with ‘The Dominant City’ too much praise and admiration and followed this with other well-regarded volumes such as ‘Irradiations: Sand and Spray’, and ‘Goblins and Pagodas’.

In the late 1920s and 1930s Fletcher became increasingly active with a group of Southern writers and poets known as the Southern Agrarians. They published the classic ‘I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition’.

Although he was highly regarded as a poet he was not very prolific. However, such was the undoubted quality that in 1939 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his work ‘Selected Poems’. He was the first poet from the south to receive such an accolade. Fletcher’s other passion and pursuit was as an authority on modern painting, a subject on which he also published.

A second marriage followed in 1936 to the children’s author, Charlie May Simon. They built ‘Johnswood’, a residence on the bluffs of the Arkansas River and travelled frequently to New York for shots of modern culture and intellectual stimulation as well as to the American West and South for the climate after Fletcher developed chronic arthritis.

In 1937 he wrote his autobiography, ‘Life is My Song’.

His developing passion for his roots and background resulted in the writing of a history of his State and published in 1947; ‘Arkansas’.

By now Fletcher was suffering from bouts of depression and on 10th May 1950, he committed suicide by drowning himself in a pond near his home in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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