Having little social life, Fletcher became a voracious reader. In retrospect, Fletcher often spoke of the gloom and desolation of the place-even at an early age, his life was characterized by a solitude from which he would never completely emerge. When Fletcher was three, the family moved into the Albert Pike mansion in Little Rock, where they remained throughout his formative years.
Of his two parents, Fletcher clearly took after his mother, who was twenty-four years younger than her husband and a great lover of literature, music, and the arts. Already fifty-five at the time of Fletcher's birth, the elder John Gould would prove a fairly remote figure to his son. His father, who was also John Gould Fletcher, was a veteran of the Confederate Army, and made his fortune after the war, both in brokering cotton and in banking. During this period, he also became associated with the Fugitives, a group of American poets dedicated to reviving an agrarian way of life and traditional Southern values.įletcher was born to an affluent Arkansas family on January 3, 1886. Later in his career Fletcher concentrated less on technical innovation and began to develop themes he had previously only touched upon in his work, including humanity's relation to nature and the individual's search for God and salvation. In addition to being an adherent of Imagism, which was dedicated to replacing traditional poetics with a more concise use of language, new rhythms, and a concrete rather than discursive or symbolic treatment of subject, Fletcher also wrote poetry that drew from such varied sources as French Symbolism, Oriental art and philosophy, and music. He is closely associated with poet Amy Lowell and the Imagist movement she championed. John Gould Fletcher is considered by many literary scholars to be among the most innovative twentieth-century poets.
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