John Gould Fletcher grew up with his two sisters in a big, lonely house on Seventh Street in Little Rock, Arkansas. The house had been built in 1840 by the great Albert Pike and was later home to the Arkansas Female College before being bought by John’s father in 1889. It was typical of the antebellum mansion: massive Ionic columns out front, four huge rooms on each of two levels, divided evenly by a hallway running through the center of the house front to back. Today the Greek Revival masterpiece houses an art collection open to the public. Big, beautiful, and lonely house. Lonely, reflective, and melancholy boy.
John’s father, Captain John G. Fletcher, was fifty at the boy’s birth, his mother half her husband’s age. His father was a very important man in Little Rock, who ran one of the most successful cotton brokerage firms in Arkansas, served three times as mayor, once as county sheriff, and even came close to winning the state governorship. Captain Fletcher wanted John to grow up to be like him, a lawyer, banker, or businessman, assured of a good living and a prominent position in society. John’s mother was a musician. She encouraged the artistic side of John. Aided by the powerful aesthetic of the house, the mother’s influence won out: the sensitive and somewhat reserved boy became a poet.
He began writing verse seriously while he was at Harvard, although he was not very serious about college itself. When Captain Fletcher died in 1907, John received an inheritance that set him up with an annual income for life. Plagued by bouts of depression that haunted him for the rest of his life, John soon lost interest in school and went abroad, first to Venice and Rome in 1908, and then on to London in 1909. Wherever he went, he devoured the art and music and literature of his surroundings, read voraciously, and continued writing. In 1910 John received word that his mother had died also. His sister Adolphine married that year in the front parlor of the old Pike mansion in which she would live the rest of her life. John stayed in London and wrote poetry.
In 1913 his first collections appeared in print. The same year he traveled to Paris for the Impressionist exhibition there and encountered Postimpressionism for the first time. Gaugin, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as the composer Stravinsky, whose Paris premiere of the Rite of Spring had invoked near-riots, all had a jolting effect on Fletcher, who now considered his earlier poetry “old-fashioned” and juvenile. It was in Paris that he also met the great American symbolist poet Ezra Pound, who subsequently introduced Fletcher to a circle of poets he had dubbed des Imagistes, among them the American poet Amy Lowell, who befriended Fletcher and encouraged him in his writing. It was a turning point in the life of a man who was to become one of the most important poets of the first half of the twentieth century.
Fletcher sailed for America in 1914 for a two-year tour, a recognized and celebrated American poet beginning to catch the attention of literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote incessantly, shooting for a poem a day. His poetry of the time reflected the Imagist emphasis on eliciting emotions from the reader through the sounds of words as opposed to their raw meaning, but his verse even contrasted with other Imagists’ poetry in its improvisation and audacity. The Arkansas boy was making a name for himself.
Fletcher spent the winter of 1914–15 with his sister at the old house in Little Rock. The gloominess and solitude of his childhood came back in on him like a deluge, and his depression returned. Before returning to England, Fletcher visited the Japanese art exhibit in Chicago. The effect was momentous, not only in his experimental poetry but primarily in its impact on his mood and philosophy. To Fletcher, Oriental art recalled a certain harmony between man and nature that the West was beginning to lose due to its emphasis on technology and industrialism. He returned to England in 1916, married Englishwoman Daisy Arbuthnot, and published Goblins and Pagodas, a literary success; but there was a growing shift in the emphasis of Fletcher’s thinking. America, including his own American South, was in dire need of rediscovering her more agrarian roots if she were to survive the runaway industrialism and modernism that characterized the day.
Such thinking began to be reflected in his writing. By the mid-twenties, he was no longer the Imagist poet enshrouding emotional meaning in the sounds of words but resembled more the Romantic William Blake of the early nineteenth century, whose references to “dark Satanic mills” decried the loss of England’s pastoral purity to the ravages of the Industrial Age. Fletcher soon became associated with the Vanderbilt University-based Fugitive poets, who throughout the twenties produced some of America’s greatest literature, all in the spirit of summoning Americans, and especially the South, to return to the agrarian and Jeffersonian roots obscured by the materialism of the modern age. Fletcher even contributed his own essay—“Education, Past and Present”—to the Fugitive’s seminal manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930.
Having lived abroad for twenty years or more, and after a severe battle with his depressive disorder, Fletcher moved back to America and to Little Rock in the early 1930’s. He was greeted with a hero’s welcome and treated as the state’s premier intellect and poet laureate. He joined folk linguist Vance Randolph in studying and promoting the native folk of Arkansas and their traditions, music, literature, and language, and in the mid-thirties he married again, this time to Charlie May Simon, a native Arkansas writer herself. In 1935, his home state commissioned Fletcher to write an epic poem, “The Story of Arkansas,” for the state’s centennial celebration, and in 1939 he became the first Southern poet to receive a Pulitzer Prize when his Selected Poems (1938) was chosen for the honor.
His last great work was Arkansas (1947), a history written in typical John-Gould-Fletcher fashion. But poetry and history in mid-twentieth-century America were passing out of vogue. Depression returned, and his last years were spent quietly by the hearth and with his books at Johnswood, the simple, far-from-ornate home he and Simon had built on the wooded cliffs above the Arkansas River on the western edge of Little Rock. When he was found dead by drowning in a shallow pool on his property in 1950, not only his talented widow but all Arkansas, the South, and the literate world who had known his lonely and impassioned soul through his writing grieved and remembered and gave thanks.
The old mansion, which had wrung so much poetry from his soul, had released its hold on him at last.
